Psychology Articles

Why should we bother with dreams?
Aren’t dreams just nonsense…just neurons randomly firing?

Evolution has selected for dreaming.
Sleep researchers tell us that all humans and many animals dream several times every night. Dream sleep is so important that experimental subjects prevented from experiencing REM sleep, the part the sleep in which dreams occur, begin to hallucinate after just a couple of nights of deprivation. They effectively begin to dream when they are awake. It is that important to dream. The ability to dream has been evolutionarily selected for because it serves a vital function in human life.

Human beings in all times and places have examined dreams with interest and attention. Mythical and religious characters are portrayed as valuing and being influenced or changed by dreams. The ancient Greeks dedicated temples and trained priests and priestesses to interpret dreams. Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, out of which developed most other modern therapies, called dreams “The royal road to the unconscious” and Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish philosopher is famous for saying that “A dream unexamined is like a letter unopened”

Psychoanalyst Paul Lipmann (2008) offers us the following list of what he feels that dreams offer:
They state and solve problems.
They express emotion… subtle and loud.
They can express in images and stories those feelings and experiences that are most difficult to think or talk about when awake.
They can express hidden feelings about one’s relationship to powerful and less powerful others.
They can both dissociate and bind together aspects of traumatic or any experience.
They can help cover pain and shame or can rip apart a scab of defense.
They portray our current problems, past dilemmas, and future possibilities.
They gratify wishes.
They can give expression to the life not lived.

Dreams are unconscious products.
Cognitive psychologists tell us that we can hold approximately seven (plus or minus two if your memory is exceptionally good or bad) “chunks” of information in our minds at once.

That is seven digits in a phone number, seven items of a grocery list. That is not very many and yet we have access to a vast reservoir of memories, concepts and emotional experiences which are called up effortlessly and seamlessly into that famous set of seven chunks. And just as seamlessly those concepts not in immediate use slip out and are put away. It’s a truly amazing system when you think about it… effortless and taken for granted. But what is the mechanism that reaches down and pulls up the information that is needed? Most of the time it is not “conscious intention.”

Unconscious processing is a natural and necessary part of thinking
Unconscious processing always underpins and facilitates conscious thinking. It is the system which receives, organizes and makes accessible all of the concepts and experiences that we own. It is simply impossible to be consciously aware of everything we know or to consciously make all the associations between facts that we must in order to make sense of our experience.

Importantly related facts, ideas and feelings may have been accumulated over a lifetime, arriving at different times and out of different life experiences. Consciousness, which is busy figuring out what to make for supper, rarely takes time to sniff around and explore all the potential associations… even to pressing life problems.

Fortunately we have an alternative system to do this work… psychoanalysts call this the personal unconscious . Cognitive researchers call it “automatic processing”,” implicit thought systems” or even “deep psychological processes”. No one tries to pretend that consciousness is big enough or strong to do all the work alone.

When we are concerned about some aspect of our lives or relationships, the unconscious continues to work on the problem while consciousness is busy doing other things. Anyone who has ever had an “Aha!” moment has had the experience of things being brought together unconsciously and presented as a now obvious fact or solution.

Sleep on it!!

The unconscious attempts to offer us larger access to what we know.
One of the main ways that the unconscious is positively integrated in our lives is through dreams. Dreams contain attempts by the unconscious to bring us information and make the arguments that elaborate or counterbalance the conscious attitude.

Typically, our feelings about situations and persons are more complicated and nuanced than what positive thinking, common sense or good manners will endorse.
We have mixed feeling about most experiences.
The birth of a child brings joy but also a curtailment of freedom.
We love and admire our best friend but her success makes us jealous.
We think we want to study to be a lawyer but is it really our father’s dream for us?

Understanding our dreams helps us understand ourselves more fully.
When the conscious attitude agrees pretty well with the unconscious one, dreams will underline, endorse or strengthen belief and resolve… they support a feeling of confidence or “rightness”.
When consciousness overvalues a person or situation dreams may shrink it down to size by portraying it in an unpleasant or inferior way.
When consciousness does not sufficiently value a person, situation or goal the unconscious may elevate the idea, by symbolically representing it as appropriately precious.
Dreams can add new knowledge to consciousness, raise questions or suggest goals or things to be avoided.

