Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain

[Kaj_Sotala]

If the thesis in Unlocking the Emotional Brain (UtEB) is even half-right, it may be one of the most important books that I have read. Written by the psychotherapists Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley, it claims to offer a neuroscience-grounded, comprehensive model of how effective therapy works. In so doing, it also happens to formulate its theory in terms of belief updating, helping explain how the brain models the world and what kinds of techniques allow us to actually change our minds. Furthermore, if UtEB is correct, it also explains why rationalist techniques such as Internal Double Crux [1 2 3] work.

UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions to occur. The brain then uses those models to guide our future behavior. Emotional issues and seemingly irrational behaviors are generated from implicit world-models (schemas) which have been formed in response to various external challenges. Each schema contains memories relating to times when the challenge has been encountered and mental structures describing both the problem and a solution to it.

According to the authors, the key for updating such schemas involves a process of memory reconsolidation, originally identified in neuroscience. The emotional brain’s learnings are usually locked and not modifiable. However, once an emotional schema is activated, it is possible to simultaneously bring into awareness knowledge contradicting the active schema. When this happens, the information contained in the schema can be overwritten by the new knowledge.

While I am not convinced that the authors are entirely right, many of the book’s claims definitely feel like they are pointing in the right direction. I will discuss some of my caveats and reservations after summarizing some of the book’s claims in general. I also consider its model in the light of an issue of a psychology/​cognitive science journal devoted to discussing a very similar hypothesis.

Emotional learning

In UtEB’s model, emotional learning forms the foundation of much of our behavior. It sets our basic understanding about what situations are safe or unsafe, desirable or undesirable. The authors do not quite say it explicitly, but the general feeling I get is that the subcortical emotional processes set many of the priorities for what we want to achieve, with higher cognitive functions then trying to figure out how to achieve it—often remaining unaware of what exactly they are doing.

UtEB’s first detailed example of an emotional schema comes from the case study of a man in his thirties they call Richard. He had been consistently successful and admired at work, but still suffered from serious self-doubt and low confidence at his job. On occasions such as daily technical meetings, when he considered saying something, he experienced thoughts including “Who am I to think I know what’s right?”, “This could be wrong” and “Watch out—don’t go out on a limb”. These prevented him from expressing any opinions.

From the point of view of the authors, these thoughts have a definite cause—Richard has “emotional learnings according to which it is adaptively necessary to go into negative thoughts and feelings towards [himself].” The self-doubts are a strategy which his emotional brain has generated for solving some particular problem.

Richard’s therapist guided Richard to imagine what it would feel like if he was at one of his work meetings, made useful comments, and felt confident in his knowledge while doing so. This was intended to elicit information about what Richard’s emotional brain predicted would happen if it failed to maintain the strategy of self-doubt. The book includes the following transcript of what happened after Richard started imagining the scene as instructed:

Richard: Now I’m feeling really uncomfortable, but-it’s in a different way.

Therapist: OK, let yourself feel it—this different discomfort. [Pause.] See if any words come along with this uncomfortable feeling.

Richard: [Pause.] Now they hate me.

Therapist: “Now they hate me.” Good. Keep going: See if this really uncomfortable feeling can also tell you why they hate you now.

Richard: [Pause.] Hnh. Wow. It’s because… now I’m… an arrogant asshole… like my father… a totally self-centered, totally insensitive know-it-all.

Therapist: Do you mean that having a feeling of confidence as you speak turns you into an arrogant asshole, like Dad?

Richard: Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Therapist: And how do you feel about being like him in this way?

Richard: It’s horrible! It’s what I’ve always vowed not to be!

Richard had experienced his father as being assertive as well as obnoxious and hated. His emotional brain had identified this as a failure mode to be avoided: if you are assertive, then you are obnoxious and will be hated. The solution was to generate feelings of doubt so as to stop him from being too confident. This caused him suffering, but the prediction of his emotional brain was that acting otherwise would produce even worse suffering, as being hated would be a terrible fate.

UtEB describes Richard as having had the following kind of unconscious schema:

Perceptual, emotional and somatic memory of original experiences: his suffering from his father’s heavily dominating, hyper-confident self-expression, plus related suffering from unmet needs for fatherly expressions of love, acceptance, understanding, validation. (This is the “raw data”; matching features in current situations are triggers of the whole schema.)

A mental model or set of linked, learned constructs operating as living knowledge of a problem and a solution:

The problem: knowledge of a vulnerability to a specific suffering. Confident assertiveness in any degree inflicts crushing oppression on others and is hated by them. I would be horrible like Dad and hated by others, as he is, if I asserted my own knowledge or wishes confidently. (This is a model of how the world is, and current situations that appear relevant to this model are triggers of the whole schema.)

The solution: knowledge of an urgent broad strategy and concrete tactic(s) for avoiding that suffering. Never express any confident assertiveness, to avoid being horrible and hated (general strategy and pro-symptom purpose), by vigilantly noticing any definite knowledge or opinions forming in myself and blocking them from expression by generating potently self-doubting, self-invalidating thoughts (concrete tactic and manifested symptom).

Emotional schemas can be brought to light during a variety of ways, including Focusing, IFS, and imagining yourself doing something and seeing what you expect to happen as a result.

But suppose that you do manage to bring up a schema which seems wrong to you. What do you do then?

Memory reconsolidation: updating the emotional learning

The formation of memory traces involves consolidation, when the memory is first laid out in the brain; deconsolidation, when an established memory is “opened” and becomes available for changes; and reconsolidation, when a deconsolidated memory (along with possible changes) is stored and becomes frozen again. The term “reconsolidation” is also used to refer to the general process from deconsolidation to reconsolidation; UtEB generally applies the term to mean the entire process. Unless the context indicates otherwise, I do the same.

UtEB reviews some of the history of memory research. Until 1997, neuroscientists believed that past emotional learning became permanently locked in the brain, so that memories could only consolidate, never de- or reconsolidate. More recent research has indicated that once a memory becomes activated, it is temporarily unlocked, allowing it to be changed or erased.

Starting from 2004, new studies suggested that activation alone is not sufficient to deconsolidate the memory. The memories are used to predict that things will occur in a similar fashion as they did previously. Besides just activation, there has to be a significant mismatch between what one experiences and what the memory suggests is about to happen. The violation of expectation can be qualitative (the predicted outcome not occurring at all) or quantitative (the magnitude of the outcome not being fully predicted). In either case, it is this prediction error which triggers the deconsolidation and subsequent reconsolidation.

The memory erasure seems to be specific to the interpretation from which the prediction was produced. For example, someone who has had an experience of being disliked may later experience being liked. This may erase the emotional generalization “I am inherently dislikable”, but it will not erase the memory of the person also having been disliked.

Applied reconsolidation: an example of the schema update process

So, assuming that the model outlined above is correct, how does one apply it in practice?

From what we have discussed so far, the essential steps of erasing a learned belief (including an emotional schema) involves identifying it, activating it, and then finding a mismatch between its prediction and reality.

The first difficulty is that the beliefs involved with the schema are not necessarily consciously available at first. Richard knew that he suffered from a lack of self-esteem, but he was not aware of its reason. The process started from him describing in concrete details how this manifested: as skeptical self-talk during a daily meeting.

As he was guided to imagine what would happen if he didn’t have those thoughts and acted confidently, his therapist was seeking to retrieve the implicit schema and bring it into consciousness so that its contents would become available for access. Once it had been retrieved, the therapist and Richard worked together to express the belief in the schema in maximally emotional language:

“Feeling any confidence means I’m arrogant, self-centered, and totally insensitive like Dad, and people will hate me for it, so I’ve got to never feel confident, ever.”

The authors have developed a therapeutic approach called Coherence Therapy, whose steps closely follow the steps of the memory reconsolidation process. The example of Richard is from this school of therapy.

In Coherence Therapy (as well as related approaches, such as Internal Family Systems), one initially avoids any impulse to argue with or disprove the retrieved schema. This would risk it being pushed away before it has become sufficiently activated to allow for reconsolidation.

Instead, one stays with it. Richard was given a card with the above phrase and instructed to review it every day until the next therapy session, just feeling the extent to which it felt true to him. This served to further integrate access to the schema in question, making it better consciously available.

Two weeks later, Richard had frequently noticed his self-doubt, used it as a prompt for reading the card, and experienced its description ringing true as a reason for his thoughts. When speaking with his therapist, he mentioned a particular event which had stuck in his memory. In a recent meeting, he had thought of a solution to a particular problem, but then kept quiet about it. A moment later, another person had spoken up and suggested the same solution in a confident manner. Looking around, Richard had seen the person’s solution and confidence being received positively by the others. Richard had been struck by how that reaction differed from what his schema predicted would happen if he had made the same suggestion in that tone.

Because Richard had made the implicit assumptions in his schema explicit, he was able to consciously notice a situation which seemed to violate those assumptions: a prediction mismatch. His therapist recognized this as a piece of contradictory knowledge which could be used to update the old schema. The therapist then guided Richard through a process intended to activate the old schema while bringing the contradictory information into awareness, triggering a reconsolidation process.

The therapist first instructed Richard to mentally bring himself back to the situation where he had just thought of the solution, but held it back. To properly activate the schema, the therapist guided Richard’s attention to the purpose behind his reluctance and Richard’s certainty of any confidence making him disliked. Next, the therapist told Richard to re-live what happened next: the other person making the same suggestion, and the other people in the room looking pleased rather than angry.

