[ Forum Central | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Howard S. Baker, M.D.
Date: 2/14/99
It is interesting that current neuroscientific thinking is as consistent with self psychology as it is. In "Thinking and Working Contextually", the authors write: "Personal experience is pictured here as fluid, multidimensional, and exquisitely context-sensitive, with multiple dimensions of experience oscillating between foreground and background, between figure and ground, within an ongoing intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence. At least many current neuroscientists view personal experience as continually contructed through the process of working memory (WM). WM can be understood to be an active process which integrates sensory input (from the environment and from within the body), long-term memory (LTM), and the meaning made in the previous moments (short-term memory or STM). LTM are the contents of what has been learned, including the complexities of model scenes, organizing principles, and transferences. The contents of LTM can be: (1) conflicted; (2) deficit laden (ie missing, such as that many of never learned Chinese or that people can be resonably empathic); (3) affectively charged, leading to a sense of drivenness; and (4) out of conscious awareness. The brain is always active, even in sleep, so that no event is without an antecedant or without some sort of environmental input. That environmental input must be interpreted into meaning through the working memory process, so the interior psychobiological process (or system) of WM, LTM, and STM is multifaceted and interacting with a similar process in salient others. Thus, personal experience must be context-sensitive. The term context-sensitive is crucial, since there are parameters with each of us that limit the meaning that can be made from and interactions. There is no difficulty explaining how figure and ground, forground and background, shift. Since the involved systems are so multidimensional, chaos theory shows how fluid and often unpredicatable the outcome of personal experience can be.
[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]