A picture is worth a thousand words.
A huge amount of the information that we take in about the world is visual. Almost every important experience has a visual memory of people, places and things attached to it. Since most life knowledge and ideas are tied up in some way with visual images, it is not really surprising that images should be the material that the unconscious uses to represent its ideas.

Dream images may seem strange at first glance, but they are often proven on examination to be extremely accurate visual metaphors of a situation which concerns the dreamer.

A very personal point of view
There is no “one size fits all” in dream interpretation. The images in dreams are often often mysterious and bizarre, they may make reference to other times and places or show the dreamer as someone entirely other that what they are in reality.
Dream dictionaries should be used sparingly and treated mostly as sources of inspiration.
The dreamer is the only person who can say whether an interpretation “works”.

Dreams in Psychotherapy
A psychologist who works with dreams in therapy draws on her knowledge of the client’s life situation and life history as well as her training in typical patterns of human response. She works with her clients to understand the dream images in relation to what the client is struggling with or has experienced in life. Together they try to understand what particular relevance and associations that these images have for this particular individual.
Dream work in therapy contributes to the process of deepening self knowledge.
Understanding of the full range of their desires and responses permits the client to invent new possibilities for action and decision… to change their life in ways that make their desires and their actions more congruent.
Dream work deepens therapeutic intimacy and creates a collaborative atmosphere between therapist and client.

Brief therapy centered on dreams
Psychotherapeutic work with dreams may be part of an on-going therapy or may be helpful as a short term process which focuses on understanding a particular situation, for example:
In periods of normal transition such as life passages,
In periods of crisis,
When difficult decisions are being considered
When radically new life experiences must be assimilated.
Sometimes a particularly striking dream or dream series will evoke a desire to question or understand a current or past situation or experience. At these moments it may be helpful to consider working with a psychologist or therapist who will provide guidance and emotional support and help steady you as you explore the questions
that dream examination raises.

Dreams are part of our system of unconscious re-organization and creative problem solving. They pull the essence of a problematic situation out of the clutter of daily experience so we can see it more clearly. They remind us of what we have nearly forgotten, or of what we have tried to forget and bring together ideas that we knew separately but which click” and create new understanding when brought together. They help us see what we really desire and they point the way to future possibilities that grow out of past experiences.

Susan Meindl, MA, is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Montreal Canada. She has a special interest in Jungian ideas and practices a Jungian approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/59983

Why should we bother with dreams?
Aren’t dreams just nonsense…just neurons randomly firing?

Evolution has selected for dreaming.
Sleep researchers tell us that all humans and many animals dream several times every night. Dream sleep is so important that experimental subjects prevented from experiencing REM sleep, the part the sleep in which dreams occur, begin to hallucinate after just a couple of nights of deprivation. They effectively begin to dream when they are awake. It is that important to dream. The ability to dream has been evolutionarily selected for because it serves a vital function in human life.

Human beings in all times and places have examined dreams with interest and attention. Mythical and religious characters are portrayed as valuing and being influenced or changed by dreams. The ancient Greeks dedicated temples and trained priests and priestesses to interpret dreams. Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, out of which developed most other modern therapies, called dreams “The royal road to the unconscious” and Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish philosopher is famous for saying that “A dream unexamined is like a letter unopened”

Psychoanalyst Paul Lipmann (2008) offers us the following list of what he feels that dreams offer:
They state and solve problems.
They express emotion subtle and loud.
They can express in images and stories those feelings and experiences those experiences that are most difficult to think or talk about when awake.
They can express hidden feelings about one’s relationship to powerful and less powerful others.
They can both dissociate and bind together aspects of traumatic or any experience.
They can help cover pain and shame or can rip apart a scab of defense.
They portray our current problems, past dilemmas, and future possibilities.
They gratify wishes.
They can give expression to the life not lived.