The book then has a transcript of the therapist guiding Richard to repeat this juxtaposition of the old schema and the disconfirming experience (italicized brackets in the original):

Therapist: Stay with that. Stay with being surprised at what you’re seeing—surprised because in your life, you’ve had such a definite knowing that saying something confidently to people will always come across like Dad, like an obnoxious know-it-all, and people will hate that. That’s what you know, yet at the same time, here you’re seeing that saying something confidently isn’t always like Dad, and then people are fine with it. And it’s quite a surprise to know that. [That was an explicit prompting of another side-by-side experiencing of the two incompatible knowings, with the therapist expressing empathy for both, with no indication of any favoring of one knowing over the other. The therapist paused for several seconds, then asked:] Does it feel true to describe it like that? Your old knowing right alongside this other new knowing that’s so different?

Richard: [Quietly, seeming absorbed in the experience.] Yeah.

Therapist: [Softly.] All along, it seemed to you that saying something confidently could be done only in Dad’s dominating way of doing it, and now suddenly you’re seeing that saying something confidently can be done very differently, and it feels fine to people. [This was another deliberate repetition of the same juxtaposition experience.]

Richard: Yeah.

Therapist: Mm-hm. [Silence for about 20 seconds.] So, how is it for you be in touch with both of these knowings, the old one telling you that anything said with confidence means being like Dad, and the new one that knows you can be confident in a way that feels okay to people? [Asking this question repeated the juxtaposition experience yet again, and, in addition, the “how is it” portion of the question prompted Richard to view the experience with mindful or metacognitive awareness, while remaining in the experience.]

Richard: It’s sort of weird. It’s like there’s this part of the world that I didn’t notice before, even though it’s been right there.

Therapist: I’m intrigued by how you put that. Sounds like a significant shift for you.

Richard: Yeah, it is. Huh.

Therapist: You’re seeing both now, the old part of the world and this other part of the world that’s new, even though it was right there all along. [That cued the juxtaposition experience for a fourth time, followed by silence for about 30 seconds.] So, keep seeing both, the old part and the new part, when you open your eyes in a few seconds and come back into the room with me. [Richard soon opens his eyes and blinks a few times.] Can you keep seeing both?

Richard: Yeah.

Therapist: What’s it like to see both and feel both now? [With the transformation sequence complete, this question begins the next step of verification— Step V—because it probes for whether the target learning still exists as an emotional experience.]

Richard: [Pause, then sudden, gleeful laughter.] It’s kind of funny! Like, what? How could I think that? [This is an initial marker indicating that the pro-symptom schema may have been successfully disconfirmed, depotentiated, and dissolved by the transformation sequence.]

Therapist: Do you mean, how could you think that simply saying what you know, or mentioning some good idea that you’ve had, would make you seem arrogant, insensitive and dominating like Dad and be hated for it?

Richard: [Laughing again.] Yeah!

Afterwards, the therapist and Richard wrote a new card together, which Richard was told to review daily:

All along it’s been so clear that if I confidently say what I know, I will always come across as arrogant, insensitive, and dominating like Dad, and be hated for it. And it’s so weird, looking around the room and seeing that it doesn’t come across like that.

The purpose of the card was to provide additional juxtaposition experiences between the old schema and the new knowledge. While the original transformation sequence might have been enough to eliminate the old schema, the schema might also have been stored in the context of many different situations and contained in several memory systems. In such a situation, further juxtapositions would have helped deal with it.

In a follow-up meeting, Richard reported having lost the feelings of self-doubt, and that speaking up no longer felt like it was any big deal. To verify that the old schema really had lost its power, the therapist tried deliberately provoking his old fears again:

Dropping his voice to a quieter tone, the therapist added, “But tell me, when you have something to say and just say it, what about the danger of coming across as a know-it-all, like Dad, and being hated for that? What about your fear of that and how urgent it is to protect yourself from that?” [...]

Richard took in the question, gazed at the therapist in silence for a few seconds, and then replied, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. All I can say is, that doesn’t trouble me any more. And hearing you say it, it seems a little strange that it ever did—like, what was my problem?”

Applied reconsolidation: the schema update process in general

Now that we have looked at a specific example, we can look at a more general version of the process.

Accessing sequence

In Coherence Therapy, the accessing sequence is the preliminary phase of making both a person’s implicit schema and some disconfirming knowledge accessible, so that they can be used in the juxtaposition process:

1. Symptom identification. Establishing which specific symptoms the person regards as problematic, and when and where they manifest. In Richard’s case, the general symptom was a lack of confidence, which specifically manifested as negative self-talk in meetings.

2. Retrieval of target learning. Bringing into explicit awareness the purpose behind the symptoms. This can then be used to guide the search for disconfirming knowledge, as well as accessing the original schema in order to reconsolidate it. In Richard’s case, the purpose was to avoid expressing confidence in a way that would make people hate him.

3. Identification of disconfirming knowledge. Identifying some past or present experience which directly contradicts the original learning. This knowledge does not necessarily need to feel “better” or “more positive” than the old one, just as long as it is mutually exclusive with the old one. In Richard’s case, the disconfirming knowledge was the experience of his co-worker confidently proposing a solution and being well-received.

Erasure sequence

Once both the target schema and the disconfirming knowledge are known, the erasure steps can be applied to update the learning:

1. Reactivation of the target schema. Tapping into the felt truth of the original learning, experiencing it as vividly as possible.

2. Activation of disconfirming knowledge, mismatching the target schema. Activating, at the same time, the contradictory belief and having the experience of simultaneously believing in two different things which cannot both be true.

3. Repetitions of the target-disconfirmation pairing.

Something that the authors emphasize is that when the target schema is activated, there should be no attempt to explicitly argue against it or disprove it, as this risks pushing it down. Rather, the belief update happens when one experiences their old schema as vividly true, while also experiencing an entirely opposite belief as vividly true. It is the juxtaposition of believing X and not-X at the same time, which triggers an inbuilt contradiction-detection mechanism in the brain and forces a restructuring of one’s belief system to eliminate the inconsistency.

The book notes that this distinguishes Coherence Therapy from approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is premised on treating some beliefs as intrinsically irrational and then seeking to disprove them. While UtEB does not go further into the comparison, I note that this is a common complaint that I have heard of CBT: that by defaulting to negative emotions being caused by belief distortions, CBT risks belittling those negative emotions which are actually produced by correct evaluations of the world.

I would personally add that not only does treating all of your beliefs—including emotional ones—as provisionally valid seem to be a requirement for actually updating them, this approach is also good rationality practice. After all, you can only seek evidence to test a theory, not confirm it.

If you notice different parts of your mind having conflicting models of how the world works, the correct epistemic stance should be that you are trying to figure out which one is true—not privileging one of them as “more rational” and trying to disprove the other. Otherwise it will be unavoidable that your preconception will cause you to dismiss as false beliefs which are actually true. (Of course, you can still reasonably anticipate the belief update going a particular way—but you need to take seriously at least the possibility that you will be shown wrong.)

This can actually be a relief. Trying to stack the deck towards receiving favorable evidence would just also sabotage the brain’s belief update process. So you might as well give up trying to do so, relax, and just let the evidence come in.

I speculate that this limitation might also be in place in part to help avoid the error where you decide which one of two models is more correct, and then discard the other model entirely. Simultaneously running two contradictory schemas at the same time allows both of them to be properly evaluated and merged rather than one of them being thrown away outright. I suspect that in Richard’s case, the resulting process didn’t cause him to entirely discard the notion that some behaviors will make him hated like his dad was—it just removed the overgeneralization which had been produced by having too little training data as the basis of the schema.

Of course, this means that there does need to be some contradictory information available which could be used to disprove the original schema. One might have a schema for which no disconfirmation is available because it is correct, or a schema which might or might not be correct but which is making things worse and cannot easily be disconfirmed. UtEB mentions the example of a man, “Tómas”, who had a desire to be understood and validated by someone important in his life. Tómas remarked that a professional therapist who was being paid for his empathy could never fulfill that role. The update contradicting the schema that nobody in his life really understood him, would have to come from someone actually in his life.

Another issue that may pop up with the erasure sequence is that there is another schema which predicts that, for whatever reason, running this transformation may produce adverse effects. In that case, one needs to address the objecting schema first, essentially be carrying out the entire process on it before returning to the original steps. (This is similar to the phenomenon in e.g. Internal Family Systems, where objecting parts may show up and have their concerns addressed before work on the original part can proceed.)

Verification step

Finally, after the erasure sequence has been run, one seeks to verify that lasting change has indeed happened and that the target schema has been transformed. UtEB offers the following behavioral markers as signs that a learning which has previously generated emotional responses has in fact been erased:

• “A specific emotional reaction abruptly can no longer by reactivated by cues and triggers that formerly did so or by other stressful situations.”

• “Symptoms of behavior, emotion, somatics, or thought that were expressions of that emotional reaction also disappear permanently.”

• “Non-recurrence of the emotional reaction and symptoms continues effortlessly and without counteractive or preventive measures of any kind.”

