I attended the ANZAP seminar Understanding the Emotional Brain recently, a stimulating talk by Lea Williams and Russell Meares followed by discussion.
Lea Williams presented some of the recent work by her and her group on, amongst other things, the brain’s response to fear and its bias towards negativity. Our brains, from current research, evidently need five positive experiences to counter each single negative experience, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium. And the fear response in the brain is complex and exhibits a dual pathway – the so-called “low road” and “high road”. In the primitive low road, the thalamus quickly prompts the amygdala into a fight-or-flight response (say, in reaction to seeing a snake on the path before me). However the slower high road, via the visual cortex, enables a more potentially more considered response (I realise it’s dead).
It’s not all bad news on negativity – research suggests that the plasticity of the brain is much higher than previously thought, and there’s potential for retraining negative brains in positive ways. And such positive ways tend to use the high road, rather than the immediate “triggering” of the low road. New strategies for retraining is a hope for psychotherapy.
Which is background to the point of this post: A lovely response from Russell Meares to a question from the audience, along the lines “Could a person’s dreams indicate which road was being used?” I was struck by Meares’ answer, in his typically poetic and reflective manner: “There needs to be a taxonomy of dreams” – a poetic statement that stands complete in itself, for me.
Mears went on to quote Russel Hobson (originator of the Conversational Model), that we can treat the dream as a psychotherapeutic session, adding that we can also treat the psychotherapeutic session as a dream.
Despite all this academic brain talk we still come back to poetics, to metaphors of the high road and the low road, finding ourselves wondering about the tales we could tell ourselves as we take our journeys. The heart can’t help but make its stories.