Dreams are unconscious products.
Cognitive psychologists tell us that we can hold approximately seven (plus or minus two if your memory is exceptionally good or bad) “chunks” of information in our minds at once.
That is seven digits in a phone number, seven items of a grocery list. That is not very many and yet we have access to a vast reservoir of memories, concepts and emotional experiences which are called up effortlessly and seamlessly into that famous set of seven chunks. And just as seamlessly those concepts not in immediate use slip out and are put. An amazing system when you think about it… effortless and taken for granted. But what is the system that reaches down and pulls up the information that is needed? Most of the time it is not “conscious intention.”

The unconscious is the system which receives, organizes and makes accessible all of the concepts and experiences that we own. It is simply impossible to be consciously aware of everything we know or to consciously make all the associations between facts that we must in order to make sense of our experience.

Importantly related facts, ideas and feelings may have been accumulated over a lifetime, arriving at different times and out of different life experiences. Consciousness, which is busy figuring out what to make for supper, rarely takes time to sniff around and explore all the potential associations… even to pressing life problems.

Fortunately we have an alternative system to do this work… psychoanalysts call this the personal unconscious . Cognitive researchers call it “automatic processing”,” implicit thought systems” or even “deep psychological processes”. No one tries to pretend that consciousness is big enough or strong to do all the work alone.

When we are concerned about some aspect of our lives or relationships, the unconscious continues to work on the problem while consciousness is busy doing other things. Anyone who has ever had an “Aha!” moment has had the experience of things being brought together unconsciously and presented as a now obvious fact or solution.

Sleep on it!!

The unconscious attempts to offer us larger access to what we know.
One of the main ways that the unconscious is positively integrated in our lives is through dreams. Dreams contain attempts by the unconscious to bring us information and make the arguments that elaborate or counterbalance the conscious attitude.

Typically, our feelings about situations and persons are more complicated and nuanced than what positive thinking, common sense or good manners will endorse.
We have mixed feeling about most experiences.
The birth of a child brings joy but also a curtailment of freedom.
We love and admire our best friend but her success makes us jealous.
We think we want to study to be a lawyer but is it really our father’s dream for us?

Understanding our dreams helps us understand ourselves more fully.
When the conscious attitude agrees pretty well with the unconscious one, dreams will underline, endorse or strengthen belief and resolve.
When consciousness overvalues a person or situation dreams may shrink it down to size by portraying it in an unpleasant way.
When consciousness does not sufficiently value a person, situation or goal the unconscious may elevate the idea, by symbolically representing it as appropriately precious.
Dreams can add new knowledge to consciousness, raise questions or suggest goals or things to be avoided.

A picture is worth a thousand words.
A huge amount of the information that we take in about the world is visual. Almost every important experience has a visual memory of people, places and things attached to it. Since most life knowledge and ideas are tied up in some way with visual images, it is not really surprising that images should be the material that the unconscious uses to represent its ideas.

Dream images may seem strange at first glance. but they are often proven on examination to be extremely accurate visual metaphors of a situation which concerns the dreamer.

A very personal point of view
There is no “one size fits all in dream interpretation. The images in dreams are often often mysterious and bizarre, they may make reference to other times and places or show the dreamer as someone entirely other that what they are in reality.
Dream dictionaries should be used sparingly and treated mostly as sources of inspiration.
The dreamer is the only person who can say whether an interpretation “works”.

Dreams in Psychotherapy
A psychologist who works with dreams in therapy draws on their knowledge of the client’s life situation and life history as well as their training in typical patterns of human response. They work with their clients to understand the dream images in relation to what the client is struggling with or has experienced in life. Together they try to understand what particular relevance and associations that these images have for this particular individual.
Dream work in therapy contributes to the process of deepening self knowledge.
Understanding of the full range of their desires and responses permits the client to invent new possibilities for action and decision… to change their life in ways that make their desires and their actions more congruent.
Dream work deepens therapeutic intimacy and creates a collaborative atmosphere between therapist and client.

