
Professor Leeanne Carey
World-leading Australian neuroscientist in occupational therapy and stroke rehabilitation and recovery research.
Mindset. It’s starting to sound like a buzzword now, right? With catchy book titles promising you’ll change your life if you change your thinking and any number of people out there making inspirational posts about just changing your mindset makes it all sound kind of like the platitudes of toxic positivity in the end.
But what if what you feel like is a negative mindset had a rational purpose for its existence? What if we looked just a little bit deeper than the conversations around psychology and looked at observable brain structure to understand how our brain does what it does to evolve from repetitive negative states to really change our mind?
In this episode, we look at the science of changing your thinking with some of Australia’s leading women in STEM.
World leading Australian neuroscientist, Professor Leeanne Carey, has dedicated her career to occupational therapy, stroke rehabilitation and recovery research and helps us to understand how the brain recovers from the trauma of stroke, re-learning through specific pathways. Professor
Muireann Irish is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and has observed brain function with a particular focus on dementia, uncovering all kinds of interesting facts about how we remember, through her research.
Dr Lisa Saulsman, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Clinical Director with the School of Psychological Science at University of Western Australia, brings her expertise in the field of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT )to complement the neuroscience.
Associate Professor Kimberley Norris, Head of Discipline and Director of Post Graduate Programs for the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Tasmania completes the picture with her expansive knowledge in adaptation and change.
If you’re ready to ask questions, these women have answers to help us all on life’s journey.
Show notes, resources and transcript available at www.reframeofmind.com.au
Support us on our Patreon and unlock bonus content at www.patreon.com/reframeofmind
Reframe of Mind is a Welcome Change Media production.
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Jump to: Episode Transcript | Show Notes | Other Guests | Gallery
Reframe of Mind contains discussion around mental health that may be disturbing to some listeners. If you are concerned about yourself or someone you know, please seek professional individual advice.
Some of the main crisis lines in Australia are listed on our Mental Health Crisis Resources page, including those that operate 24/7 like Beyond Blue and Lifeline.
Guests this episode:
World-leading Australian neuroscientist in occupational therapy and stroke rehabilitation and recovery research.
Highly-awarded cognitive neuropsychologist at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney.
Associate Head of Learning and Teaching in Psychology, Director of Postgraduate Professional Training Programs in Counselling and Psychology.
Senior Lecturer and Deputy Clinical Director with the School of Psychological Science at UWA.
Jump to: Episode Transcript | Show Notes | Other Guests | Top of Page
Here’s some extra things you might not know about our guests, as well as some of the things mentioned during the episode.
Leeanne is an occupational therapist and neuroscientist and is recognised as a world leader in the science of occupational therapy, evidence-based rehabilitation, and translation of neuroscience to stroke rehabilitation.
Her program of research spans 30 years and focuses on five main areas:
(i) Restorative approaches to stroke rehabilitation. (ii) Translation and implementation of evidence-based practice.
(iii) Nature of sensorimotor impairment and impact on function.
(iv) Targeting of rehabilitation through novel brain imaging and biomarkers.
(v) Impact of depression and cognition on stroke recovery and participation.
Her research is new and original, and represents a shift in rehabilitation focus.
Leeanne talks about her approach to helping stroke patients regain their sense of touch in the video below:
Muireann has a longstanding interest in how complex cognitive processes such as memory, imagination, and social cognition are disrupted in dementia syndromes.
Her current research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms which underpin these impairments, with a view to developing interventions that can ultimately improve quality of life for people living with dementia and their families.
Muireann’s research has been recognised in multiple awards including a NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2014), the Laird Cermak Award for Outstanding Research in Memory presented by the International Neuropsychological Society (2013), and a L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship (2015).
Muireann talks about her why when it comes to researching and studying memory and the impact of dementia:
Research resources:
Video Resource:
Listen to Episode 3 of Reframe of Mind to hear more from Kimberley:
CBT Resources by Dr. Saulsman:
Centre For Clinical Interventions
Listen to Episode 3 of Reframe of Mind to hear more from Lisa:
Transcript has been auto-generated and may contain errors. Your support on our patreon would go towards being able to provide a human-edited transcript for accessibility.
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We pay our respects to them and their elders past and present.
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All content related to this program is for general informational purposes only and contains stories and discussions around mental health that may be disturbing to some listeners.
00:00:23
If you’re concerned about yourself or someone you know, please seek professional individual advice and support.
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More details are contained in our show notes.
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Every time you do a study that you think you’ve kind of isolated, a little piece of the pie.
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Puzzle inevitably it raises more questions, and so you.
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Think oh now I need to, we didn’t.
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Think about that.
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That’s New Scientist and neuropsychologist near an Irish and this.
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Is re frame of mind.
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Where your hosts Louise.
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Pool and Andy.
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Leroy and we’ll hear from you an.
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Irish leader in this episode, along with some of the other wonderful women of Science that we’re speaking to.
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Professor Leanne carry from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental health doctor Lisa Salzman from.
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The School of Psychological Science at.
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The University of WA and associate professor Kimberly Norris at the University of Tasmania.
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Last time I re friend of mine we spoke about risk taking you realized where we want to make changes.
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We tend to make similar types of choices that emerges patterns in your life.
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So we started wondering if it’s actually possible to change our brains.
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Well, we were talking about the philosophical and feeling subjects in this podcast, Andy, but it is important to bring it back to the science because, well, we’ve been talking about changing the way that we think.
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Oh yeah.
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Sometimes those theories can quickly start to come across as platitudes and run the risk of being turned into toxic positivity.
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Yeah, and we’ve been big on ways to cut through those punches in these series, but.
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I guess in some way we kind of felt that even saying that statement in the front of the program is.
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Starting to sound a bit like a prodigy.
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It’s a cycle of a platitude.
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Yeah, so we we wanted to phrase it differently.
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Actually, here’s what we wanted to do.
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Reframe our statement.
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OK so re frame of mind is a podcast about mental health, but we find that when people want to talk about mental health, what they actually mean.
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His mental illness.
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One of our.
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Favorite phrases in the series is that we don’t exist in a.
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Vacuum so mental health and the way that we.
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Talk about it shouldn’t either.
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So it’s kind of.
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Understanding that we are profoundly influenced by the world around us, you know.
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And also the biology that we take through life that we’ve been handed to us through our parents in our genes and that sort of thing.
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So looking after mental health of our lifetimes, it is more than grabbing a quick fix.
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Part issued.
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You know we have to gain understanding.
