Below the interview, I give some examples of predictions due to body memories from real stories of my clients.
Here is the latest instalment in the serialisation of my long form conversation with Tony Fitzgerald. Transcript below for those who prefer to read. Previous instalments:
Transcript
How body memories become a place holder for predictions. What to expect when you sense a combination of visual, auditive, nasal, interoceptive, neuroceptive, or sensory input, based on your past experiences.
LS: The way I figured it out was the term body memories. So when you experience something dramatic, when you get some high feelings around that, or of course accidents, whether it's physical traumas, then this body memory influences your future in a way that if any of these sensory inputs that remind you about what was going on is triggering this body memory, then you can say you start to predict. But in my terms, it's so fast, if you're going to a party and don't like some part of that, you can say you're predicting, but they can be very, very fast. So fast, you can hardly call it a thought.
TF: No, a prediction doesn't start with a thought. It starts with an involuntary response. Thought comes later.
LS: So it's these body memories that kickstart the process. You can say, I've got the new word, the prediction mechanism here. But I can maybe tell you something you might not know, because these body memories and predictions, it can also be very positive things. So not often, but once in a while, I help a person with Parkinson's to resolve a positive feeling that they feel excited that they should start a new task, meet new people, get some benefits of something, but this excitement can be too much. So it's the same, a prediction in three days that something amazing will happen, and that's a good feeling, but it may cause them not to sleep for three days before this is going on, and it's too much, this excitement, this, "oh, it will be fantastic". So I sometimes help them too. I ask them politely, do you want to get rid of this extreme happiness? But it's actually a lot of people with Parkinson's, it's typical people in high-performance jobs, they have these sort of exciting things that after a long job life gets too much and they are into this state of tension.
TF: That makes so much sense and just to clarify the prediction side, the predictions are about threats and opportunities. It's not just stress, it's not just fear, it's threats and opportunities, it's the whole survival system. It's like, I need to go and get a fruit or some food from the next valley. What risks am I going to run into? Is there a bear there? Are there bees and honey? Are there prickles on the floor? What's the environment? So there's a reward and there's a danger and a risk.
The brain is forever predicting and calculating what's my best movements here? How can I meet my needs, the outcomes I want, avoid the states I don't want to feel and avoid the dangers? And so the brain is forever predicting those. So when you look at those predictions about the excitement about something happening, it's opportunity. It's still part of this one system. Some people think about neuroception, and that tends to be that threat, that narrow threat detection. But actually, it's, neuroception is...
LS: Any feeling! Right now, we have a tendency to divide them into good emotions and bad emotions. But in reality, they all come in sort of a, more or less, can we call it neutral, that's sort of okay, and emotion that's too much, that pushes you into stress in some way.
TF: What's really curious, when you talk about the dopamine system, that's an anticipation of reward. That sort of what's trying to bump up dopamine, the brain is trying to get a way to bump it up. If you look at that as a prediction, there's a biology underneath the whole prediction system as well. It's not just the predictions themselves, you can think of the brain as a network that is now communicating with itself, altering neurotransmitters, and altering connections between different parts of the brain. So if you look at things like eating disorders, if you look at things like depression, if you look at schizophrenia, there are parts of the brain that stop communicating really well.
Now, in the prediction space, there's an understanding that when there are unpredictable neurons, and uncontrollable neurons, they're actually pushed out of the system, if you can't predict and anticipate. So now you try and go, what can we anticipate? What can we predict? Those neurons are favoured, those connections are favoured. There's a whole new understanding, not just a psychological understanding, but a biological understanding of the brain, changing neurotransmitters every moment, changing the receptors that are available, changing the communication between the neurons.
Which part talks to the dopamine system, does that talk to the reward systems, that talk to other bits of the brain? If you can't rely on rewards, it actually gets shut out. So it tries to shut that system out. So when we talk about diseases, there's a new understanding now coming through about even self efficacy affects that the way parts of the brain talk to each other. There's a much deeper understanding now.
LS: I actually think that if you are caught in these traumas, or old emotional patterns, predicting the bad things, or what is too much, it's sort of a highway where your thoughts are so used to running in the same direction. So looking at it in the way you and I do, it's sort of giving the brain a chance to find a new and more natural way where there's no connection to these feelings.
TF: That's a beautiful point.
Lilian’s examples of body memories/predictions from her therapy practice.
I help people get free of these body memories, and symptoms slowly vanish.
What can it be?
Butterflies in the stomach: you predict that this exam will include some problems and have concerns about the result. Maybe this is based on an exam in the past, where you failed, or did not do “your best”.
A person with Parkinson’s that freeze when he gets close to his fridge. Why? Because his mother slapped him if he helped himself when he was hungry as a child. The inner prediction is forecasted from the sensory input of the visual stimuli of the fridge.
A person with Parkinson’s freezes in the same place in her hall. A former husband slapped her right next to a cupboard, so the visual stimuli of this put her into freeze.
A person gets a stiff arm reaching up at a certain angle. This a reminder from a near-drowning accident, where she finally got hold of a safe grip
A person gets a tremor when he thinks about the tasks on the job tomorrow. He predict the tasks to be as stressful as they were yesterday.
A mother gave a child a present every time they did their homework and got a fine mark. And for the rest of their life, they strive for the same dopamine kick in their job. The prediction is “this article will be the one that gives me the reward”, and their dopamine starts pumping in their system before the result is on the board. The problem is that one of the dopamine degradation products is adrenaline which easily causes them symptoms.
A mother gave a child “the angry glance” every time they started playing, dancing singing, so the child installed a body memory/prediction, that they should stop themself if life was going in a fun and happy direction. They predict that having fun comes with a penalty.
You are holding a meeting and you need to check in with every person the first half hour to get a feeling if this meeting is going to be good or not. So you base your presumption of the whole meeting based on this fast round of presentation. As it is so important you get symptoms during this half hour. This need for prediction is based on a situation in the past that got out of control, so you now need to prepare for a worst-case scenario.
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