Brief therapy centered on dreams
Psychotherapeutic work with dreams may be part of an on-going therapy or may be helpful as a short term process which focuses on understanding a particular situation, for example:
In periods of normal transition such as life passages,
In periods of crisis,
When difficult decisions are being considered
When radically new life experiences must be assimilated.
Sometimes a particularly striking dream or dream series will evoke a desire to question or understand a current or past situation or experience.
At these moments it may be helpful to consider working with a psychologist or therapist who will provide guidance and emotional support and help steady you as you explore the questions
that dream examination raises.

Dreams are part of our system of unconscious re-organization and creative problem solving. They pull the essence of a problematic situation out of the clutter of daily experience so we can see it more clearly. They remind us of what we have nearly forgotten, or of what we have tried to forget and bring together ideas that we knew separately but which click” and create new understanding when brought together. They help us see what we really desire and they point the way to future possibilities that grow out of past experiences.

Susan Meindl, MA, is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Montreal Canada. She has a special interest in Jungian ideas and practices a Jungian approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/59983

In 1972, Thomas Nagel first introduced what is now known as the “epistemic gap” amongst contemporary philosophers. It was described in his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” and the gist of the argument was this: one cannot fully understand the mind unless one is experiencing that mind.

Nagel took the example of a bat because bats are so fascinatingly different than humans; they hang upside down most of the time, use echolocation, they are nocturnal, and most eat nothing but insects. Could a human ever convincingly claim that he knew what it was like to be a bat? Nagel didn’t believe this was possible – I agree.

Can the same be true amongst humans? Can another human fully understand the mind of another, or, does one have to be in the first-person to understand the mind more clearly?

Philosopher Frank Jackson wrote a paper in 1982 titled “Epiphenomenal Qualia” where he introduced the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s room. It goes like this:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete.”

These arguments by Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel are two of the most famous papers in support of the idea of qualia – a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. It is an idea often associated with the mind/body dualism (the belief that the mind is in some-part nonphysical, and therefore a separate entity from our physical bodies).

The epistemic gap does not prove any such thing however, and it is perfectly compatible with a materialist view of the mind. The real questions that the epistemic gap provokes is within the field of psychology and the scientific method itself.

Science is science – we believe – because of its objective, empirical, and third-person approach to knowledge. Science has often given men the ability to step outside of the happenings of natural phenomena, study them, test them, replicate their findings, and come to conclusions.

There is no doubting the breakthroughs and advancements science has come to offer man throughout the centuries. It would be foolish to deny these achievements.

Even in Western psychology (which is quite a young field relative to the natural sciences), researchers have made incredibly discoveries of the mind and how it works. We have devised useful models for how the mind perceives sensations (Psychophysics), how it processes information, stores memories, and solves problems (Cognitive Psychology), how the mind changes throughout the human lifespan (Developmental Psychology), how the mind builds associations and how these associations affect our behaviors (Learning or Experimental Psychology), how the brain or the “physical anatomy of the mind” works (Neuropsychology), and we’ve been given the chance to take all of this information and apply it to a variety of other fields: Clinical Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Sport Psychology, and even Forensic Psychology.

There is no denying the leaps psychology has made, all in the name of proper science. This is knowledge we would likely have not gotten any other way if it were not for the extraordinary and rigorous scientific method.

However, there is good reason to believe that Nagel and Jackson are right and that we cannot fully explain or understand a mind from an outside view. This is the belief that once science carries out its full course of discoveries that there will be something left unsaid about the mind (our understanding of the mind could never be as complete as our understanding of the physics on our planet). Unless – we redefine science.

But I believe we already have the techniques used to fully understand a mind – or at the very least, our own mind.

To understand this technique properly, we need to first drift away from the Western logical positivist philosophy of “if you can’t measure it, then it isn’t real,” which I believe has plagued much of modern day intellectual thought. Instead, I turn to the philosophies of the East – who have been studying the mind far, far longer and far more thoroughly than the West.

In particular I am fond of Buddhism which – like Western Science – takes pride in an objective approach to the study of phenomena. But there is a important property of the mind that Buddhists acknowledge and scientists go out of their way to ignore: the mind is – before all else – something that must be experienced first-person, or it wouldn’t be a mind at all.

