. . .
“In many cases you can see an immediate effect, as in chronic depression — suddenly you turn on the electrodes — you don’t tell them when it’s on or off, right? And their whole face lights up. And you ask, “What do you feel like?” And they say, “Oh, it feels wonderful. It feels like I won the lottery! It’s so great.”
– Dr. Heather Berlin, Neuropsychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai
In this episode, our guest is neuropsychologist Dr. Heather Berlin, an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Berlin conducts research to better understand the neural basis of impulsivity, compulsivity, and emotion with the goal of more targeted treatment.
She employs neuroimaging and neuropsychological and psychopharmacological testing of brain lesion and compulsive, impulsive, and personality disorder patients. She is also interested in the neural basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, the use of psychedelics to treat mental disorders, and in the neural basis of creativity. We discuss her work and interests in this episode.
Dr. Berlin has done an enormous range of work, which you can distill into this very profound question: “How do we control our unwanted impulses, our desires, our emotions, our reactions with other people?” These are very common questions, starting very early in life.
There seems to be a tug of war between those deep midbrain nuclei and the control system which involves the prefrontal cortex. Various areas of the prefrontal cortex have somewhat different effects, but prefrontal is associated with self regulation, while midbrain nuclei have to do with impulses, motivations, emotions, and so on. The prefrontal cortex is sometimes called the “organ of civilization” or as Heather dubs it, “the brake system”.
After 50 years of persistent efforts to find solutions, in the last decade we finally have treatments with dramatic positive effects. Dr. Heather Berlin presents us with recent medical breakthroughs for very severe life problems that have been difficult to address.
“Medical science is often an art as well as a science, but Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) really can have significant effect and impact on people with difficult-to-treat conditions, like OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), but also people with intractable or untreatable depression.”
– Dr. Heather Berlin
Talking Points:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 3:09 – Impulse Control and Associated Brain Areas
- 9:27 – Finding a Balance: Healthy Brain vs Impairment and Self Regulation
- 17:40 – The Essence of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders
- 24:40 – The Big News: Deep Brain Stimulation as an Effective Treatment for OCD
- 29:29 – Brain Aspects of Stress and Resilience
- 37:01 – How Effective is Deep Brain Stimulation?
- 41:59 – Advances in Psychedelic Research
- 45:15 – Psilocybin and Ego Dissolution
- 54:18 – Pharmaceutical Addiction Tapering
- 58:12 – Flow States, Mystical Experiences: “The Cosmic Perspective”
- 01:04:46 – Possibilities
Bios
Bernard J. Baars: a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, Bernie is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory and global workspace dynamics, a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex and consciousness. Bernie’s many acclaimed books include A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness; The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology; In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind; Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience. Winner of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by the International Neural Network Society, which recognizes work in perception proven to be paradigm changing and long-lasting.
Dr. Heather Berlin: a dual-trained neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mont Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. Clinically, she specializes in lifespan (child, adolescent, and adult) treatment of anxiety, mood, and impulsive and compulsive disorders (e.g. OCD), blending her neural perspective with cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and humanistic approaches. https://www.heatherberlin.com/
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