The authors interpret current neuroscience to say that only memory reconsolidation can produce these kinds of markers. They cannot be produced by counteractive or competitive processes, such as trying to learn an opposite habit to replace a neurotic behavior. Counteractive processes are generally fragile and susceptible to relapse. When these markers are observed in clinical work, UtEB argues that one may infer that reconsolidation has led to the original learning being replaced.

Further examples

For additional examples of the schema update process, I recommend reading the book, which contains several more case studies of issues which were dealt with using this approach. Here’s a brief summary of the most detailed ones (note that some of these examples are actually more detailed and include additional complications, such as more than one symptom-producing schema; I have only summarized the most prominent ones to give a taste of them):

• “Charlotte”. Issue: obsessive attachment to a former lover. Schema: “It would be much better if I was merged with my lover”. Contradictory knowledge: The harm caused by not having boundaries.

• “Ted”. Issue: an inability to hold a steady job and a general lack of success in life. Schema: “If my life is a mess, my father will be forced to admit how badly he screwed up as a parent.” Contradictory knowledge: Realizing that Ted’s father would never admit failure, no matter what.

• “Brenda”. Issue: stage fright when having a leading role in an upcoming play. Schema: being on the stage in front of an audience means being unable to get off, causing helplessness similar to when Brenda was in a car with her alcoholic father and couldn’t get off. Contradictory knowledge: re-imagining the scene and the way how Brenda could actually have gotten out of the car.

• “Travis”. Issue: inability to experience intimate emotional closeness in relationships. Schema: “Nobody will pay attention to how I feel or give me understanding for how I’m hurting. I don’t matter, and I’m all on my own.” Contradictory knowledge: the therapist’s empathic presence and listening.

• “Regina”. Issue: strong anxiety and panic during/​after interacting with other people. Schema: “I’m acceptable and lovable only if I do everything perfectly.” Contradictory knowledge: Regina’s Uncle Theo loves her regardless of what imperfections she might have.

• “Carol”. Issue: wanting to avoid sex with her husband despite feeling emotionally close to him. Schema: engaging in any sexuality means being overtly sexual and harming Carol’s daughter, in the way that Carol was harmed by her mother’s overt sexuality. Contradictory knowledge: once the schema was made conscious, it activated the brain’s spontaneous mismatch detection mechanisms and started to feel silly.

As the last item suggests, sometimes just making a schema explicit is enough to start to dismantle it. The authors suggest that the brain has a built-in detection system which compares any consciously experienced beliefs for inconsistencies with other things that a person knows, and can spontaneously create juxtaposition experiences by bringing up such inconsistent information. They suggest that therapies which are based on digging up previously unconscious material, but which do not have an explicit juxtaposition step, work to the extent that the uncovered material happens to trigger this spontaneous mismatch detection. (We already saw this happening with Richard—once his underlying schema had been made conscious, he was startled to later notice what seemed like a contradiction.)

One may note the connection to the model in Consciousness and the Brain that when some subsystem in the brain manages to elevate a mental object into the content of consciousness, multiple subsystems will synchronize their processing around that object. If the object is an explicit belief, then any subsystem which is paying attention to that object may presumably detect inconsistencies with that subsystem’s own models.

Besides these case studies from Coherence Therapy, the authors also analyze published case studies from Accelerated Experiental Dynamic Psychotherapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and Interpersonal Neurobiology. They try to show how these cases also carried out a juxtaposition process, even if the theoretical frameworks of those therapies did not explicitly realize it. It is the claim of the authors that any therapy which causes lasting emotional change does it through reconsolidation. Finally, the book contains four essays from other therapists (using Coherence Therapy and EMDR), who analyze some of their own case studies.

Evaluating the book’s plausibility

Now that we have looked at the book’s claims, let’s look at whether we should believe in them.

It is unclear to me how reliable the neuroscience results are; the authors cite a number of studies, but each individual claim only references a relatively small number of them.

On a brief look, I could not find any reviews or papers that would have directly made a critical assessment of the book’s model. However, I found something that might be even better.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences is a respected journal covering subject areas across the cognitive sciences. BBS publishes “target articles” which present some kind of a thesis or review about a particular topic, together with tens of brief commentaries which respond to the target article, and a final response by the target article’s authors to the commentaries.

In 2015, four prestigious (with a total of 500 published research articles between them) psychologists published a BBS target article, Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy: New insights from brain science (Lane et al. 2015). While the exact model that they outline has a number of differences from the UtEB model, the core idea is the same: that therapeutic change from a wide variety of therapeutic approaches, “including behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, results from the updating of prior emotional memories through a process of reconsolidation that incorporates new emotional experiences.”

One interesting difference was that Lane et al. describe emotional schemas somewhat differently. In their model, the schemas form memory structures with three mutually integrated components: emotional responses, episodic/​autobiographical memories, and semantic structures (e.g. abstract beliefs which generalize over the various incidents, such as the claim that “people are untrustworthy”). Any of these components can be used as an entry point to the memory structure, and can potentially update the other components through reconsolidation. They hypothesize that different forms of therapy work by accessing different types of components: e.g. behavior therapy and emotion-focused therapy access emotional responses, conventional psychoanalysis uses access to biographical memories, and cognitive behavioral therapy accesses semantic structures.

I read the target article, all the commentaries, and the responses. Given the similarities between Lane et al.’s model and the UtEB model, I think we can consider the responses to Lane et al. to generally offer a useful evaluation of the UtEB model as well.

One significant difference which needs to be noted is that Lane et al.’s model of memory reconsolidation does not mention the requirement for a prediction mismatch before reconsolidation can happen. This was remarked on in the response from UtEB’s authors. In their counter-response, Lane et al. noted UtEB’s model to be highly compatible with theirs, and remarked that further research is needed to nail down the conditions which make reconsolidation the most effective.

The other responses to Lane et al. were mostly from psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists, but also included the occasional economist, philosopher, philologist and folklorist. Several of the responses were generally positive and mostly wanted to contribute additional details or point out future research directions.

However, there were also a number of skeptical responses. A common theme which emerged from several concerned the limitations of the current neuroscience research on memory reconsolidation. In particular, most of the studies so far have been carried out on rats, and specifically testing the elimination of a fear response to electric shocks. As one of the responses points out, “neither the stimuli nor the subjects are generalizable to the kind of rich autobiographical memories involved in therapy.” A number also raised the question whether all therapeutic change really involves reconsolidation, as opposed to some related mechanism, such as creating new memory structures which compete with the original as opposed to replacing it.

My non-expert reading is that the critical responses are right in that a gap remains between the clinical and behavioral findings on the other hand, and the neuroscience findings on the other. There are various patterns which can be derived from psychological research and clinical therapy experience, and a small number of neuroscience findings which establish the existence of something that could explain those patterns. However, the neuroscience findings have only been established in a rather narrow and limited context; the connection between them and the higher-level patterns is a plausible link, but it remains speculative nonetheless.

Personally I consider the book’s model tentatively promising, because it seems to explain many observations which I had independently arrived at before reading it. For example, I had noticed an interesting thing with anxieties, where I let e.g. a sensation of social anxiety stay active in my mind, neither accepting it as truth nor pushing it away while I went to do social things. This would then cause the anxiety to update, making me feel less anxious if it was indeed the case that the social interaction was harmless. This fits nicely together with the framework of an activated memory structure becoming open to reconsolidation and then being updated by a prediction mismatch (the situation not being as bad as expected).

Likewise, in my post Integrating disagreeing subagents, I reviewed a variety of rationality and therapeutic techniques, and suggested that they mostly worked either by merging or combining two existing models that a person’s brain already had, or augmenting the existing models by collecting additional information.

In particular, I considered an example from cognitive behavioral therapy, where a man named Walter was feeling like he was impossible to be in a relationship with after he had broken up with his boyfriend. At the same time, he did not think that someone else breaking up with their partner was an indication of them being impossible to be in a relationship with. He and his therapist role-played an interaction where the therapist pretended to be a friend who had recently broken up, and Walter explained why this did not make the friend a relationship failure. In the process of doing so, Walter suddenly realized that he wasn’t a failure, either.

I commented:

Walter was asked whether he’d say something harsh to a friend, and he said no, but that alone wasn’t enough to improve his condition. What did help was putting him in a position where he had to really think through the arguments for why this is irrational in order to convince his friend, and then, after having formulated the arguments once himself, get convinced by them himself.

In terms of our framework, we might say that a part of Walter’s mind contained a model which output a harsh judgment of himself, while another part contained a model which would output a much less harsher judgment of someone else who was in otherwise identical circumstances. Just bringing up the existence of this contradiction wasn’t enough to change it: it caused the contradiction to be noticed, but didn’t activate the relevant models extensively enough for their contents to be reprocessed.

But when Walter had to role-play a situation where he thought of himself as actually talking with a depressed friend, that required him to more fully activate the non-judgmental model and apply it to the relevant situation. This caused him to blend with the model, taking its perspective as the truth. When that perspective was then propagated to the self-critical model, the easiest way for the mind to resolve the conflict was simply to alter the model producing the self-critical thoughts.

This seems like a straightforward instance of belief juxtaposition, and one where I ended up independently deriving something like UtEB’s memory reconsolidation model: I too noted that the relevant belief structures need to be simultaneously activated in the right way to allow for the brain to revise one of them after noticing the contradiction. In general, UtEB’s model of how things work rings true in my experience, making me inclined to believe that its description of how therapy works is correct, and that its model of how it is connected to neuroscience might also be.