This brings me to the practice of meditation – or more generally – a mindfulness of our inner worlds. There is a world in all of us that is subjective, personal, and completely our own. We cannot let anyone in it no matter how colorful our language or how much experience we share with another human being – it is ours and ours alone – and there are aspects to it that can only be dealt with by our self; no therapist, psychologist, family member, friend, scientist or spouse can ever figure it out for you.

Neither Buddhism or Science can rightfully claim to know how to bridge the gap between the subjective and objective. Both try their best to be objective at different vantage points: Science takes a third-person empirical approach while Buddhism takes a first-person empirical approach. Why can’t the study of the mind include both?

There is a fast growing interest in the West in meditative practices, yoga, tai chi, and other mind/body, holistic and alternative medicines for physical and mental health. This suggests there might be a vacancy in the West’s psyche, perhaps due to a combination of an incomplete scientific view of the mind along with an overwhelming nihilistic and atheistic attitude toward what would be deemed the spiritual or “mystic” aspects of man.

Many of these so called mystical practices are lumped into the demeaning pop psychology term “New Age.” Followers of so called New Age practices are said to be gullible and weak-minded – and perhaps some of them are. But it is also my belief that introspection and reflection on one’s mind can be the most rewarding and therapeutic practice for better mental health, the sharpening of one’s mental skill set, and a complete understanding of how the mind truly works (in the context of how it operates in the head of the individual and not by inference of a third-person observer).

Because of this I am very welcoming of these alternative and non-scientific studies of the mind. I in no way mean to deter scientific practices (I believe their should always be a science of the mind and a scientific study of human psychology), but I will stand up for the little guy on this one – science is not the giant be-all end-all of knowledge. It has its limitations, and we must be open to alternative studies of the mind. Sometimes we should turn our senses inward — and we may find there is some gold of truth to be discovered.

http://www.theemotionmachine.com

In 1972, Thomas Nagel first introduced what is now known as the “epistemic gap” amongst contemporary philosophers. It was described in his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” and the gist of the argument was this: one cannot fully understand the mind unless one is experiencing that mind.

Nagel took the example of a bat because bats are so fascinatingly different than humans; they hang upside down most of the time, use echolocation, they are nocturnal, and most eat nothing but insects. Could a human ever convincingly claim that he knew what it was like to be a bat? Nagel didn’t believe this was possible – I agree.

Can the same be true amongst humans? Can another human fully understand the mind of another, or, does one have to be in the first-person to understand the mind more clearly?

Philosopher Frank Jackson wrote a paper in 1982 titled “Epiphenomenal Qualia” where he introduced the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s room. It goes like this:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete.”

These arguments by Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel are two of the most famous papers in support of the idea of qualia – a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. It is an idea often associated with the mind/body dualism (the belief that the mind is in some-part nonphysical, and therefore a separate entity from our physical bodies).

The epistemic gap does not prove any such thing however, and it is perfectly compatible with a materialist view of the mind. The real questions that the epistemic gap provokes is within the field of psychology and the scientific method itself.

Science is science – we believe – because of its objective, empirical, and third-person approach to knowledge. Science has often given men the ability to step outside of the happenings of natural phenomena, study them, test them, replicate their findings, and come to conclusions.

There is no doubting the breakthroughs and advancements science has come to offer man throughout the centuries. It would be foolish to deny these achievements.

Even in Western psychology (which is quite a young field relative to the natural sciences), researchers have made incredibly discoveries of the mind and how it works. We have devised useful models for how the mind perceives sensations (Psychophysics), how it processes information, stores memories, and solves problems (Cognitive Psychology), how the mind changes throughout the human lifespan (Developmental Psychology), how the mind builds associations and how these associations affect our behaviors (Learning or Experimental Psychology), how the brain or the “physical anatomy of the mind” works (Neuropsychology), and we’ve been given the chance to take all of this information and apply it to a variety of other fields: Clinical Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Sport Psychology, and even Forensic Psychology.

There is no denying the leaps psychology has made, all in the name of proper science. This is knowledge we would likely have not gotten any other way if it were not for the extraordinary and rigorous scientific method.

