Coincidentally, this showed up in my RSS feed yesterday:
'Should family therapy include your deceased great-great-grandmother? Epigenetics meets after-death communication'
http://www.skeptiko.com/dan-booth-cohen-emily-volden-systemic-family-therapy/
Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. Today we talk about families… and what a pain in the neck they can be. Don’t get me wrong, I treasure my family. I treasure my relationship with my wife, but it’s difficult at times. My kids? They’re awesome; except when they’re not. My brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, brother-in-laws, all that extended family I don’t see much, they’re great too. But like the rest of my family their problems can become my problems. Families issues can become overwhelming. They can send us look for help.
Today’s guests (Dan Booth Cohen and Emily Blefeld Volden) are two psychotherapists who help individuals and family systems get back on track. But what makes them interesting, and relevant Skeptiko listeners, is they’ve shattered the traditional family therapy model by incorporating in the growing, inescapable body of evidence suggesting consciousness extends beyond death and that those who are deceased may still be among us. So, if you thought you had problems with your family — stick around — you’re liable to find out you have a lot more folks in your lineage to worry about: (follow link for the interview)
Dr. Cohen says, "when the ancestors are not okay, and often they are not, they show up in our lives as our symptoms". The approach of dealing with 'ancestor issues' kind of reminds me of one of the techniques Heather uses, to take the person back to an earlier time in their
own life and fix that problem as if you really were still that younger person. It looks like these two psychotherapists apply a similar principle, but direct part of the therapy to our
ancestors' issues. (They also discuss the epigenetic angle briefly, and Sheldrake). I haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet, so I can't really assess their work yet, but it's interesting that someone is at least looking into this approach.
Joe said:
The idea that beliefs are largely unconscious or subconscious and, if not made known to the conscious mind, will dictate our beliefs and behavior, has been validated by several experiments on brain activity and "choices" made by humans.
...
Although the conscious mind is probably not totally sidelined here. By consciously CHOOSING to do other than what our "instinct" or habitual patterns would have us do, we can possibly set up a feedback loop to the unconscious, informing or teaching it new ways of "thinking" and also perhaps healing any issues or scars that it has.
I think you hit on one of the important things about this study, because it and others like it are often used by the hardcore atheist/materialist types to say that humans have absolutely no free will. But that's not necessarily the case. Like you said, we can consciously choose to do other than what our habits would have us do. Unfortunately, experimenters haven't really realized this for the most part, so they don't
test for it.
The lab setting has some similarities to real life, but there are potentially some big differences. For example, can choosing whether to use your right or left hand be compared to something that you consider over a period of days, weeks, or even months, and potentially with feedback from others? Or, can a person actively change their mind within those 7 seconds? And, like you said, can we consciously 'train' our unconscious to act in new ways, develop new habits? For example, when playing a piece of music, I'm guessing that a musician's unconscious has already 'decided' to perform certain movements before the actual performance of those movements. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been any conscious effort in order to get there (e.g. choosing to practice rather than eat potato chips and watch old episodes of
Friends).
Looks like
some researchers have got the idea, though:
http://www.charite.de/en/service/press_reports/artikel/detail/the_brain_computer_duel_do_we_have_free_will/
Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point – the 'point of no return'. The results of this study have been published in the journal PNAS*.
The background to this new set of experiments lies in the debate regarding conscious will and determinism in human decision-making, which has attracted researchers, psychologists, philosophers and the general public, and which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s. Back then, the American researcher Benjamin Libet studied the nature of cerebral processes of study participants during conscious decision-making. He demonstrated that conscious decisions were initiated by unconscious brain processes, and that a wave of brain activity referred to as a 'readiness potential' could be recorded even before the subject had made a conscious decision.
How can the unconscious brain processes possibly know in advance what decision a person is going to make at a time when they are not yet sure themselves? Until now, the existence of such preparatory brain processes has been regarded as evidence of 'determinism', according to which free will is nothing but an illusion, meaning our decisions are initiated by unconscious brain processes, and not by our 'conscious self'. In conjunction with Prof. Dr. Benjamin Blankertz and Matthias Schultze-Kraft from Technische Universität Berlin, a team of researchers from Charité's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, led by Prof. Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, has now taken a fresh look at this issue. Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered.
“The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision, i.e. use a 'veto',” explains Prof. Haynes. As part of this study, researchers asked study participants to enter into a 'duel' with a computer, and then monitored their brain waves throughout the duration of the game using electroencephalography (EEG). A specially-trained computer was then tasked with using these EEG data to predict when a subject would move, the aim being to out-maneuver the player. This was achieved by manipulating the game in favor of the computer as soon as brain wave measurements indicated that the player was about to move.
If subjects are able to evade being predicted based on their own brain processes this would be evidence that control over their actions can be retained for much longer than previously thought, which is exactly what the researchers were able to demonstrate. “A person’s decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement,” says Prof. Haynes. “Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. However, there is a 'point of no return' in the decision-making process, after which cancellation of movement is no longer possible.” Further studies are planned in which the researchers will investigate more complex decision-making processes.
As long as we take the path of least resistance, we'll probably just continue acting in the ways that we're used to acting. But just like our genes are not set in stone, our 'readiness potentials' aren't either. We just need to be first aware that this is the case: that we DO act in habitual ways that may not be in our best interest (or of those around us). Awareness of the habits can then be clues as to what the deep beliefs are. And all that knowledge can then help us train ourselves to develop a
new habit. And maybe doing some psychotherapy with out ancestors can help! ;D
