an evaluation of emdr

struggling in the last 20 years or so with severe emotional paralysis, a term coined by myself to denote the full extent of psychological impedance affecting my everyday endeavours - i set out to understand better the emdr cognitive tool said to reprocess the way the mind copes with memories

emdr (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a form of neuro reprograming trough techniques devised to reset the way the mind processes memories according to some stimulus

from the way i experience and understand the range of psychological disturbances comprising schyzophrenia i can say honestly that it seems to me the way this tool works is by providing the mind with a kind of detour from the persistent way it processes stressful stimula

biological speaking, we give much relevance to things pervasive to our survival skills; have you ever seen how meerkats scan their surroundings in search of predators? they seem so focused on the task that they hardly can give way to any other thought other than that, it is essential for their survival. if we could see an heatmap of a brain scan from a meerkat performing this essential task and tag it in some convenient way with an apprpriate marker it probably would show all brain areas fully devoted to it, they can't have the previlege to be any other way

i'm not pretending to be scientificaly accurate or precise over this, only to acquire a good enough metaphor to what's going on the background to get an usefull insight. i don't really know if a thought can take over all brain activity or not but it sure feels that way on certain moments like on panic attacks. i like to call it, and excuse me for the f-word, mental masturbation, because the brain is fouled by our virtual thoughts to trigger specific fisiologic responses when those thoughts connect with some memories set above some threshold; the same way a guy can foul the brain as being laid with a hot women, some thoughts have such a negative impact that they foul the brain into setting off a panic attack like the individual was being persuited by a predator or something

to understand how this could work we must remind ourselfs the way the mind deals and processes memories. as much as the current understanding goes, memories are staggered trough a set of wheights delimiting their relative degree of importance to us in hierarchical form so that they are more or less easily accessible according to this scheme

so when we experience some stressfull or traumatic thought trough remenbrance because of the profound impact we attribute to it it kind of takes over all our brain resources, so our mind doesn't know exactly what is dealing with, it could be a predator for all it knows and we fell in a sort of psychic trance in a freezing state of mind where the brain locks momentum (as in cognition stream block) upon the object of distress, a tipical outcome in situations of panic attacks and schizophrenia; it is sort of like time stops and the mind momentarily desynchronizes with reality flow. anyway, in this view brain activity works as a sort of emotional metric over the perceived impact of the memory

therefore, my hypothesis goes, there is a correlation between the relavance of our memories (asserted by the weights we set on them) and the focus the mind devotes to it: the stronger the relevance the harder the brain focus on it. on extreme cases this focus can degrade to a fixation (broadly speaking, not exactly connected with the fixation concept from psychanalysis) on the subject of those memories, and we can conceive their behavioural output as conditioned responses

so when we are presented with aditional stimulus at the precise moment we are going trough this swirling emotional landscape the mind receives a sort of trojan horse on the previous behavioural impact of the memory so that a dissociative connection between the stressful event and the discomfort it arises could be break.

because everything that causes personal discomfort must be dealt promptly it has an high cognitive weight associated with it, so if we can blur the stimulus with some ordinary and common one we might degrade the thought down the hierarchical ladder by actively forcing the mind to reprocess the event, hopefuly achieving this by diverting the mind to other stimulus - i borrow the milton model of neuro-linguistic programming term overloading conscious attention concept to name this 'diversion' - and freeze a new snapshot on memory where our (negative) response was impaired by minifying the cognitive resources devoted to it because we were processing other minful events in paralell at the same time.

this way the reprocessing consists of resetting new (lower) weights associated with specific memories. it's like we were telling our mind, look we were only devoting 50% of our brain mass to it (after diverting the other 50% with alt stimulus) so it's no big deal afterall

so far i have been talking about weights without giving much thought on the precise nature of them. being a layman person interested in this by virtue only of self-interest i have the liberty to allow myself to speculate freely without being absolutly rigorous or self-demanding to prove my assertions that a professional or a scientist wouldn't possess - nevertheless don't forget that theories arise too often if not always from pure speculation. that been said, i postulate that the way the brain implements the so called weights to echelon memories on the mind is by their cardinality, that is, the number of times we remember them, where the rational is that we remember, and therefore access, the most important (to us) more often than the others and so are given top priority over the others, that is we remember them better, so to speak

did you know that people with mental degenerative deseases like alzheimer forget ancient memories last and the newer ones first in what we might call a lifo model of remembrance. this makes some sense since we tend to learn the most important skills for survival when younger and the brain doesn't had enough time to settle the new ones as important as perused in my proposal. it is something like the way google indexes webpages since the ones that are most accessed come upfront and therefore are better remembered because of that

in conclusion, this is just an alt view to the common way this techniques are perceived, as a kind of free access trap metalanguage to the inner workings of the brain machinery, we know like ctrl signals on conventional network protocols; interesting, this makes me elaborate the all field as a blue box to make free calls to the inner mind. wonder shievering, if only could be so simple

this distinction between reprocessing and behavioural output can also be elaborated further as a sort of compile-time vs runtime effects of cognitive stimula so that emdr seems to act on both, and my own interpretation stresses more upon the later as a technique to calibrate the response pre-programmed on our mind and added to our toolbox repertoire to manage stressful situations, like breath control or meditation

This article was updated on September 18, 2018