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So it’s important to understand why we do the things we do and the other things we do are influenced by the world around us as well.
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It might sometimes sound a bit like Woo Woo.
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This concept of neuroplasticity, but that’s ’cause the science is.
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So new and constantly expanding the scientific research.
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So it backs up the theories that prove that we can change our brains.
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In fact, we do it every day.
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Yeah, so in this episode we’re going to talk to some of Australia’s leading female voices in STEM about the science of changing.
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Thinking because there’s nothing like solid evidence to support new ideas about our capabilities.
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Professor Lee Ann Carey is a world leading Australian neuroscientist in occupational therapy and stroke, rehabilitation and recovery research.
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Working at the Flurry Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health.
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We decided to start with a lesson in neuroplasticity.
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What I want and Leanne was happy to oblige.
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Neuroplasticity, it’s about that ability of the nervous system.
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System to respond to stimuli by reorganizing its structure, function and collection.
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So it’s essentially that underlying phenomenon that allows us to change, adapt, and learn one thing too.
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It’s important to remember in this is that it’s the changes are.
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Experience and learning dependent.
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They occur during development.
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Throughout the normal lifespan and actually in response to injury.
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And actually, there’s probably already a number of your listeners that might have heard about the concept of neuroplasticity, and it’s in things like the book the brain that changes itself by Norman Doidge.
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Yeah, that was the 1st place I heard it.
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And yeah.
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And on the television series, for example, redesign my brain by Todd Saints.
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And so.
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I think the knowledge that the brain can change this concept of neuroplasticity is now becoming a mainstream.
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It’s important for us all to know that the brains changing its function and networks constantly.
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Whatever we do even now.
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This is encouraging news.
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Yeah, and something that we’re going to continue.
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The conversation with throughout this episode, especially with Leanne in relation.
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To stroke recovery.
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But for now.
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Let’s take a deeper look into the structure of our brains and what different areas are responsible for.
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We kind of thought this might be important to understand if we’re going to try and change the way we think and respond to things.
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We’re an Irish is an Australian Research Council, future fellow and associate professor of psychology at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney.
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Our research is focused on the cognitive neuroscience of memory with a specialization in exploring memory changes.
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Caused by dementia.
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For anyone who’s honest, normally glaze revert scientific theory.
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Be prepared to be wowed by.
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How relatable murin actually makes it all sound.
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The structures that are deeper inside the brighter, more likely.
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To be the older ones.
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And these are the ones that we kind of see are conserved across different species and.
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So the ones that are.
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More near the front of the brain.
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So the fact that humans have a prefrontal cortex.
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These are the regions that are more recent in terms of our evolutionary history, and these are the ones that give us.
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All of the extra sort of human and cognitive or thinking capacities that we’ve evolved to have, and so the prefrontal cortex is more attuned to flexible forms of thinking.
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Having control over our thoughts, being able to have a sort of sense of self awareness.
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Being able to introspect.
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And to sort of reflect on your behavior and then calibrate or titrate or respond and change your behavior in response to different sort of contingencies or changes in the environment.
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So it’s kind of a combination of older structures that are more attuned to.
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You know those very basic feelings of pleasure.
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And the sort of primary evolutionary drew.
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Then you know, searching for a mate or searching for food as well as the prefrontal structures, which are more sophisticated forms of monitoring and being strategic and being flexible in the same process so.
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I have this image in my head now of as being.
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Like a tree, we cut ourselves open and we’ve got all those different rings on the inside of the brain.
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It’s not quite like.
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Yeah, it’s it’s fairly complex and.
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You know when we’re talking about these different fun?
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Options, it’s important to note that like there aren’t.
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There isn’t really just one region that just does one function.
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It’s very, very complicated, and now we’re starting to move away from this kind of 1 structure function mapping towards a much more network based approach where different regions might actually work together.
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Sort of in concert to do different things.
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But they may.
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Reorganize and then pair up with a different set of regions you know in the service of a different function.
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So it’s very, very complicated and the whole.
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Field is kind of shifted.
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Towards a more network based approach.
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So we’ve started to understand the structure of the brain and how the brain functions and is changeable throughout our lives.
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Let’s bring it into the context of our conversation in this series about mental health and how the brain’s evolution is set up for what has become negative thinking in modern times.
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For someone who was able to describe this perfectly for us was Doctor Lisa Saltzman.
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You might remember.
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Him from episode 3 of this series where we’re just starting to understand depression and anxiety.
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They say he’s a senior lecturer and deputy clinical director with the School of Psychological Science at the University of WA.
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Do you think we inherently are negative thinkers as a species?
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I I do, I do.
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Think from an evolutionary perspective.
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Our mind was built to find the bad stuff, you know.
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Actually, that’s our minds.
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Design is to look for threat to look for.
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The negative, to look at what might go wrong, to protect ourselves, and, you know.
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In in Caveman or cave person time, should I say you know that was a protective way to be because everyday life was a very threatening, dangerous place.
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You know you Fast forward to now and everyday life isn’t quite the same as that.
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Yeah, our mind was always built to do that.
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So even when there aren’t those legitimate real kind of threats facing us, our mind will try to find them.
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I think our mind will try to sort of seek them out and seek them out everywhere and and that can be, you know, really turning inward and looking for our own.
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You know perceived personal faults and failings, and sort of bringing those to the forefront.
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You know to warn us.
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But yeah, others might see it too.
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So yeah, I do think that really generally the norm is to hone in on the negative as a protective sort of a function, but unfortunately it gets overdone now and and starts to backfire on us and in.
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Yeah, depleting our mental health, not, you know.
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Instead of what was first designed to protect us is now working against us.
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How do we notice that to begin with, like how much a?
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Negative thought is good for us.
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How much need?
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I I think you know, it’s absolutely normal to have negative thoughts and you know having negative thoughts pop into our mind is is really as I said, it’s our minds design, so it’s very normal that will happen and we’ll worry about certain things, whether they’re realistic things or not.
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Realistic things.
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I think for me it’s about how much thinking we do, how long you spend caught in those thoughts.
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So for me it’s not that people have negative thoughts.
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I don’t think that’s a problem or an issue.
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I think it’s.
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How, how much time we spend listening to those thoughts, how much we get caught in them.
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So it’s really excessive negative thinking that becomes the problem like Excel.
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Massive overthinking and overanalyzing.
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I think really is is something that is a bit of a a plague of, you know, human beings.
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I think at the moment and that your terms we might use for that thought process like worrying you are worrying about the future or ruminating on the past.