However, there is good reason to believe that Nagel and Jackson are right and that we cannot fully explain or understand a mind from an outside view. This is the belief that once science carries out its full course of discoveries that there will be something left unsaid about the mind (our understanding of the mind could never be as complete as our understanding of the physics on our planet). Unless – we redefine science.

But I believe we already have the techniques used to fully understand a mind – or at the very least, our own mind.

To understand this technique properly, we need to first drift away from the Western logical positivist philosophy of “if you can’t measure it, then it isn’t real,” which I believe has plagued much of modern day intellectual thought. Instead, I turn to the philosophies of the East – who have been studying the mind far, far longer and far more thoroughly than the West.

In particular I am fond of Buddhism which – like Western Science – takes pride in an objective approach to the study of phenomena. But there is a important property of the mind that Buddhists acknowledge and scientists go out of their way to ignore: the mind is – before all else – something that must be experienced first-person, or it wouldn’t be a mind at all.

This brings me to the practice of meditation – or more generally – a mindfulness of our inner worlds. There is a world in all of us that is subjective, personal, and completely our own. We cannot let anyone in it no matter how colorful our language or how much experience we share with another human being – it is ours and ours alone – and there are aspects to it that can only be dealt with by our self; no therapist, psychologist, family member, friend, scientist or spouse can ever figure it out for you.

Neither Buddhism or Science can rightfully claim to know how to bridge the gap between the subjective and objective. Both try their best to be objective at different vantage points: Science takes a third-person empirical approach while Buddhism takes a first-person empirical approach. Why can’t the study of the mind include both?

There is a fast growing interest in the West in meditative practices, yoga, tai chi, and other mind/body, holistic and alternative medicines for physical and mental health. This suggests there might be a vacancy in the West’s psyche, perhaps due to a combination of an incomplete scientific view of the mind along with an overwhelming nihilistic and atheistic attitude toward what would be deemed the spiritual or “mystic” aspects of man.

Many of these so called mystical practices are lumped into the demeaning pop psychology term “New Age.” Followers of so called New Age practices are said to be gullible and weak-minded – and perhaps some of them are. But it is also my belief that introspection and reflection on one’s mind can be the most rewarding and therapeutic practice for better mental health, the sharpening of one’s mental skill set, and a complete understanding of how the mind truly works (in the context of how it operates in the head of the individual and not by inference of a third-person observer).

Because of this I am very welcoming of these alternative and non-scientific studies of the mind. I in no way mean to deter scientific practices (I believe their should always be a science of the mind and a scientific study of human psychology), but I will stand up for the little guy on this one – science is not the giant be-all end-all of knowledge. It has its limitations, and we must be open to alternative studies of the mind. Sometimes we should turn our senses inward — and we may find there is some gold of truth to be discovered.

http://www.theemotionmachine.com

“Behaviour is ultimately the product of the brain, the most mysterious organ of them all.” Ian Tattersall (from Becoming Human.Evolution and Human Uniqueness, 1998)

The question of why we are motivated to certain behaviours is perhaps one of the most fundamental in Psychology. Since Pavlov described conditioning in dogs in his famous 1927 paper, scientists have pondered the origins of motivations that drive us to action. For most of the early twentieth century, behaviourists like Watson & Skinner sought to explain behaviour in terms of external physical stimuli, suggesting that learned responses, hedonic reward and reinforcement were motives to elicit a particular behaviour. However, this does not tell the whole story. In the last few decades, the school of cognitive psychology has focused on additional mechanisms of motivation: our desires according to social and cultural factors having an influence on behaviour. Furthermore, recent advances in neuroimaging technology have allowed scientists an insight into the vast complexities and modular nature of specific brain regions. This research has shown that behaviours necessary for survival also have an inherent biological basis.

The biological trigger for inherent behaviours such as eating, drinking and temperature control can be traced to the hypothalamus, an area of the diencephalon. This article will explore the hypothalamic role in such motivated behaviours. It is important to note that a motivated behaviour resulting from internal hypothalamic stimuli is only one aspect of what is a complex and integrated response.