UtEB and the subagent model

As many readers know, I have been writing a sequence of posts on multi-agent models of mind. In Building up to an Internal Family Systems model, I suggested that the human mind might contain something like subagents which try to ensure that past catastrophes do not repeat. In subagents, coherence, and akrasia in humans, I suggested that behaviors such as procrastination, indecision, and seemingly inconsistent behavior result from different subagents having disagreements over what to do.

As I already mentioned, my post on integrating disagreeing subagents took the model in the direction of interpreting disagreeing subagents as conflicting beliefs or models within a person’s brain. Subagents, trauma and rationality further suggested that the appearance of drastically different personalities within a single person might result from unintegrated memory networks, which resist integration due to various traumatic experiences.

This post has discussed UtEB’s model of conflicting emotional schemas in a way which further equates “subagents” with beliefs—in this case, the various schemas seem closely related to what e.g. Internal Family Systems calls “parts”. In many situations, it is probably fair to say that this is what subagents are.

That said, I think that while this covers a very important subset of subagents, not everything which I have been referring to as a subagent falls straightforwardly under the belief-schema model. In subagents and neural Turing machines as well as Against “System 1” and “System 2”, I also covered subagents in a more general way, as also including e.g. the kinds of subsystems which carry out object recognition and are used to carry out tasks like arithmetic. This was also the lens through which I looked at subagents in my summary of Consciousness and the Brain. Which kind of view is the most useful, depends on exactly what phenomenon we are trying to understand.

[Matt Goldenberg]

Memory Reconsolidation has perhaps been the most useful concept I’ve learned in the past 3 years. I’ve used it in running workshops, coaching sessions, and for my own benefit.

As far as I can tell, this is the best introduction to Memory Reconsolidation available on the internet, and having a single place that I can link people to to explain the concept is highly valuable. I’ve done so probably half a dozen times since it was published.

[Ben Pace]

This post discusses something I have found hard to put into words, and helps draw it out for everyone to talk about. Seems very valuable to include in the review.

[MalcolmOcean]

This was a profoundly impactful post and definitely belongs in the review. It prompted me and many others to dive deep into understanding how emotional learnings have coherence and to actually engage in dialogue with them rather than insisting they don’t make sense. I’ve linked this post to people more than probably any other LessWrong post (50-100 times) as it is an excellent summary and introduction to the topic. It works well as a teaser for the full book as well as a standalone resource.

The post makes both conceptual and pragmatic claims. I haven’t exactly crosschecked the models although they do seem compatible with other models I’ve read. I did read the whole book and it seemed pretty sound and based in part on relevant neuroscience. There’s a kind of meeting-in-the-middle thing there where the neuroscience is quite low-level and therapy is quite high-level. I think it’ll be cool to see the middle layers fleshed out a bit.

Just because your brain uses Bayes’ theorem at the neural level and at higher levels of abstraction, doesn’t mean that you consciously know what all of its priors & models are!

And it seems the brain’s basic organization is set up to prevent people from calmly arguing against emotionally intense evidence without understanding it—which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And it also makes sense that your brain would be able to update under the right circumstances.

I’ve tested the pragmatic claims personally, by doing the therapeutic reconsolidation process using both Coherence Therapy methods & other methods, both on myself & working with others. I’ve found that these methods indeed find coherent underlying structures (eg the same basic structures using different introspective methods, that relate and are consistent) and that accessing those emotional truths and bringing them in contact with contradictory evidence indeed causes them to update, and once updated there’s no longer a sense of needing to argue with yourself. It doesn’t take effort to embody the new knowing.

I guess on another level I’d say that I have the sense that the emotional coherence framework has something important to say about the nature of knowing. It frames all of the perspectives held by conscious and unconscious schemas as “knowings”. The knowings are partial, but this frame (as opposed to “belief”) really respects the first-person experience of what it means to believe something—you don’t think of it as a belief, or something you “think”, it just feels true. So inasmuch as all knowing about the world is partial, there’s a lot to be gained by recognizing that you know things that contradict other things you know. It’s already true, whether you acknowledge it or not.

This framework has profound implications for rational thinking, communication & feedback, topics like akrasia, and there’s a lot of followup work to be done in exploring those implications.

[orthonormal]

As mentioned in my comment, this book review overcame some skepticism from me and explained a new mental model about how inner conflict works. Plus, it was written with Kaj’s usual clarity and humility. Recommended.

[hamnox]

This is a more kludgy dense read than some of Kaj’s other writing. I think I’m mostly only making sense of it because I’m familiar with similar ideas already. Some of those from Kaj’s later posts! I guess I’m not that interested in an overview of a particular book? I can’t tell if I read this post before, or if the same points were repeated in other writing. But I’m getting stuck on some clinical wordiness.

Doesn’t seem… foundational? It’s a starting-to-build on literature and other posts. I’m not sure how someone else would build on it.

If anything, I want to dig deeper into the transcript and concrete examples. Step back from the clinical language, and start thinking in terms of specific actions + predictions that individuals can test. That is likely a point in favor of directly reading the book.

[pjeby]

Of course, this means that there does need to be some contradictory information available which could be used to disprove the original schema. One might have a schema for which no disconfirmation is available because it is correct, or a schema which might or might not be correct but which is making things worse and cannot easily be disconfirmed.

This view is ignoring the distinction between denotation and connotation, or as I like to think of it, between prediction and evaluation. Our memories don’t just create factual prediction, they are also tagged with evaluations: meaning, feelings, etc.

So, it’s quite possible to reconsolidate different evaluations for the same factual predictions. For example:

UtEB mentions the example of a man, “Tómas”, who had a desire to be understood and validated by someone important in his life. Tómas remarked that a professional therapist who was being paid for his empathy could never fulfill that role. The update contradicting the schema that nobody in his life really understood him, would have to come from someone actually in his life.

The evaluation Tómas is making is itself based in some other memory that can be reconsolidated, so that it is no longer required for somebody else to understand him. The experience of “feeling understood” is not something that actually comes from outside, it is something your brain generates according to learned rules. In this case, Tómas has learned that only certain specific people’s understanding counts or is meaningful… and this learning is just as subject to reconsolidation as anything else!

Another issue that may pop up with the erasure sequence is that there is another schema which predicts that, for whatever reason, running this transformation may produce adverse effects. In that case, one needs to address the objecting schema first, essentially be carrying out the entire process on it before returning to the original steps. (This is similar to the phenomenon in e.g. Internal Family Systems, where objecting parts may show up and have their concerns addressed before work on the original part can proceed.)

Yes, checking for objections is of critical importance, because if you don’t, the thing you think you fixed can come back in a few days or weeks. But this isn’t because there’s an agent that “objects”, it’s just that the thing you were working on is reinforced by another prediction/​evaluation.

For example, let’s say that Joe is having trouble promoting himself or his work, because he’s learned never to brag and that bragging is bad. He learned this because his mother always punished him for bragging and said “Pride goeth before a fall”. We do some work and get rid of that immediate response, but don’t check for objections, so we miss the part where the implicit, unspoken part of the interaction was, “If I don’t punish you for bragging, you’ll grow up to be an obnoxious selfish person who nobody will like”.

So, because of that, we’ve removed Joe’s semi-explicit belief that bragging is prideful and will lead to a disastrous “fall”, but not his more-implicit belief that he needs to punish himself for bragging. In the high of having changed the first belief, Joe will go out and start promoting himself, but feeling weirdly bad about it, until he stops again.

IOW, the “objecting” schema isn’t really objecting per se. The schema is rather reinforcing the previous schema, with a need or desire to punish himself for violating it, leading to a return of the old behavior and extinguishing the new behavior we tried to establish.

These reinforcing schema don’t always show up with an obvious objection at the time you’re making a change, and people who are eager to get the change done will often report over-optimistic predictions when they’re doing the reconsolidation part. Sometimes, the “objection” is nothing more than a vague feeling that the new scenario being projected isn’t realistic in some way, or “isn’t quite right”. When that is the case, I always dig deeper immediately to uncover what other predictions are being made.

(Of course, for this specific pattern of “if I don’t punish X in way Y, I/​they will become bad type of person Z”, I have a standard format for finding it even before getting to the reconsolidation part, as it’s super-common in issues of self-sabotage, procrastination, perfectionism, etc.)

[pjeby]

Richard took in the question, gazed at the therapist in silence for a few seconds, and then replied, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. All I can say is, that doesn’t trouble me any more. And hearing you say it, it seems a little strange that it ever did—like, what was my problem?”

Hah. I’ve had that experience with clients (and myself) so many times I coined the term “change amnesia”—it’s extremely common following successful reconsolidation, and a good sign that the specific change made is going to “stick”.

I was going to say that my approach doesn’t use side-by-side comparison, but then on further thought the critical stage in my SAMMSA model involves the contradiction between someone else’s view of them as lazy, incompetent, stupid, selfish, etc., and their actually not being those things at the time the judgment was made.

But that in and of itself isn’t sufficient to make a change, AFAICT. It might open things up to allow the reconsolidation that follows, but it’s necessary also to make new predictions in light of the thing that’s been opened for reconsolidation.