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But just generally the idea of excessive overthinking.
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I, I think is problematic, so for me it’s not negative thoughts that are a problem.
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It’s the amount or excessiveness that you know.
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Excessive nature of that thinking that’s the issue.
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Associate Professor Kimberly Norris have given us some great insights from a psychology perspective throughout the series.
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She’s a researcher, had a discipline and director of the Postgraduate Program, School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Tasmania, and has helped us to learn how the brain forms new ways of understanding and responding.
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Does the body?
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Respond better to messages of, you know, trying to retrain with that internal voice?
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Or does it respond better to things like muscle stretching, the aromatherapy, the other sensors when we’re trying to retrain ourselves?
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Ideally, it’s actually a combination of both that internal voice as well as those physical approaches because.
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The brain has.
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A really strong connection with the body and they speak to each other all the time.
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So if you actually act on both at the same time, you’re literally those neural pathways you’re building in your brain which actually underpin patterns of behavior.
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They underpin routines and rhythms they actually.
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Build much more quickly and are reinforced more strongly when they’re getting multiple sensory inputs, so when it’s your internal voice as well as your actions they build together and over time this neural pathway.
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And the more we use it, the stronger it becomes.
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And that’s actually why you never break a habit as an adult because you literally have a neural pathway in your brain for that habit.
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And we instead replace them.
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Which literally means building a new, more preferable neural.
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Pathway in your brain that becomes the dominant pattern.
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Pelham does it take to build a new pathway.
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Depends on how complex the behavior is.
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More simple behaviors can be achieved.
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You know quite quickly more complex behaviors can take weeks, but the idea is the more often you activate this neural structure, the more often you activate this pathway, the more energy literally, the more energy you’re sending.
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To it to grow.
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Leanne carry in the course of her research in stroke rehabilitation, has observed how our brains change at different points of our lives.
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There’s really compelling evidence now that the brain can change that has this new plastic capacity throughout the lifespan.
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So whilst the person is younger, there might be more rapid changes we can still change throughout the lifespan, and I think this is really so crucial.
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And we’re working with different people at different life stages to to know that there’s this possibility and.
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For people, for example, that I work with who had a stroke that it really provides a hope for change.
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When it comes to among people affected by stroke I’m I’m wondering, is it easier to retrain our brain that has had a trauma like that?
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Actually the plasticity is enhanced by an injury like that, so it does have a special significance for a person who’s had had a stroke.
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They’re sort of challenge to move and think and feel with an altered brain and body and this.
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Phenomenon really opens a window to change and adaptation really in the days, weeks, months and even years after stroke, I often say to the people who stroke that I work with.
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They actually have an even greater capacity for change and adaption because of that injury.
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And they can learn new skills on a day to day basis like we.
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Can but we have to also be aware that they could learn habits and movements that are not so helpful, such as they might learn not to use that limb.
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So while there’s a greater capacity, it’s also important that we really work to harness that capacity for positive change.
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Is there a theory why the brain becomes more moldable at these points?
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Well, I I think it’s really that because there’s a fool if it’s a challenge for it so that the person.
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You know there’s part of the network that’s not working properly, so there has to be some way of trying to reconnect between those parts that are working and or to help support some of that breakdown in a particular region.
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That might have occurred, so I suppose when you use the word more moldable it, it’s it’s almost a need based because of the challenge and whether or not it’s more moldable.
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But it or whether it’s the.
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But it has to be molded because these these gets going on and you know, we often think about you know how we changed the brain to change the behavior.
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But really, it’s also both ways how we change the behavior to change the brain.
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So there’s a two way process going on.
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Mirren in her research observes how behavior is influenced.
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By our drive for pleasure.
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Essentially, it all boils down to the fact that you have to think back to evolution and what is going to give us the biggest sort of survival advantage and anything that confirms in a sort of adaptive advantage then needs to be assigned something that’s.
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Positive so if.
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We think about like the main rewards that.
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You know, a Neanderthal or an animal actually would need their food, their mateship.
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And sex, and that’s basically and then avoiding predators, and so then being bestowed with like a pleasurable experience means it’s more likely that the animal or the human is going to try and seek these things out, work, or allocate effort to get these things, and also hopefully avoid predators and negative outcomes in the in the process.
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So essentially I think much of our behavior is actually driven by this sort of underlying sort of drive to receive pleasure or to experience pleasure.
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And it’s just so happy.
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Ones that that actually confers very important survival advantage.
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What’s happening in the brain?
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From that perspective, that’s going on that’s causing us that pleasure.
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Yeah, so there’s.
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A very sophisticated network in the brain and it’s part of this dopaminergic system, so this is a system that’s heavily oriented or geared to dopamine, which is one of the main neurotransmitters in the brain, and so the network that’s implicated when we do experience those feelings of pleasure.
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Like you know the tingles.
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When you hear your favorite tune.
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And there are regions in the front of.
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The brain in the frontal lobe.
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And then there are regions in an area deep inside the brain called the striatum and collectively they are sort of like these HID Anik hotspots is the term that’s used in the literature so they fire or activate when we respond in a pleasurable way to stimulus.
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So if you are, you know, biting into you know a lovely.
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More on slice of pizza or something.
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These are the regions that will get activated in the brain and so they they largely are driven by this dopaminergic neurotransmitter.
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And it’s what gives us these feelings of pleasure.
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And it’s very reinforcing.
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So actually we will remember those feelings in response to a stimulus.
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And also we can anticipate and look ahead to sort of think ahead and sort of plan out how we might actually work towards and achieve other similar rewards.
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These are swordsman agrees, telling us we’re basically built to run away from uncomfortable experiences, and our Louise you can definitely relate to these.
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One of the things that when I was reading about your managed my emotions.
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Graham, you know one of those pillars.
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Being in tolerating uncomfortable feelings that that that strikes a chord in me.
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Because if there’s something that I’m working on, it’s not that I feel bad.
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It’s actually that I’m feeling bad about feeling bad.
00:18:49
Yeah, absolutely yeah.
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I think it’s very much a part of you know, human nature for us too.
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I guess really not want.
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You know, yeah, we are as I said, built to not sort of.
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To run away from or try to avoid uncomfortable experiences.
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That’s very natural for us to do.
00:19:09
We really, you know, similar as I’ve just been talk about.
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We’re kind of hardwired to do that as a protective thing, but I’m unfortunately doing that with our feelings and it’s very hard to run away from your own feelings.
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And it also just backfires like the more that you don’t.
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Want that feeling?
