The tenacious brain: How the anterior mid-cingulate contributes to achieving goals

[Alejo]

Hi guys,

I am making my way through Peter Levine's Trauma and Memory Really interesting book, it's short and very accesible in its language.

At some point during the book, he discusses the aMCC or Anterior Mid cingulate Cortex, as a way in which Tenacity is measured, he ties this with the Hero's journey archetype, essentially a part of the brain that is associated, according to a study, with our ability to push on for a goal, but not just push on for a goal, but make calculations about cost, physiological and otherwise, and keep at it until said goal is achieved.

Levine takes it a step further than the story itself, the study is very academic and it's all about computation and whatnot, but Levine actually gives it an emotional component, to face insurmountable odds and still take on the task, it's not just a way to accomplish great feats, but to deal with trauma, to overcome programs, dragons, seemingly impossible to tackle on tasks.

I thought it was a very interesting notion, not that I think that a persons tenacity is the by product of an area of the brain, but rather this area of the brain reflects the active of the spirit.

It is also interesting that people with depression, have an underachieve aMCC. A few quotes from the article that I thought were interesting.

Other predictive models have argued that the aMCC’s serves not only to predict external events, but also internal states of the body, allowing for the maintenance of allostasis (i.e. efficient energy regulation through prediction of future energy needs) (Barrett and Simmons, 2015) [see also (Barrett, 2017b, a)]. To effectively calculate the expected value of a behavior, it is crucial to anticipate the costs in terms of physiological resources, and to deploy additional resources through arousal regulation when necessary. To maintain goal-directed behavior, these interoceptive predictions must be compared to experience, so that prediction error can be used to adjust energy resources to meet task needs. Chanes and Barret (2016) have also speculated that aMCC with its extensive connections is well suited to provide an integrated workspace for unified conscious experience due to its ability to represent information across different modalities based on allostatic relevance.

We propose that tenacity can be understood as a kind of bias in aMCC computations: a tendency to maintain the representation of expected rewards, devalue the cost of effort and to judge one’s available physiological resources as meeting or exceeding task demands even in the face of negative affect. There are three sources of evidence that the aMCC is involved in tenacity: lesion studies, neuroimaging studies, and stimulation studies. We review each in turn.

Taken together, these findings indicate that the aMCC plays an important role in judgments of the subjective value of effort that can influence the choice between responding with tenacity or withdrawal.

A more compelling example is provided by Parvizi and colleagues (Parvizi et al., 2013), who employed direct electrical stimulation of the aMCC, producing what they described as an increase in the ‘will to persevere (Parvizi et al., 2013) (see Figure 2H). Patients generally described the experience of aMCC stimulation as evoking the feeling of preparing for a difficult challenge. As one patient put it: “I started getting this feeling like … I was driving into a storm. […] like, you’re headed towards a storm […] and you’ve got to get across the hill and all of a sudden you’re sitting there going how am I going to get over that, through that?”