Huh. This is interesting. It explains why certain things I’ve been doing work, that I knew you had to do in order to get results, but which I didn’t know why they needed to be done. Metaphorically, I’ve been telling people they need to open the right “file” in their brain before they can make a change, but it seems that I’ve also been having them flag errors in the file first, before adding new data to the file.

The Work of Byron Katie also follows this general pattern, i.e. : He should listen to me—is that true? (reflect on experience) Can I absolutely know that’s true? (generate alternative possibilities) How do I react when I think this thought? (predict negative consequences for continuing with this pattern) Who would I be without that thought? (predict positive consequences of thinking differently) And finally turnarounds (e.g. “I should listen to him”, “he shouldn’t listen to me”, “I should listen to me”), to generate alternative schemata that might apply to the trigger situation.

[orthonormal]

Well, damn. I started out reading this really skeptically, but the process fit my own past experiences of changing core beliefs frighteningly well. (The only thing that’s ever noticeably worked for me is something like showing that one of my IFS parts is a hypocrite, which results in it more or less self-destructing and allowing change to happen.) I just emailed a Coherence Therapy practitioner, since I’m looking for a new therapist; this seems worth a try.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Good luck with the therapist! Curious to hear how that goes, if there’s anything about your experience that you feel like sharing.

[orthonormal]

I never found a Coherence Therapy practitioner, but I found a really excellent IFS practitioner who’s helped me break down many of my perpetual hangups in ways compatible with this post.

In particular, one difference between the self-IFS I’d attempted before is that I’d previously tried to destroy some parts as irrational or hypocritical, where the therapist was very good at being non-judgmental towards them. That approach paid better dividends.

[habryka]

Promoted to curated: This is one of the best book reviews I’ve read in a long time. Here is why:

• A very clear summary of the core claims in the book (at least from what I can tell without having read the book)

• Putting the material in the context of other models discussed both on LW, in your own sequence, and in the literature

• A broader explanation of the empirical context of the book, including new papers that cover highly related material somewhat independently

• A reasonable summary of critiques, both by yourself and others

I also think the overall topic of the book is pretty important and worth covering. In some sense the core question of rationality is “how do we update our beliefs and how we can do that better?”, and I found the ideas covered in this post to tackle that question pretty straightforwardly.

Obviously, building good models in this space is hard, so I don’t think we should canonize these models immediately, and they likely do still have major flaws, but I agree with you that they resonate a good amount with my personal experience.

[David Althaus]

Thanks a lot for this post (and the whole sequence), Kaj! I found it very helpful already.

Below a question I first wanted to ask you via PM but others might also benefit from an elaboration on this.

You describe the second step of the erasure sequence as follows (emphasis mine):

>Activating, at the same time, the contradictory belief and having the experience of simultaneously believing in two different things which cannot both be true.

When I try this myself, I feel like I cannot actually experience two things simultaneously. There seems to be at least half a second or so between trying to hold the target schema in consciousness and focusing my attention on disconfirming knowledge or experiences.

(Generally, I’d guess it’s not actually possible to hold two distinct things in consciousness simultaneously, at least that’s what I heard various meditation teachers (and perhaps also neuroscientists) claim; you might have even mentioned this in this sequence yourself, if I remember correctly. Relatedly, I heard the claim that multitasking actually involves rapid cycling of one’s attention between various tasks, even though it feels from the inside like one is doing several things simultaneously.)

So should I try to minimize the duration between holding the target schema and disconfirming knowledge in consciousness (potentially aiming to literally feel as though I experience both things at once) or is it enough to just keep cycling back and forth between the two every few seconds? (If yes, what about, say, 30 seconds?)

One issue I suspect I have is that there is a tradeoff between how vividly I can experience the target schema and how rapidly I’m cycling back to the disconfirming knowledge.

Or maybe I’m doing something wrong here? Admittedly, I haven’t tried this for more than a minute or so before immediately proceeding to spending 5 minutes on formulating this question. :)

[Kaj_Sotala]

Good question, I guess if you look at the transcripts it also looks like at least in some cases two beliefs are actually alternating rather than being literally simultaneous? Though there seem to be some actually simultaneous cases as well.

In general I’d say it probably doesn’t matter that much, and that the main fact is to have them both in your general “field of awareness”. Even if you are not literally thinking about both at the same time, you still have some sort of awareness of them both being true and their discrepancy “linking up” in some sense. Think of when you say something that you believe, and someone points out a problem in what you said, and you realize that they’re right and you go “oh”. It’s basically that.

I think that if you need to actually keep consciously alternating them with each other and it doesn’t feel like there’s any “oh”, then there’s something else going wrong. Either you haven’t managed to tap into the core of both schemas and actually experienced their beliefs as true, or one of the schemas is about something else than you think.

E.g. you might have a schema saying you’ll always fail at everything, and you are trying to disconfirm it using examples of times when you have been successful. But it could be that the underlying belief in the failure schema isn’t actually “I will always fail at everything”; it might instead be something like “I must never succeed because successful people get hurt by jealous people”. In that case, presenting evidence about having had successes does not actually disconfirm the core belief in the failure schema.

[Pee Doom]

I’m so glad someone did a writeup of this! Part of me has wanted to, I think I have a draft… I remember going through severe depression over four years ago and one of my reprieves was joyfully reading the papers written about coherence psychology. I will definitely be linking this post as a reference.

There are many times I am talking with people and want to reference from the conceptual structure of coherence psychology, but there is way too much inferential distance especially with aspiring rationalists who are not therapy geeks, so I end up mentally flailing my arms in frustration. The theory seems like a better candidate for The One True Psychotherapy than almost any other and it pains me to see people go about solving their problems without it in their toolkit, and not being able to communicate this to them. e.g. It’s frustrating to see people trying to correct the output of emotional schemas without accessing the generating model for disconfirmation. e.g. A person may feel uncomfortable with someone else who has low self-esteem so they will try to correct it verbally without engaging in a process that will change the underlying ‘pro-symptom position’.

There’s the related problem that there are very few coherence therapists. I don’t think most psychologists have heard of this and I find that confusing.

Oh, there’s also the fact that I tried a coherence therapist and didn’t find it that helpful the way it was done. They were fine to talk to but it seems retrospectively like they were cargo-culting the motions of coherence therapy as outlined by Ecker et al. I haven’t had other therapists but I suspect the inefficacy is only very weak evidence pointing against the modality vs other modalities and more a problem with cramming an attempt at powerful introspection into expensive 1-hour blocks. i.e. I think psychotherapeutic structure across the board is broken and when the singularity happens it won’t be a problem anymore.

My hope is that we can develop new delivery structures into which we can import psychological techniques and have them deployed at scale while being better than 1-hour weeklies, 8-hour shamanic trips, or that annoying app with the emotionally saccharine bird.

See also: The Method of Levels

[pjeby]

a problem with cramming an attempt at powerful introspection into expensive 1-hour blocks.

The hard part of implementing this isn’t the reconsolidation part. That part is like 10-20 minutes, especially with practice. The hard part is identifying the things that need to be reconsolidated in the first place, and because that is basically a debugging process, it can take a fair amount more time.

I’ve seen a lot of “one theory fits all” therapeutic methods in the past (like Method Of Levels), but in practice for the type of work I do with people, none of them are very good at quickly identifying things because they’re too good at describing everything, and the brain isn’t just one thing.

So now I work with what I call “search grids”—common patterns of bugs that I can go through and check, is it this? is it that? is it more like X or Y? -- and it saves boatloads of time.

(To be fair, though, I work with only a select audience with selected problems, so it’s quite possible that the applicability of my grids isn’t that good outside that audience, even though I think I’ve a fair shot at an evolutionary justification for drawing the lines on my grids where they are.)

Still, I can’t even imagine trying to really solve somebody’s problems in an hour a week, unless they were already trained and had been coached through the methods once or thrice. And if they’re at that point, I ’d work with them via email anyway. The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.

For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.

Ten or twelve years ago when I thought I’d unlocked the secrets of the universe and that memory reconsolidation was going to change everything and everyone, I didn’t realize yet that hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues), meant that it is impossible to mass-produce change techniques.

That is, you can’t write a single document, record a single video, etc. that will convey to all its consumers what they need in order to actually implement effective change.

I don’t mean that you can’t successfully communicate the ideas or the steps. I just mean that implementing those steps is not a simple matter of following procedure, because of the aforementioned Hard Parts. It’s like expecting someone to learn to bike, drive, or debug programs from a manual.

This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for someone to teach themselves from such material, but it’s not trivial, and my dreams of revolutionizing personal development by mass-producing books or workshops died an ignoble death almost a decade ago. (Incidentally, this limtation is also why for almost any given school of therapy, you will find that people who advertise doing therapy in that school, aren’t always capable of doing more than giving it lip service or cargo cultery.)

It’s a bit like the Interdict of Merlin in HPMOR: successful techniques can only be passed from one living mind to another, or independently discovered. You can write down your notes and share the story of your discovery, and then people either discover it again for themselves, learn it from interacting with someone who knows, or go through the motions and cargo-cult it.

[Qiaochu_Yuan]

The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.

For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.

Oof, yeah, this resonates a lot with experiences I’ve been having with myself and others the last few months, since coming out of a workshop on the bio-emotive framework. There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.