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Kind of like the more you have.
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It kind of thing so.
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So the more we fight and struggle and try to get rid of our feeling is, the more they’re just going to fight back and sort of try to hang around even longer or even more intensely.
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And also think for some people some of the methods that they might use to try and get rid of their feelings.
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Can can also be damaging in a in and of themselves.
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You know things like you might be using drugs or alcohol.
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Or self harm?
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Or you know, maybe it’s just avoiding things or procrastinating other sorts of behaviors that you just end up hurting ourselves kind of thing.
00:19:53
But these might be things we used to try and get away from our feelings.
00:19:56
If you’ve ever wondered how important our emotions our to our cognitive flexibility, Kimberly Norris explains, when we get some momentum going around, adapting to change that, so we we, we start positively adapting to change and then does that make it easier to kind of keep adapting to change like once?
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We we stop.
00:20:16
Trading changes either good or bad.
00:20:18
Most definitely, and it’s quite fundamental to an aspect of experience called cognitive flexibility, so cognitive flexibility is essentially when.
00:20:27
You are able.
00:20:28
To see that there are always multiple options.
00:20:33
Of experiencing, interpreting, and responding to any given situation and cognitive flexibility is absolutely that idea of rather than good or bad.
00:20:44
So take away what we call the violence, so take away the emotional component and recognize objectively it’s different and different.
00:20:53
Means we can shape whether it can be positive or.
00:20:57
Again, if it leads to some degree, the other really exciting thing is, not only does this help you.
00:21:01
Adapt positively to change going forward and across a whole range of contexts.
00:21:06
There’s some really exciting research that shows that cognitive flexibility can also help to protect from cognitive decline that you might see in dementias.
00:21:17
That’s really fascinating.
00:21:18
So getting better at changes is better.
00:21:20
For our brain.
00:21:21
It is it really easy and of course the fact that we’re living longer.
00:21:26
It means we do need to start thinking about our brain health perhaps a little bit more.
00:21:29
Than we have in the past.
00:21:30
I wanted to clarify.
00:21:31
Does this indicate that there’s a level of dissociation that needs to happen along?
00:21:36
Not necessarily dissociation, but an ability to regulate emotions, and I think that’s actually another really interesting thing that I think there’s just an assumption made that we all learn how to manage emotions.
00:21:49
But it’s actually a really.
00:21:51
Really hard thing to do and I’m sure many of us have had those moments of saying Oh my goodness.
00:21:57
I reacted in a way that I probably didn’t feel fully in control of just then, so I think emotion regulation, which is a fancy way of saying learning how to manage our emotions, is also something that all people would benefit from.
00:22:12
Now I really need to make sure that people.
00:22:14
Understand, that doesn’t mean you don’t experience emotion.
00:22:17
That’s not it at all.
00:22:18
Emotions are normal.
00:22:19
They’re healthy than necessary, but it’s understanding that we emotions.
00:22:25
Serve a purpose.
00:22:26
And when you manage your emotions, they.
00:22:28
Serve that purpose.
00:22:29
Effectively, rather than making our lives more difficult.
00:22:34
Prizing Lee Moon has discovered that memory is linked to emotion.
00:22:38
If you think about the types of memories that you can actually remember, and the ones that are important to you or have left a sort of a salient mark in terms of your own sense of self, inevitably they will have an emotional component.
00:22:52
And again, this is really crucial if you think back.
00:22:56
I mean, I keep saying with this.
00:22:57
Evolutionary, sort of.
00:22:58
Point of view, but if you think about why?
00:23:01
We would have memory in the first place.
00:23:03
Again, it has to serve some sort of adaptive survival function, so you need to remember the things that had a good outcome and you also need to remember the things that didn’t actually pan out so well, so you will avoid those types of negative scenarios in the future.
00:23:19
And so if.
00:23:20
You take that into sort of current neuroscience.
00:23:23
We know that when you experience a particularly emotional or arousing event.
00:23:29
There is a coupling between a structure called the amygdala, which is very sensitive to emotion, or, you know, valence and arousal of situations and that couples with the hippocampus, which is one of the key memory structures and actually provides a much more indelible and much more enduring memory trace, and so that’s when we see things.
00:23:48
Like when you know people have very traumatic and experiences then it can leave, you know, enjoying memories that are very difficult to shift and can lead to sort of post traumatic stress disorder where the memories are reactivated and we experienced in.
00:24:02
I feel like.
00:24:03
My brain kind of redacts information.
00:24:06
If a memory associated around it has been really painful or traumatic.
00:24:11
Like I mean, grief in particular is a great one, and my example is always things like, you know, dead cats or broken relationships.
00:24:19
It’s it’s.
00:24:20
It’s like sometimes I forget that those.
00:24:22
Experiences existed because everything connected with that grief kind of goes back in to activate it.
00:24:29
So is that?
00:24:31
I mean, I I don’t think I have dementia.
00:24:34
But that sounds similar to what people experience going through that.
00:24:38
So what?
00:24:39
What’s kind of going on with us there?
00:24:41
I assume other people have this experience and it’s not what you normally.
00:24:45
Yeah, no, I think this scenario of grief and.
00:24:49
Its relationship to memory is.
00:24:51
Very complex and I think we don’t have enough.
00:24:54
You know there’s not enough and study actually being directed towards that, but we do know is that obviously negative event.
00:25:02
Are very much retrieved in more detailed, but I think the caveat is that there can come a point where you’ve retrieved something so many times that you actually start.
00:25:13
To lose the.
00:25:14
Detail and the specificity of the memory.
00:25:18
And it becomes much more abstracted, almost like a fact.
00:25:21
Very over general sort of a schematic.
00:25:24
Of the event.
00:25:25
And also when you factor in them that very heavy burden of emotion that comes with you know a bereavement and grief, there is almost a protective sort of function.
00:25:36
I think that comes into play that we don’t fully understand yet where it’s almost as though you reach a certain tipping point of emotion and the brain will be able to recall the gist of the event.
00:25:46
We will not be able to focus as squarely on the emotions, and it may just be a way of protecting against.
00:25:54
Painful reliving of an event over and over again, so it’s it’s very interesting.
00:26:00
And I think there’s probably a lot of differences in terms of, you know, individual differences in how we actually are attuned to these types of events and how we replay or deny or suppress or cope with these.
00:26:14
Varying emotions if you’ve ever returned to study in any capacity, you’ve probably found that you’re better at retaining the information because your choice to study is more meaningful and as it turns out, meaningful activities work best in stroke recovery as well according to Leo.