The hypothalamus links the autonomic nervous system to the endocrine system and serves many vital functions. It is the homeostatic ‘control centre’ of the body, maintaining a balanced internal environment by having specific regulatory areas for body temperature, body weight, osmotic balance and blood pressure. It can be categorised as having three main outputs: the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system and motivated behavioural response. The central role of the hypothalamus in motivated behaviour was proposed as early as 1954 by Eliot Stellar who suggested that “the amount of motivated behaviour is a direct function of the amount of activity in certain excitatory centres of the hypothalamus” (p6). This postulation has inspired a wealth of subsequent research.

Much of this research has been in the field of thermoregulation. The body’s ability to maintain a steady internal environment is of critical importance for survivalas many crucialbiochemical reactions will only function within a narrow temperature range. In 1961, Nakayama et al discovered thermosensitive neurons in the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus. Subsequent research showed that stimulation of the hypothalamic region initiated humoral and visceromotor responses such as panting, shivering, sweating, vasodilation and vasoconstriction. However, somatic motor responses are also initiated by the lateral hypothalamus. It is much more effective to move around, rub your hands together or put on extra clothes if you are feeling cold. Similarly, if you are too warm you might remove some clothing or fan yourself to cool down. These motivated behaviours demonstrate that in contrast to a fixed stimulus response, motivated behaviour stimulated by the hypothalamus has a variable relationship between input and output. This interaction with our external environment may be a ‘choice’, however it is clear that the motivation to make these choices has a biological basis.

The mechanics of thermoregulation can be explained by what is sometimes referred to as ‘drive states’. This is essentially a feedback loop that is initiated by an internal stimulus which requires an external response. Kendal (2000) defines drive states as “characterised by tension and discomfort due to a physiological need followed by relief when the need is satisfied”. The process begins with the input. Temperature changes are picked up from peripheral surroundings by thermoreceptive neurons throughout body which sense both warmth and cold separately. An electrical signal (the input) is then sent to the brain. Any divergence from what is known as the ’set point’ – in this case a temperature of approx 37° – will then be identified as an ‘error signal’ by interoceptive neurons in the periventricular region of the hypothalamus. Armed with these measurements and temperature signals being relayed from the blood, the hypothalamus then launches an appropriate error response. This includes motivating behaviour to make a physical adjustment, e.g. to move around or remove surplus clothing in an attempt to control your temperature.

This type of feedback system in the body is common. Other systems necessary for survival such as regulation of blood salt and water levels are regulated in a similar way. However, the processes that motivate us to eat is much more complex.

Humans have evolved an intricate physiological system to regulate food intake which encompasses a myriad of organs, hormones and bodily systems. Furthermore, a wealth of experimental research supports the idea that the hypothalamus plays a key role in this energy homeostasis by triggering feeding behaviours. Controlling energy balance is of crucial importance and eating is primarily to maintain fat stores in the event of food shortage. If fat cell reserves in the body are low, they release a hormone called leptin which is detected as an error signal by the periventricular region of the hypothalamus. This then stimulates the lateral hypothalamus to initiate the error response. In this case, we start to feel hungry which in turns initates the somatic motor response by motivating us to eat .

Since the hypothalamus also controls metabolic rate by monitoring blood sugar levels, in theory we seem to have a similar feedback loop to temperature control. However in practice this is not a reality. The main difficulty in maintaining energy homeostasis is that motivation does not rise solely from internal biological influences. Cultural and social factors also play an important part in motivation about when, what and how often to eat. In western culture, social pressures to be thin can override the need to eat and in extreme cases like anorexia the drive state becomes reversed. The motivation is no longer to eat because they are hungry but is instead not to eat so they do feel hungry. This corruption of the reward system is well documented and is associated with delusions of body image, a concept which is also linked to the hypothalamus and the parietal lobe. Problems can also occur if an individual receives over stimulation to eat. The prevalence of obesity in today’s society is testament to this fact.

Author: Kellieanne McMillan (Glasgow University, BSc Neuroscience)