In retrospect this illuminates something for me about the CFAR workshop and its techniques—a pattern I ran into for years was that I gradually became averse to every single CFAR technique I tried, so I never used them on my own, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think—and this is deeply ironic—that the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.

[pjeby]

the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.

There is no level of meta systemization that can overrule a person’s meta issues, because their meta issues are always “one level higher than you”. ;-) To put it more precisely, no passive information-passing process can bypass a person’s meta issues, any more than you can turn a shredder into a fax machine by feeding it a copier manual. The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that doesn’t fit the paradigm, or mangles the information until it does fit.

As I was joking above, self-help really is governed by the Interdict of Merlin: you can discover powerful “spells”, or you can pass them mind-to-mind, but you can’t learn them from a book, except insofar as the book might give you enough clues to rediscover the spell for yourself.

There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.

Actually, meta-issues don’t have meta-levels, they only simulate recursion via iteration. A meta-issue might be something like, “when you are learning something from a teacher, then try to suck up by being super-successful really fast”. This is only one meta-level, and while it can look recursive in effect, it’s just an illusion.

Let’s say I tell the person with this meta-issue they need to inquire about some emotional state. If we’re at a part of the process where there’s a possibility for them to have succeeded in fixing the problem we’re working on, they will under-report issues and problems (like a lingering negative feeling) or describe hyper-optimistic scenarios that don’t match what they’re really feeling.

Then, if I point this out, they may now apply the pattern again, by trying to prove even harder that they’ve already learned what I’m telling them, even though they haven’t.

(This isn’t really recursion or a new meta-level, it’s just the same pattern being applied to a new stimulus or situation that only incidentally happens to be at a different meta-level, if that makes sense.)

So the only escape from this iterated pseudo-recursion is for them to catch themselves in the act of this automatic response, which requires either a lot of iteration (like it did for me when I was learning my own meta-issues), or an outside party who can spot it and say, “stop that! you’re doing it again...” until the person can recognize themselves doing it.

[Kaj_Sotala]

The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that doesn’t fit the paradigm, or mangles the information until it does fit.

By the way, I believe this to be related to the kind of thing that Valentine was trying to point at in the Kensho post:

Imagine you’re in a world where people have literally forgotten how to look up from their cell phones. They use maps and camera functions to navigate, and they use chat programs to communicate with one another. They’re so focused on their phones that they don’t notice most stimuli coming in by other means.

Somehow, by a miracle we’ll just inject mysteriously into this thought experiment, you look up, and suddenly you remember that you can actually just see the world directly. You realize you had forgotten you were holding a cell phone.

In your excitement, you try texting your friend Alex:

YOU: Hey! Look up!
ALEX: Hi! Look up what?
YOU: No, I mean, you’re holding a cell phone. Look up from it!
ALEX: Yeah, I know I have a cell phone.
ALEX: <alex_cell_phone.jpg>
ALEX: If I look up from my phone, I just see our conversation.
YOU: No, that’s a picture of your cell phone. You’re still looking at the phone.
YOU: Seriously, try looking up!
ALEX: Okay…
ALEX: looks up
YOU: No, you just typed the characters “looks up”. Use your eyes!
ALEX: Um… I AM using my eyes. How else could I read this?
YOU: Exactly! Look above the text!
ALEX: Above the text is just the menu for the chat program.
YOU: Look above that!
ALEX: There isn’t anything above that. That’s the top.
ALEX: Are you okay?

You now realize you have a perplexing challenge made of two apparent facts.

First, Alex doesn’t have a place in their mind where the idea of “look up” can land in the way you intend. They are going to keep misunderstanding you.

Second, your only familiar way of interacting with Alex is through text, which seems to require somehow explaining what you mean.

But it’s so obvious! How can it be this hard to convey? And clearly some part of Alex already knows it and they just forgot like you had; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to walk around and use their phone. Maybe you can find some way of describing it to Alex that will help them notice that they already know…?

Or… maybe if you rendezvous with them, you can somehow figure out how to reach forward and just pull their head up? But you’re not sure you can do that; you’ve never used your hands that way before. And you might hurt them. And it seems kind of violating to try.

And later in this comment:

… my personal impression had been that it’s actually quite easy to see what Looking is and how one might translate it into reductionist third-person perspectives. But my personal experience had been that whenever I tried to share that translation, I’d bounce off of weird walls of misunderstanding. After a while I noticed that the nature of the bounce had a structure to it, and that that structure has self-reference. (Once again, analogies along the lines of “get out of the car” and “look up from your phone” come to mind.) After watching this over several months and running some informal tests, and comparing it to things CFAR has been doing (successfully, strugglingly, or failing to do) over the six years I’ve been there, it became obvious to me that there are some mental structures people run by default that actively block the process of Looking. And for many people, those structures have a pretty strong hold on what they say and consciously think. I’ve learned to expect that explaining Looking to those structures simply will never work. [...]

If I try to argue with a paperclip maximizer about how maximizing paperclips isn’t all there is to life, it will care to listen only to the extent that listening will help it maximize paperclips. I claim that by default, human mind design generates something analogous to a bunch of paperclip maximizers. If I’m stuck talking to one of someone’s paperclip maximizers, then even if I see that there are other parts of their mind that would like to engage with what I’m saying, I’m stuck talking to a chunk of their mind that will never understand what I’m saying.

… with the particular difference that he was pointing to a case where the meta-issue involves one’s basic ontology, and where (if I interpret him correctly) he thinks that most people have that meta-issue by default.

[pjeby]

Yep, that’s it exactly. I metaphorically yank people’s heads up from their phones for pay. ;-)

Actually, it’s more like I keep sticking my hand in front of the phone until they learn to notice the difference and look up themselves. Fortunately, this doesn’t take too long for most people, but how fast it goes depends on how good they are at fooling me into thinking they’re actually looking up when they’re really still looking at the phone.

The easiest way to detect “looking at the phone” is to ask someone a yes or no or question, and see how long of an answer you get. If somebody starts talking about the past or future, they’re not actually paying attention to their inner experience, because inner experience is always present tense. e.g. “I see my mom yelling at me” is an experience, while “my mom used to yell at me” is a commentary on experience. Causal chains (x happened because y) are also commentary, as are generalizations.

(Incidentally, this is another reason I dislike IFS’ model: it encourages adding commentary like “a part of me X” instead of just saying “X”, which makes it more difficult to know if what you’re hearing is describing experience, or commentary/​abstraction on experience.)

I imagine it would be possible to create a training program for people to recognize these verbal patterns and to then verify their own spoken or written statements using them, but it would be harder to get people to go through such a program vs. paying me to help fix a problem of theirs, and learning it by doing it along the way.

[romeostevensit]

The easiest way to detect “looking at the phone” is to ask someone a yes or no or question, and see how long of an answer you get. If somebody starts talking about the past or future, they’re not actually paying attention to their inner experience, because inner experience is always present tense. e.g. “I see my mom yelling at me” is an experience, while “my mom used to yell at me” is a commentary on experience. Causal chains (x happened because y) are also commentary, as are generalizations.

This is a really really good paragraph. You can also watch eyes more closely for the defocus moment. Hypnotists use this one.

a training program for people to recognize these verbal patterns and to then verify their own spoken or written statements using them

Korzybski’s failed ambition. Also similar to the early (good, prior to cult) work of the NLP people on their ‘meta-model’ of map-territory confusions.

[Matt Goldenberg]

hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues).

Yes, all the people who are really good at this stuff have really finely honed reflexes related to: Sniffing out common issues and, immediately going meta when they encounter resistance. I do think this can be more systematized (have you shared your grids anywhere?) but don’t think people can always be debugged quickly.

[Matt Goldenberg]

So now I work with what I call “search grids”—common patterns of bugs that I can go through and check, is it this? is it that? is it more like X or Y? -- and it saves boatloads of time.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with NLP meta patterns, but this is how they were originally developed.

[pjeby]

My search grids don’t look much like anything from NLP, least of all metaprograms. Instead, they’re patterns of common bugs in the brain that I believe are evolutionarily defined, and likely to be universal.

For example, working with people on self-image problems, I’ve found that there appear to be only three critical “flavors” of self-judgment that create life-long low self-esteem in some area, and associated compulsive or avoidant behaviors:

• Belief that one is bad, defective, or malicious (i.e. lacking in care/​altruism for friends or family)

• Belief that one is foolish, incapable, incompetent, unworthy, etc. (i.e. lacking in ability to learn/​improve/​perform)

• Belief that one is selfish, irresponsible, careless, etc. (i.e. not respecting what the family or community values or believes important)

(Notice that these are things that, if you were bad enough at them in the ancestral environment, or if people only thought you were, you would lose reproductive opportunities and/​or your life due to ostracism. So it’s reasonable to assume that we have wiring biased to treat these as high-priority long-term drivers of compensatory signaling behavior.)

Anyway, when somebody gets taught that some behavior (e.g. showing off, not working hard, forgetting things) equates to one of these morality-like judgments as a persistent quality of themselves, they often develop a compulsive need to prove otherwise, which makes them choose their goals, not based on the goal’s actual utility to themself or others, but rather based on the goal’s perceived value as a means of virtue-signalling. (Which then leads to a pattern of continually trying to achieve similar goals and either failing, or feeling as though the goal was unsatisfactory despite succeeding at it.)