00:26:30
If we think about our brain being a network to help us do things and to achieve a goal if that goal is meaningful, it already the person is already working with you to achieve that and and it’s focused so that there’s the opportunity.
00:26:52
To then call on the parts of the network that are employed.
00:26:57
Point to that particular task and if I could be an example.
00:27:03
So we work on actually helping people regain a sense of touch and use it in everyday activities.
00:27:11
And there’s different layers to the goals that are meaningful for them.
00:27:16
It might be first.
00:27:18
The goal of the sensation just to feel if there’s a difference between two surfaces through to the goal of being able to hold a fork without dropping it, for example.
00:27:33
So the the meaningfulness is really.
00:27:37
Critical to get that, buy in and then the steps along the way to achieve that goal.
00:27:45
For people living.
00:27:46
With dementia, Mirren has discovered that music is a very powerful force.
00:27:51
It reminds me of summertime when I was working with people who living with dementia in the aged care sector and the activities that always went better were the ones where we didn’t rely on them.
00:28:02
To have any.
00:28:03
Great import into an outcome, so other than enjoying it.
00:28:08
So for example, I would wanna session.
00:28:10
Of art with one of.
00:28:12
The one of the groups there is quite a range of outcome with with the individuals there, some of them painted abstract, really colorful pieces on the paper.
00:28:21
Some of them found the brush is a little bit too much to use, so they use their fingers and still make some quite quite nice works.
00:28:26
And then there was one lady again, but he picked up the brush, poked it into the.
00:28:30
Paint and then put it straight into her mouth.
00:28:32
And when I asked why she did it, she said that it looked delicious like something she wanted to eat.
00:28:36
So for people living with dementia, is it more about the sensors and trying to actually help them to just be in the moment?
00:28:43
Yeah, I think there’s a huge.
00:28:45
Aspect of it in just constraining.
00:28:48
The experience to the present.
00:28:49
Moment and taking the pressure off as well as he said to not have it as working towards an outcome, but actually the process in itself is just one of enjoyment and experience.
00:29:01
And if we circle back to our opening kind of topic about pleasure, it’s interesting because the studies that have been done on music.
00:29:09
In particular, in dementia in Alzheimer’s disease.
00:29:12
Please show that and when we image the brain of people who have got Alzheimer’s disease, that’s incentive structures that Fronto striatal brain circuit that I was mentioning doesn’t appear to be as damaged as many of the memory structures or the spatial memory or the navigation structures are and they remain preserved for a remarkably long time.
00:29:35
Into the disease.
00:29:36
This course, so it seems that if you can tailor the activity to the individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, they can derive pleasure from those experiences through this circus, and so that’s being suggested to be one of the reasons, maybe why music therapy and art therapy is so effective, because that capacity to experience pleasure is.
00:29:56
Still there it’s.
00:29:57
Just finding the right key to unlock us.
00:29:59
You know using maybe personally relevant stimuli or personally relevant music, and so it’s really interesting, and I think one of the things that I particularly like about music, is that you can use these types of approaches in even the very severely impaired individuals living in you know assisted or residential aged care.
00:30:19
They don’t need to be able to, you know, communicate verbally, but.
00:30:24
More often than not, this approach will reach everyone.
00:30:26
It’s like the grace of universal communicating tool.
00:30:30
You’ll find people who haven’t spoken being able to sway or tap or move along to the beat, and it just seems to be a very potent way of engaging again, even if it’s non verbally but communicating back to people.
00:30:44
Who have been, you know, unreachable for a time?
00:30:47
So let’s bring this into the context of cognitive therapy where someone isn’t impaired by the impact of stroke or dementia.
00:30:54
Working with imagery is something that Lisa identifies is particularly successful.
00:30:59
When we think we can think in lots of different ways and we can think in more what we might call verbal linguistic ways.
00:31:06
So I mean what I mean by that is like in words and sentences or we think of that that voice in our head in that self talk kind of thing.
00:31:12
But we can also think more in imaginal ways like in mental images and other kind of sensory.
00:31:19
And there’s actually lots of research to show that.
00:31:22
It’s imagery, sort of based thinking connects more powerfully to our motions than more verbal wordy.
00:31:29
Kind of based thinking.
00:31:30
So in just as an example, you know if you were to say the word chocolate cake to yourself, you know a few times just to yourself.
00:31:37
You probably wouldn’t have much of a reaction, but if I asked you.
00:31:40
To close your eyes.
00:31:41
And imagining great vivid detail or chocolate cake, then I do this exercise and a lot of people like a lot of people will find themselves sort of salivating and having sort of hunger kind of urges that that’s if you like chocolate cake, of course.
00:31:54
I love.
00:31:54
Talking, I do too.
00:31:56
I do too.
00:31:58
So you know that’s just like a.
00:32:01
A way of illustrating that your image reconnects really powerfully to our emotional physiological experiences.
00:32:06
So and and the reason for that is that our brain actually isn’t very good at distinguishing an image from reality, so our brain is sort of processing what we’re imagining in quite a similar way to if that we’re actually happening for real.
00:32:20
So therefore we’re responding emotionally physiologically, as if what we’re imagining were somewhat real.
00:32:27
So I think because of that you know people, might you know anyone that’s familiar with CBT might be used to kind of tuning into more the verbal thoughts and the sentences of you know meaning that they’re bringing to situation, but it’s quite interesting to sort of try and tune into the snapshots of mental images that might also be popping up, you know, like so again, an example would be.
00:32:47
I might have.
00:32:48
I thought yeah, I’m going to make a fool of myself on this podcast, so it’s like a sentence in my head.
00:32:52
A bit of self talk, but I could.
00:32:54
Have the image of.
00:32:55
Someone listening to the podcast instead of rolling their eyes at something that I’ve said.
00:32:59
And so that’s you know, kind of tuning into not just what we see.
00:33:02
That kind of self talk, but are there little snapshots of images that are also representing how we’re seeing situations.
00:33:09
Now, if you’ve ever heard someone say the brain can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction and thought he was toxic positivity, claptrap think again, room explains.
00:33:19
A few people say to us from a psychologist point of view that the brain can’t tell the difference between our imagined reality and reality reality.
00:33:29
What is your thoughts on that?
00:33:31
It’s it’s an.
00:33:33
Interesting debate, so I think there’s a difference in terms of the imagination that I study in terms of the perception of the world around us and how we make sense of the world by perceiving different sensory.
