Unlocking the Emotional Brain

Books or essays that answer each others' questions

• if that raises the question "why is it so hard, yet apparently somewhat possible, to unlearn said traumas?" then go read Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which answers that question in detail
  

• the "developmental view" (untangling trauma, à la Unlocking the Emotional Brain)

• Behavior: The Control of Perception relates to Unlocking the Emotional Brain in relation to learning, unlearning, & the role of conscious awareness therein
  
  • video of me talking about this youtu.be/AigDi5PEEc8

• Sources of Power talks about expert decision-making in terms that imply that it's governed by the same underlying rapid situational-assessment neurology as traumatic responses, that Unlocking the Emotional Brain describes.

Podcast summaries

• Keywords - brain hemispheres coercion what is coercion? productivity scapegoat Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing Conversation As Medium make shared or different frames explicit shared train of thought do people naturally self-regulate how deep they're willing to go? commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets dream mashups Unlocking the Emotional Brain IFS partswork what might a healthy community look like? doing community well The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere Behavior: The Control of Perception Perceptual Control Theory Hemisphere DharmaChange doesn't just happenHemispheres & Self-improvement left hemispheres aren't made for interfacing with other people Perceptual Control Theory control systems

• 40:59 - 47:40 - Why we can't change our minds Unlocking the Emotional Brain IFS partswork Coherence Therapy inner conflict

December 20th, 2021

• the PCT books and Unlocking the Emotional Brain have some interesting cross-connections, which I talk about in the convo I had with Eva de Hullu

• and if one asks the Deutsch-inspired question of how this happens neurologically, or even something like what is necessary to achieve this, neurologically?, Unlocking the Emotional Brain and PCT both have some answers
  
  • Controlling People in particular talks a lot more about the reorganization system, and so if you want people to not try to outsmart culture then it would naturally be necessary to keep people from consciously inspecting certain things!!!

August 1st, 2021

• 3. emotional flashback management / Unlocking the Emotional Brain
  • Suppose that someone deeply understands the principles of 1. brain hemispheres / McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model and 2. control systems / Perceptual Control Theory...
  • what else might make it difficult to collaborate with them?
    • one might be if they've temporarily contracted their awareness around something impersonal, such as when I'm having a Deep Work day coding, and I've recruited all of my brain for modelling the codebase
      • this usually requires a bit of meta-awareness and context-shifting, but as long as something isn't treated as load-bearing when it's not, and nobody takes it personally, it's usually a fairly minor issue
    • a different element though might be that some aspect of what you try to talk about with them activates some emotional flashback to some moment of unsafety, which generates an acute contracted awareness and then often a compulsion to engage in some defensiveness = protectiveness rather than feeling able to listen or dialogue
      • see Dream Mashups for a discussion of this and how to work with it in the moment
      • less in-the-moment, there's a need to do some sort of therapeutic process to untangle the system that is hyperactively generating a panic response in a given situation
        • some such situations might still be threats of some kind, but the current response heightens the threat rather than neutralizing it
        • some such situations might not be threats, but are being tagged as threats by an emotional brain that can't tell the difference (or eg the "same situation" would have been a threat in childhood but isn't now) and it can learn to differentiate
  • at any rate, someone who is triggered is going to tend to have trouble being curious
    • (although might be able to anyway if they can hold the activation within the expanded awareness of their right hemisphere)

• 4. coherence empathy / Unlocking the Emotional Brain
  • The implications of Unlocking the Emotional Brain go deeper than just overt trauma though. They provide a scaffold for understanding and respecting our bodyminds as sensemaking systems, such that we can stop trying to stuff the ticket back in the machine and get on with learning and integrating all of our different perspectives.
  • This applies internally as well as interpersonally.

March 9th, 2021

• connects to both to brain hemispheres / McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model and to Coherence Therapy & Unlocking the Emotional Brain
  • it basically describes the functional application of the very same rapid-response brain systems that cause trauma flashbacks / dream mashups

January 9th, 2021

• I wrote this review of Kaj Sotala's summary of Unlocking the Emotional Brain
  • Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain
  • This was a profoundly impactful post and definitely belongs in the review. It prompted me and many others to dive deep into understanding how emotional learnings have coherence and to actually engage in dialogue with them rather than insisting they don't make sense. I've linked this post to people more than probably any other LessWrong post (50-100 times) as it is an excellent summary and introduction to the topic. It works well as a teaser for the full book as well as a standalone resource.
  • The post makes both conceptual and pragmatic claims. I haven't exactly crosschecked the models although they do seem compatible with other models I've read. I did read the whole book and it seemed pretty sound and based in part on relevant neuroscience. There's a kind of meeting-in-the-middle thing there where the neuroscience is quite low-level and therapy is quite high-level. I think it'll be cool to see the middle layers fleshed out a bit.
  • Just because your brain uses Bayes' theorem at the neural level and at higher levels of abstraction, doesn't mean that you consciously know what all of its priors & models are!
  • And it seems the brain's basic organization is set up to prevent people from calmly arguing against emotionally intense evidence without understanding it—which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And it also makes sense that your brain would be able to update under the right circumstances.
  • I've tested the pragmatic claims personally, by doing the therapeutic reconsolidation process using both Coherence Therapy methods & other methods, both on myself & working with others. I've found that these methods indeed find coherent underlying structures (eg the same basic structures using different introspective methods, that relate and are consistent) and that accessing those emotional truths and bringing them in contact with contradictory evidence indeed causes them to update, and once updated there's no longer a sense of needing to argue with yourself. It doesn't take effort to embody the new knowing.
  • I guess on another level I'd say that I have the sense that the emotional coherence framework has something important to say about the nature of knowing. It frames all of the perspectives held by conscious and unconscious schemas as "knowings". The knowings are partial, but this frame (as opposed to "belief") really respects the first-person experience of what it means to believe something - you don't think of it as a belief, or something you "think", it just feels true.