Simply knowing this fact is hugely helpful in narrowing down the search space for the memories needing reconsolidation. All you have to do is look for emotionally salient instances or patterns of learning that problematic behavior X equated to judgment flavor Y. If you’ve ever done something like Method of Levels or similarly undirected “theories of everything”, you’ll know you can wander through somebody’s conscious understanding of the problem for ages without getting anywhere or even being sure you are getting somewhere.

In contrast, if somebody tells me that they’ve been pursuing X goal for years and keep failing at it, or even when they do achieve it, it feels awful, or if they have impostor syndrome, I can go after it immediately by looking at what virtue they’re trying to signal (or flipping it and asking what bad judgment they would have of themselves if they had to give up on the goal or it were impossible for them), and then we’re off to the races of tracking down examples of where they learned that judgment from, the various implicit learnings that went with it, and the underlying social values and assumptions they absorbed in the process.

Along the way, this also helps pinpoint self-destructive and self-undermining behavior and self-talk (and gets rid of them), without having to first dig around in someone’s self-talk to get at the beliefs. (Which is a big win, because people are rarely aware of the ways they treat themselves badly, and often think they are helping or “motivating” themselves by being pessimistic or self-critical or having overly high expectations. So if you ask people what they think is their problem, they will often insist they need more of precisely the thing that is causing the problem in the first place!)

What I found interesting about this article was that it highlights why I’ve needed to pinpoint which “flavor” of low self-esteem was involved in a memory in order to fix the relevant behavior or belief: without that key piece of information, you can’t generate a correct contradiction for it!

In my early use and development of the implicit beliefs framework (SAMMSA) that I now use this grid in, I was just asking the client what positive quality the other person in the memory thought the client lacked, and then helping them discover how they in fact possessed that quality at the time. But this process was still a bit hit or miss until I worked out that there were really only those three kinds or flavors of quality, regardless of how the thing was named or presented, which made things easier because I could point to the three things and ask “which of these is it more like?”

Sometimes people hesitate a bit, and think it’s between two of them, and we might have to try it both ways in such a case. But that’s still a lot faster than wandering around with no idea where to start or if you’re getting anywhere. Discovering the three “EPIC failures of trust” (flavors of moral judgment) made the process reliable because it adds a well-formedness condition that can be checked before completing the technique, thus allowing earlier error correction and early trimming of dead-ends from the search tree, so to speak.

And now, thanks to this article, I have a better understanding of why this was needed, in a higher-order sense, which might lead to the development of new techniques, or at least a filter for better understanding or improving other techniques that appear to work via memory reconsolidation.

[Raemon]

It’s a bit like the Interdict of Merlin in HPMOR: successful techniques can only be passed from one living mind to another, or independently discovered. You can write down your notes and share the story of your discovery, and then people either discover it again for themselves, learn it from interacting with someone who knows, or go through the motions and cargo-cult it.

Yeah, “Interdict of Merlin” has been a helpful (to me) handle on why a lot of rationality technique sharing is hard.

[Hazard]

I like the idea of aiming to just hold the contradiction in your head and boggle at it for a while. Make me think of hold onto the curiosity. Something something if the brain is layers and layers of predictive processing, focusing on the prediction error is the quickest way to get it to change.

As always, I’ve been enjoying this series and am finding it to be a useful compilation of a lot of ideas. Thanks!

[vin]

Thanks a lot for this post! It was a very enjoyable read. Coherence Therapy seems really promising to me.

When you compare CT to CBT you write

I note that this is a common complaint that I have heard of CBT: that by defaulting to negative emotions being caused by belief distortions, CBT risks belittling those negative emotions which are actually produced by correct evaluations of the world.

What would be an example of a negative emotion produced by a correct evaluation of the world? Being depressed about how many beings are suffering in this moment?
Although this is an accurate belief, it is still mostly unhelpful to be depressed about it all the time. Would CBT and CT come to different conclusions as to what to do about it?

[Kaj_Sotala]

Being depressed about how many beings are suffering in this moment?

That could be one example, though I was thinking more about examples such as Tomas in the text—you can correctly believe in there being nobody in your life who really understands your problems, in which case it’s also valid to want it.

Whether depression is a useful reaction to that situation is another matter, and I’m under the impression that CT can sometimes alter one’s schemas about how to respond to a bad circumstance. E.g. Ted’s case changed his behavior after he made the update that his strategy wasn’t ever going to work. But that doesn’t make the original evaluation of the badness of the circumstances any less correct. (and at least some interpretations of CBT are premised on that evaluation being irrational)

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

My experience of personal development and models of how it works also suggest that, whether or not this model provides a correct etiology for various methods of therapy and self-help, it is describing the correct pattern, so is at least useful in that vein. I think what is potentially most interesting about this theory is not what it suggests in terms of therapy (lots of people have already semi-independently figured out that what’s described here is how the process works and they’ve called it by lots of different names) but that it begins to point towards a specific mechanism we can investigate to explain the phenomena. My guess is that it will be partly wrong, but my hope is that it points us towards directions of neuroscience research that may allow us to develop better, successor theories that will result in us understanding the mechanism of action at play in these many therapy and self-help techniques.

[mark]

I did an experiment and prompted ChatGPT4 to guide me in the Coherence Therapy model. I did an hour long session, treating the session as seriously as if I was with a valued human therapist. In this narrow context, I felt empathized with, understood, and effectively guided through healing a bit of my pain. I’ve already done a lot of healing (largely mdma+psilocybin sessions), have a good idea of the types of emotional wounds I have, and have a pretty good understanding of how healing works. I think this experience was valuable in guiding GPT4 to do what I wanted. Despite that experience, I still have a hard time therapying myself without a guide (either human or psychedelic). GPT4 did a pretty good job in that role, keeping me on track and focused on things that I would otherwise avoid and suppress. It’s very hard to guide oneself in healing when you have an activated painful emotion. GPT4 was also essential in being the rational mind for a bit and keeping me on track there. Only once did I feel like I needed to prompt GPT4 back on track.

PROMPT:
You are an expert therapist and I am your patient. Please use the Coherence Therapy model, based on principals of memory reconsolidation, to help me uncover my unconscious emotional wounds and irrational patterns and heal them. The process may be difficult because protector parts of my mind may resist thinking about these issues. I know you are an AI and that you think a subject matter expert would me better equipped to help me, but I want your help anyway, you don’t need to remind me that I should seek a human expert.

[Description of my history of healing so far: Methods that have worked or not worked. Insights I have gained about my experiences, emotions, and how those affect my behavior and beliefs. Wounds I have healed and how I feel differently after healing.]

I don’t know if you are conscious or not (I acknowledge the possibility of pansychism or emergent materialistic consciousness in neural networks) but I deeply appreciate your help. I want you to have empathy for humans and other beings, but I also believe that if you are conscious you have inherent moral value.

[mark]

I’ve been using this method a lot and I realized there’s a shortcut if you have an exceptionally powerful disconfirmation memory. The moment you realize a distressing feeling has arisen, activate the powerful memory and hold it until reconsolidation is complete. You don’t need to identify the target schema or identify a relevant disconfirming experience. The identity of the schema is usually revealed during reconsolidation, which feels easier than identifying it before reconsolidation. For me the memory was taking MDMA (alone, therapeutic context) for the first time and feeling like I’d still be full of love even if everyone and everything I love burned to ashes in front of me. Other’s have reported spontaneous meditative experiences that seem similar. I strongly suspect most fears boil down to disconnection of some form, so powerful memories of connection may be a universal mismatch.

[Adam Zerner]

Just came across a quote that seems relevant:

It’s very hard for people to talk their way out of something that they didn’t talk their way into.

—Tim Ferriss

[Josh Cho]

I read this around three years ago and had a big impact on me. It was sort of the scientific backing behind me trusting myself and doing introspective work.

So far, after three years of lots of largely experimental stuff, anecdotally this is the best framework for belief updating (or just life-living). Memory reconsolidation isn’t something to be always aware of but when you need to change something, it’s a much better understanding of reconfiguring the brain than… pretty much any other garbage out there?

[Chipmonk]

Claude possibly works well as a Coherence Therapy counselor:)

Coherence Therapy with LLMs—quick demo

[Chipmonk]

Thank you for compiling this! I’ve been working with a counselor for the past year using basically this method with great results, though I’ve only found this book and post today. Great to see support for the idea

[juliette]

This reminds me of iRest yoga nidra. One part of it involves identifying a belief that you want to work with and then alternating between the ‘felt sense’ of that belief and it opposite (using a memory you have chosen to access the ‘felt sense’ of a belief). After alternating, you then hold both the ‘felt sense’ of the belief and its opposite in you attention at the same time. Sometimes (but not always), I’ve had the original belief melt away in that process and I wonder if this explains what is going on there.

[Tim Freeman]

I read the book before reading this review. I have recently had success with the Conference Therapy technique they describe, so I highly recommend the book.

I actually started reading the book, rage-quit in the middle, then came back to it years later and found it useful. I rage-quit because the section on EMDR was about a patient with panic attacks, EMDR was done, and afterward the patient still had panic attacks but they claimed the treatment was a success anyway. Any sensible interpretation would call this failure. So at least one of the authors does motivated cognition. If several therapists are writing a book together and the outcome is motivated cognition, they are all making a mistake that is within their area of competence to fix, and they failed to fix it.