00:33:46
Inputs, so one of the things that I’m particularly interested in is this relationship between memory and imagination, and how similar are the two and how much.
00:33:56
Do they differ?
00:33:57
And so there’s been a lot of interest.
00:33:59
This is a huge topic in terms of, you know, cognitive neuroscience of memory is weather, memory and imagination are actually the same.
00:34:06
Pain and which on the surface seems to be very.
00:34:09
A strange question to pose because we all know what memory is and we all have memory and we all have a fundamental understanding of what memory means to us.
00:34:18
But then if you say well as memory just imagination, people start to get very confused.
00:34:23
But this seems to be.
00:34:24
Where the literature?
00:34:25
Is kind of going at the moment and it’s basically because there was a discovery.
00:34:30
But just over 10 years ago now that when people are remembering events from their past and when they’re envisaging events that might happen in the future, the same core brain regions and saying core network activates, and so there’s massive overlap in terms of the structures and the regions that fire up to enable us to remember and to imagine.
00:34:51
And the overlap is so strong.
00:34:53
If you were to look at the stands of people, you wouldn’t be able to actually tell who’s remembering who’s imagining, so it’s led to this sort of rethinking of memory, almost as a form of like mental construction, and that the same people have gone as far as to say that memory in itself doesn’t really serve us.
00:35:11
All that well, it’s more the imagination that we can construct from the elements of our memory.
00:35:16
That’s the important thing to ensure that we can survive, adapt and plan.
00:35:21
Does that make people who?
00:35:23
Daydream or whose mind wand?
00:35:24
They’re probably a bit more happier than the rest.
00:35:27
I would say so, yeah, and I mean again, this is another area of explosion in cognitive neuroscience because that same core network that I mentioned is also highly activated from people mind wander and Daydream.
00:35:40
So when you’re daydreaming or letting your mind go, your brain is actually highly active so.
00:35:46
It’s not idle in the slightest.
00:35:49
Your brain is hard at work when you’re daydreaming.
00:35:51
And the majority of thoughts that we have on your daydreaming are actually perspective, so their future oriented.
00:35:58
And again, this has LED some of the big theorists in the field to suggest that when you’re daydreaming, it’s really, really important from an evolutionary perspective, it’s allowing you to test hypotheses to, you know.
00:36:11
Then act out different scenarios to do all of these things and to plan, test and predict without engaging in the behavior that would actually possibly come with a cost.
00:36:21
Just so you.
00:36:22
Can you know test out whether you give a cheeky answer and everything without having to actually do it to see the reaction of what the person would be.
00:36:30
And you can imagine why.
00:36:31
Maybe a colleague is having a bad day and maybe made a snappy comment at you without having to go and ask them.
00:36:36
So there’s ways that we can actually test our hypotheses and act on the world, but it’s through imagination.
00:36:43
Without us having to go out and do every possible permutation and see just what.
00:36:47
Happens, so it’s a very sophisticated way of letting us operate on our environment without actually engaging in the physicality of us.
00:36:55
And it’s been shown to serve a number of different creative social memory and planning functions that you know, really elevate it from just simply someone not.
00:37:07
Paying attention or someone you know, ideally just engaging in sort of some whimsical fantasy.
00:37:13
And actually, there’s a growing consensus now that daydreaming is really, highly important from an evolutionary and adaptive perspective.
00:37:21
In a practical sense, Leanne has conducted research involving brain scans that identify the brains use of anticipation in stroke recovery.
00:37:29
One of the things we saw in one of the videos that you were doing I had to do it was a scan of the brain sensing and then the other side was a scan of the brain anticip.
00:37:38
Writing and what what struck me is really interesting is there’s not a lot of difference between the.
00:37:43
No it don’t.
00:37:43
Two in our ability to anticipate something, and I feel like that has more applications than just a stroke recovery.
00:37:52
In our imagination, it seems like it’s really important.
00:37:55
Yeah, but it’s quite a powerful well.
00:37:58
Knowing that is quite powerful and how we can use it.
00:38:02
And it’s quite interesting to know that that is the way that our brain works. So particularly when the person’s had a prior experience, for example, of feeling that if they then imagine it shortly afterwards, basically the similar area of the brain is involved. So we actually directly use that.
00:38:23
In the sequence in which we explore sensations and use it in the task and in that deliberate anticipation that I talked.
00:38:32
About before and then, we also get that person to imagine what the sensation is supposed to feel like after having just had that prior experience and all of that is coming together to try and sort of prime.
00:38:49
That part of the brain that might have been challenged.
00:38:52
In the context of the network so that they have a greater ability to tune in to the stimulus that’s coming in and to make sense of it.
00:39:04
And that’s the light bulb moment that we see so often it it’s quite remarkable actually.
00:39:11
You know we love a bit of Wu.
00:39:12
Andy, yeah, so this seemed like the perfect.
00:39:14
Time to explore the brains ability to time travel with urine.
00:39:19
Now we know that when we remember an event from the past, we’re not actually remembering the original experience, so we are remembering the last time that we replayed, you know, reconstructed this event.
00:39:31
So there are all these theories about how memories are just the last sort of iterate.
00:39:36
Mission of a constructive process, and that’s why memory is so fallible and so vulnerable to distortion and to errors, because if you reconstruct a memory and then maybe some information is brought in that counter to your original experience, someone might say you.
00:39:53
Know I was.
00:39:53
Wearing a red coat that day, you said I’m wearing a blue coat.
00:39:56
And that’s incorrect.
00:39:57
You will probably retrieve that event with the incorrect information now incorporated into your new memory trace.
00:40:04
So we’re constantly updating and reconstructing our memory, but this can give rise to errors and distortions, and the same thing.
00:40:13
Then we reconstruct the past.
00:40:15
That also enables us to construct the future, and so we’re able to, you know, draw upon our stored memories that we’ve experienced and say, well.
00:40:25
If I do travel to, you know Antarctica, what do I know about us?
00:40:30
What do I know about travel?
00:40:31
What do I know about?
00:40:32
You know the people that might come with me and you can actually construct a very realistic and.
00:40:37
You know, highly salient event, but you have no prior experience of because you have all of this knowledge that you can delve into and reconfigure and reconstruct.
00:40:47
Can we use this to our advantage the the fact that memory’s not, I suppose not really real, can we start to construct a narrative for ourselves that is more beneficial to how we feel like, say so you have like low self worth?
00:41:01
Can you start to tell yourself?
00:41:02
That story, but it is different than that.
00:41:06
And then it becomes eventually becomes the memory and becomes the belief that you have.
