Psychotherapy and Neuroscience

Psychotherapy & Neuroscience

This website’s targeted review of the research examines many divergent areas of the human experience. We have research parts (and puzzle pieces), but no whole (gestalt/context) with which to better understand how each research study’s findings interact with one another.  This website’s targeted review of the research seeks to examine and integrate many divergent areas of the human experience. This website’s review of the research suggests the following:

Underlying the human condition is some enduring response to stress that had been deemed too difficult to manage, rethink, and to process. 

This response gets locked into the CNS (B. Van Der Kolk) and is implicitly (re)experienced in reliving of interactive scripts, emotion, and in persistent HPA activation.  This response persists throughout one’s life and likely underlies future genetic expression of many different childhood and adult psychiatric and physical conditions.

Studying the structures of the cingulate cortex and the nature of memory processing into the cortex by the hippocampus is key for understanding the nature of how the brain works. 

For therapy to be corrective, it needs to focus on gaining access to and to the processing of memory that had been denied processing due to an immature brain and CNS and its traumatic nature along with the availability of a corrective relationship.

Chronic responses to stress can be reflected iteratively in an algorithm as long as all components and thresholds for genetic expression are known.

Please reference the Future Direction Introduction section of this website for an elaboration of these concepts.

Please feel free to contact me concerning the site’s materials or any other general inquiries.

Gail R. Berger, M.S.W.
Rome, New York

Finding a Context

When a child builds a puzzle, the first step is to piece together a border. The outer parameters are needed to fill in the remainder of puzzle parts. This website seeks to create that border and the matrix needed for creating the milieu for understanding the human experience and later algorithm development to allow for predictability.

Discovering a Social Map

Our reality is created by different anterior-posterior hippocampal mediated- spatial maps of our world. We have perceptual-sensory maps of our physical space (of where we live, work and go to school) and social-emotional maps of our relationships (for approach-avoidance) with others who live and interact in that space, respectively. Both categories of maps are represented in an internal model of perceptual-visceral-cognitive-emotional and behavioral responses between and among ourselves and our environment.