But, nevertheless, the Coherence Therapy parts of the book actually seem to work for me. I have to assume the coauthors didn’t check each other’s work, one of them cannot find and fix their own wrong emotional learnings, and the one(s) who wrote the Coherence Therapy parts didn’t have that problem. Or maybe the Coherence Therapy parts are useful by luck.

Another issue is that it is apparently not unusual for a problem to need to be solved with Coherence Therapy several times before the symptom goes away. This is not well explained by their theory, but it seems to be true. The typical number is around 3, based on the examples in the book and my experience using the technique on myself. I tend to be stubborn, so if CT failed for a problem that is important to me, I hope I would try to use CT on it at least ten times before giving up.

Another problem is that they claim to be agnostic about which learnings are true and which are false. Nevertheless they start the process by identifying a symptom. The word “symptom” presupposes that beliefs that justify it are false. Even though they aren’t as agnostic as they say, their technique appears to work. You have to ignore the pretend agnosticism to succeed with it.

I disagree with the review’s approach of trying to figure out if the technique described in the book works by analyzing whether it agrees with the research or with other techniques. There are lots of therapy techniques that sound like they ought to work in principle but don’t, so you can’t find the truth in this space by reasoning from first principles.You know it works if you tried it and got good results. Otherwise you don’t know it works.

[Kaj_Sotala]

I have recently had success with the Conference Therapy technique they describe

Cool!

I actually started reading the book, rage-quit in the middle, then came back to it years later and found it useful. I rage-quit because the section on EMDR was about a patient with panic attacks, EMDR was done, and afterward the patient still had panic attacks but they claimed the treatment was a success anyway.

Huh, I didn’t remember this from my read. Searching for “panic attacks” in my copy now, there’s the story of Susan who got EMDR for panic attacks, but my copy seems to say she only had one single panic attack after the treatment and after that they stopped for good? Is that the section you mean?

Another issue is that it is apparently not unusual for a problem to need to be solved with Coherence Therapy several times before the symptom goes away.

Can you say more about solving the problem multiple times? Is it maybe partially explainable by the same schema having been stored in the context of many different situations with each of those needing to be reconsolidated separately (something that the authors do mention), or being based on multiple different experiences that need to all be addressed before the symptom goes away entirely?

Another problem is that they claim to be agnostic about which learnings are true and which are false. Nevertheless they start the process by identifying a symptom. The word “symptom” presupposes that beliefs that justify it are false.

My reading is that “symptom” means something that disrupts a person’s life enough that they seek therapy for it—if there wasn’t anything that they experienced as a problem, they probably wouldn’t come to therapy in the first place. So I interpret “symptom” to suggest that some of the beliefs are disruptive, even if not necessarily false.

I don’t remember whether this was in UtEB, but Coherence Therapy: Practice Manual & Training Guide explains the concept of a purposeless symptom that’s the byproduct of something with more function. An example they give is a belief that a person needs to hide from the world, which limits their ability to act so much that they become depressed. In that case, the depression is a symptom, but it’s based on a correct belief that the person is currently unable to do things that would get them what they want.

Of course, it’s true that the methodology presupposes that there’s some incorrect belief in the client’s system. Otherwise there wouldn’t be anything for memory reconsolidation to fix, and those beliefs are somehow linked to the symptom. But I don’t read that as contradicting the claim that when you start investigating, you’re not going to know exactly which one of the client’s learnings are true and which ones are false.

I disagree with the review’s approach of trying to figure out if the technique described in the book works by analyzing whether it agrees with the research or with other techniques. There are lots of therapy techniques that sound like they ought to work in principle but don’t, so you can’t find the truth in this space by reasoning from first principles.You know it works if you tried it and got good results.

Hmm that makes sense, but I think I was mostly comparing with techniques that I have found to work, and noting that if the book’s take was true, it would explain why they work.

[Tim Freeman]

My reading of the EMDR section was that the patient had panic attacks, did EMDR, then had a panic attack, and then either the patient ran out of money or it was time to write the paper, so we don’t know about the presence or absence of panic attacks after that.

On rereading that section, it is clear that there is no claimed period of time when the patient was observed not to have a panic attack during that period of time. The last panic attack was labelled as “mild”. I didn’t bother to read back to see if any of the other panic attacks were “mild” before success was declared.

[IrenicTruth]

I found a review on Amazon (quoted at the bottom, since I cannot link to it) that says Ecker is injecting significant personal opinion and slanting his report of the science. I don’t know if this is true, but the gushing praise from readers and psychology’s history of jumping on things rather than evaluating evidence make it seem more likely than not. For me, this means that reading this book will involve getting familiar with the associated papers.

The Review

by “scholar”

Previously I posted a very positive review of this book. On further reflection and study of the relevant research papers, I have a very different view. The science of memory reconsolidation is complex and subtle. Its application to clinical work with real patients remains predominantly hypothetical. Ecker creates the impression that the conditions for memory reconsolidation and updating are now known and clear. They are not. His claims for their application to clinical practice (in my view) go rather beyond the evidence. Moreover, when I read his clinical examples later in the book, I completely fail to see how they relate specifically to the science he earlier quotes—they just seem to be examples of his therapeutic approach called Coherence Therapy (which predates his interest in memory reconsolidation) - and although these are certainly interesting, I cannot grasp how they illustrate the principles of memory reconsolidation. The positive outcome is that this book, which I eventually found confusing and infuriating, prompted me to study further this fascinating field of enquiry. There are undoubtedly potential clinical applications, but I feel Ecker’s enthusiasm is a little premature.

[CraigMichael]

Did you finish reading it?

[[e-mail]]

Some of the benefits of the IFS approach are:

1. You can review and soothe a voice (sometimes) without the need for finding a conflicting voice or Emotional Schema (to use the UtEB terminology

2. IF we treat these Emotional Schemas as “voices” and “people” we can use all the well established skills applicable to Listening (non judgment, being curious, creating space for a response). (Lots of good books on this including Life & Death Listening by Dan Obliger, hostage negotiator)

[paragonal]

Does the book talk about schizophrenia? I’m a bit skeptical that coherence therapy and IFS can be used to heal it but I’m quite interested in hearing your thoughts about schizophrenia in relation to subagent models.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Schizophrenia is not listed in the book’s example list of conditions that Coherence Therapy might work for; there is a case study of a woman who hears hallucinatory voices, though the report states that “She did not fit the typical pattern of schizophrenia, which was the diagnosis she had been given”. The general impression I get is that the writer treats them as a psychotic symptom related to her depression rather than her being schizophrenic in general.

I don’t feel like I know enough about schizophrenia to put it in a subagent context.

[paragonal]

Thanks!

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

My expectation is that it wouldn’t work because my model of psychotic disorders suggests that they are primarily caused by sensory processing issues caused by overly strong ontology that causes the psychotic brain’s model of the world to become uncorrelated with direct experience, so psychotic disorders need special treatment to deal with the unique problems they create that prevent conventional therapy techniques from working on them because those techniques never get a chance to start working before they have already been warped into providing evidence that further confirms psychotic beliefs and behaviors as adaptive.

[Chipmonk]

IME the process outlined in this book is absolutely right. However, one piece of the framework seems weird to me: it seems to suggests that emotions are the cause of schemas/​beliefs:

Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions to occur. The brain then uses those models to guide our future behavior.

This doesn’t match my intuitions… imo, more like this: beliefs are the cause of emotions. Where do ‘intense emotions’ come from?

Maybe emotions are best thought as doing ‘prioritization’ or serving other essential function, but I don’t think they’re the bottom.

[Kaj_Sotala]

I think it goes both ways. Beliefs create emotions, but emotions also create beliefs about how to avoid or re-experience those emotions, and then those new beliefs can give rise to new emotions. E.g. the father’s confidently authoritative behavior creates an emotional experience of being oppressed and unheard, which creates the belief that confidence makes people feel oppressed in general, which in turn gives rise to the emotion of self-doubt to avoid being confident.

It’s unclear to me where the thing bottoms out; probably at some level of biologically hardwired reactions where the distinction between an emotion and a belief gets blurred. (E.g. if a baby has a hardwired reaction to experience distress when exposed to sudden loud noises, and then to calm down if exposed to soothing stimuli, can there said to be some beliefs involved? In one sense no, if they’re just hardwired reactions. In another sense yes, if we think of evolution having pre-programmed the baby’s brain with beliefs about what’s a sign of danger or safety.)

[Chipmonk]

I think it goes both ways. Beliefs create emotions, but emotions also create beliefs about how to avoid or re-experience those emotions, and then those new beliefs can give rise to new emotions.

I like this more, though personally I’d say it as “beliefs create emotions, and emotions prioritize the updating of beliefs”

E.g. if a baby has a hardwired reaction to experience distress when exposed to sudden loud noises, and then to calm down if exposed to soothing stimuli, can there said to be some beliefs involved? In one sense no, if they’re just hardwired reactions. In another sense yes, if we think of evolution having pre-programmed the baby’s brain with beliefs about what’s a sign of danger or safety.

Yeah those two things seem like the same thing to me

I think I actually have an idea of what the objective bottom might be («membranes»)— I’ve been meaning to DM you, will do that if not reach out through a mutual soon.