00:41:11
Yeah, and I think there are some therapies that do work and from this premise that you’re remembering, you know a certain version of an experience that you encoded, but it may not necessarily be an accurate representation of what actually happened.
00:41:26
So if you bring people together who have all experienced the same.
00:41:31
And they will retell that narrative in very different ways, because it all comes from your own perspective and your own feelings at that time as well.
00:41:41
And it’s very interesting how that sort of spotlight of attention that you have on yourself can color and shade.
00:41:48
Sort of the whole emotional tone.
00:41:50
And the way in.
00:41:51
Which you embed that event into your own personal sort of self story and.
00:41:58
There is opportunity I.
00:41:59
Think then to kind of work with those.
00:42:01
Memories and try and go back into the learning.
00:42:04
A lot of therapies are based on this, picking apart memories from the past and trying to understand them with a new lens and trying to understand perhaps your role or you know things that happen that will be under control and re framing them and then.
00:42:18
Laying down this new version you know with high.
00:42:21
On site, and particularly in some conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder, there’s now a lot of interest in actually being able to modify, or perhaps even diminish the emotional reaction that people have when they are triggered into remembering.
00:42:37
You know that traumatic event and trying to use you know, pharmacological.
00:42:41
Of interventions to really dampened and diminish that emotional response or the trauma response so that the memory can just be remembered almost as a factual account without triggering those very harmful and distressing feelings alongside.
00:42:57
Yes, so that’s an interesting angle that’s coming out of that post.
00:43:00
Traumatic stress and disorder literature.
00:43:03
I was going.
00:43:04
To do a little circuit breaker here and say.
00:43:06
Thank you for listening to us if you.
00:43:08
Love the show.
00:43:09
Let us know.
00:43:09
Hit the subscribe button on your podcast app and show us those five star ratings and able to tell your friends about us and check out Patreon page for access to even more content like extended interviews at patreon.com/re frame of mind.
00:43:23
The more people we get talking about mental.
00:43:25
Health the more supported will all be.
00:43:29
Well, the and helps us to understand the workings of the brain networks to further unlock our knowledge of brain plasticity.
00:43:36
Mentioned earlier about how the brain has, you know, different sections in different networks, and it’s almost like being the network meeting somebody.
00:43:42
Falling over somewhere they all rushed to help.
00:43:44
It, but what’s happening at the physical level there?
00:43:46
Is it a chemical thing that’s happening or other synapses sort of getting in and sort of looking for different places to to connect?
00:43:54
Or how does that?
00:43:55
How does that work?
00:43:56
With different layers of change that can occur, and I suppose this is, you know, one of the big questions that still be.
00:44:05
Explored at the first level when learning a skill and making some change and making sense, save the altered information and expectation would be that there’s some reorganization of the brain networks that some of those areas are able to basically.
00:44:25
Chip in and help to make sense of it because we know when we feel anything it can be enhanced with the signal because of multiple sensors coming into it as well.
00:44:36
So there’s a redundancy in the system there’s.
00:44:40
Parallel processing etc.
00:44:42
Want to get into too much of the technical, but I I suppose that the first thing is, you know if we we look even the function.
00:44:49
Reorganization we do have this capacity to learn and adapt, even if you think in your own situation.
00:44:56
If you were thinking about you, know your swing is a tennis racket.
00:44:59
You know you can learn a double.
00:45:01
You gotta swing with feedback.
00:45:03
It can learn the debt.
00:45:04
So there’s one level there.
00:45:05
There’s also some evidence of more the change.
00:45:10
In the sciences that you mentioned to sort of a a growth rate of the synapses in the connection.
00:45:17
That’s more evident in some animal studies, and probably takes longer as well, but the extent to which that’s able to be really captured in real time in instruct survivors is is is relatively limited, but there.
00:45:37
There’s some capacity, both for their neurogenesis, that they talk about in the connection in new synapses, as well as this higher level change, which is a
00:45:48
Uh reorganization and and agree connecting of the network.
00:45:55
Given that we know that there’s a redundancy in the network and there’s parallel ways of processing information.
00:46:05
Sounds like we’re complex machines with a pretty smart operating system.
00:46:10
And much easier.
00:46:10
To update the NUM Monterrey I believe.
00:46:14
’cause I’m still trying to clear my hard drive.
00:46:16
To fit that on.
00:46:16
Thankfully, you got enough memory in your brain.
00:46:19
So it only makes sense that we might need to sometimes trick the brain into taking the action that we wanted to take.
00:46:25
Lisa talked to us about how we can use our sensors for what’s called a pattern interrupt in our cognitive function.
00:46:32
Is there a way, for example of using different sensors to disrupt the?
00:46:37
I guess the runaway train that that silver tool can have, so is what you’re describing like a pattern interrupt with that.
00:46:44
Kind of thing.
00:46:45
Yeah, well, I guess you know for some people they’re quite visual people.
00:46:49
Not everyone, but some people are quite visual and they’ll think in mental pictures quite a bit, so being able to identify well what is the negative image that’s continue popping up for me regarding this thing that I’m bothered by.
00:46:59
And what would be a more helpful image?
00:47:01
How could we change the image?
00:47:02
How could we rewrite the image to be something that’s more realistic?
00:47:05
It’s more reasonable or.
00:47:06
It’s more helpful.
00:47:07
You know how can we change that image for the better and and interestingly, you know.
00:47:13
And that’s really a perspective shift.
00:47:14
It’s moving from an unhelpful kind of image to a more helpful image, just like we’ve moved from an unhelpful.
00:47:19
Verbal short to a more helpful verbal thought.
00:47:21
What I find interesting is also working with metaphorical imagery, so the images that we might be more helpful imagery might come up with doesn’t necessarily always have to be like some realistic literal image, so there’s actually a lot of value in using metaphors, for example to kind of disrupt and interrupt that process so.
00:47:38
I give it my.
00:47:38
Favorite example is I was working with someone.
00:47:41
Who had a very strong fear of negative judgment from other people and sort of the new perspective.
00:47:47
We were trying to sort of entertain was the idea that you know on the whole.
00:47:50
People are generally quite nice or they’re kind of wrapped up in their own world, and they’re not really giving you know them much.
00:47:56
You know much of a second thought.
00:47:58
And when we’re.
00:47:59
Trying to work on trying to develop this new perspective, just sort of naturally like an image emerged to capture that more helpful idea and the image that came up was the idea of seeing people as dogs and cats.
00:48:12
So because for this person right, the meaning of them was, well, dogs love you unconditionally.
00:48:18
And from their perspective, they said or cats couldn’t care less about you.
00:48:21
They just go off and do their own thing, and no offense to cap people out there.
00:48:24
I don’t want to cause.
00:48:25
Any controversy about?
00:48:26
Oh, it’s not that’s not.
00:48:27
That yeah, but you know so this kind.
00:48:30
Of seen people with sort of dogs and cats and wearing people clothing and.
00:48:35
Things like that.
00:48:35
It really conveyed this this message.
00:48:37
This essential new perspective.
00:48:39
But yet people, either nice or you know, then we’re really not paying much attention, but it did it in quite an emotionally evocative sort of a way.
00:48:46
You know when we would.
00:48:47
Bring this sort of image to mind.
00:48:49
There was a lot of lightness to it.
00:48:50
There was a lot of humor with we’d laugh a lot about this image.
00:48:55
So in that way it was really actually very powerful, sort of way of kind of diffusing.
00:49:01
The idea that people are threatening and really capturing this more helpful perspective in just such an emotionally strong way.
00:49:06
So that was a very helpful way of kind of interrupting that negative train of thought.
00:49:11
That that can occur.
00:49:12
Yeah, but I also think so.
00:49:14
Just picking up ’cause that’s I guess I’m talking about very visual imagery there, but even things like I think you know around just even how we hold our body.
00:49:22
You know a more physical being.
00:49:24
You know when I’m you know, exercise.
00:49:26
I often do with with people is around.
00:49:29
You know, it’s thinking about a situation they find really challenging.
00:49:31
Typically, you know.
00:49:32
It’s a, it’s a.
00:49:33
Triggering kind of situation for them and getting them to imagine?
00:49:37
Yeah, how would you like to be in that situation?
00:49:39
How would you like to handle that situation or deal with that situation?
00:49:42
I’m going to get them to imagine actually doing that being that way, behaving that way, operating that way, and when they’re doing that, I’ll often ask some things like.
00:49:50
What’s your facial expression when you’re when you’re doing this?
00:49:53
And can you adopt that expression now as we’re doing this image or exercise?
00:49:56
Or what’s your body posture like when you’re behaving in this way that you’d like to be and can?
00:50:01
You adopt that because you.
00:50:02
Know there’s kind of.
00:50:04
I think that’s a big part of things is you know how we are in our bodies can really reflect the same messages.
00:50:10
So this is kind of what we’re telling ourselves, like maybe, for example, it’s I.
00:50:13
I can do this and I am capable.
00:50:16
But if someone body language isn’t also reflecting that as well, you kind of don’t really feel it in your gut.
00:50:21
So I think trying to get things like what we tell ourselves and kind of our body language all aligned is actually quite helpful as well as kind of interrupting this process and helping people to kind of when they’re having trouble switching gear.
00:50:35
Of how they would really like to be and operate in their life in different situations.
00:50:39
I think those all those things actually kind of matter.
00:50:42
And help.
00:50:42
Is there a tool that would help us to work out which one of these sensors is our dominant one that would be best for us to work with?
00:50:50
I there may be, but I haven’t come across it.
00:50:53
I don’t know that there’s a specific tool I think is about a little bit of experimentation.
00:50:58
Everyone is different.
00:50:59
You know a bit of trial and error.
00:51:01
Certainly when I work with people with imagery you know I’m not just asking about the visual picture, I’m asking, you know, what can you hear?
00:51:07
You know?
00:51:07
What can you smell and taste and?
00:51:11
And sense in your body so you could kind of explore all the sensors that you know, make up the image.
00:51:16
’cause often when people think of you know imagery, they just think it’s a visual thing.
00:51:19
But it’s not.
00:51:20
It’s it’s multi sensory.
00:51:21
You know when you hear a song playing in your mind and that song is not actually playing, that’s an auditory image, you know.
00:51:27
So we we do think, you know, with our senses in lots of different ways, so I think it is a process of a little bit of experimenting and seeing.
00:51:36
Kind of what sensors really kind of make an impact for that individual, so I I don’t know that I can sort of preempt.
00:51:42
You know what’s going to work for each individual other than kind of trying a few?
00:51:46
Things on for size really.
00:51:48
So how does?
00:51:49
Rebuilding your brain networks happen for people recovering from stroke.
00:51:52
Likely we had Leanne with her expertise on hand until us and help us understand how that works.
00:51:58
I think if we.
00:51:59
Think about how the brain works.
00:52:01
It works in network.
00:52:04
Books and in an interconnected way.
00:52:07
So if part of that network has been damaged by the stroke, then there’s the other parts of the network that need to reconnect to make up for that loss.
00:52:21
And that’s I suppose, where.
00:52:24
That readiness and the presence of neuroplastic change.
00:52:29
He’s intensified after a stroke because we know that that plasticity is linked with experience and learning.
00:52:39
So then, whilst there has been, they damaged somewhere.
00:52:43
If you can see that you can put to the person that the brain has this capacity for change.
00:52:50
But it’s ongoing the whole time.
00:52:53
And really, what we need to come together about.
00:52:57
Is how we can shape the change in a way that meets the goals and new challenges that that person is being presented with, so it really is being very concrete that there is hope because of this phenomenon.
00:53:17
Of neural plasticity of the brain, and because the fact that the brain isn’t our ability to do things is not just linked with one area of the.
00:53:28
Right, it’s linked with networks and there’s redundancies and capacities to reconnect and reorganize those networks to achieve a better outcome might not be exactly the same as it was before, but to achieve the goal that the person’s aiming for.
00:53:49
Mirren introduced us to some research on meditating monks, which supports this theory as.
00:53:53
Well, the other thing that always gets brought up is is that.
00:53:56
Idea of meditation.
00:53:58
In that mindfulness, but that’s always something that I’ve actually struggled with.
00:54:03
Now listening to you talk about imagination and how the 2nd that you kind of relax your brain just takes off on its own.
00:54:09
Maybe we’re trying to force ourselves into.
00:54:11
I won’t have a thought but that’s causing.
00:54:14
Of that explosion of thoughts, and we should.
00:54:15
Pay attention to that.
00:54:16
Yeah, I think as well.
00:54:18
The meditation and literature is very interesting because there have been some really really just cool studies looking at, you know, practiced meditators or monks like Tibetan monks who are just highly skilled meditator.
00:54:32
Is and they do show that the way in which their networks, their brain, network dynamics, it changes.
00:54:40
So the way that the networks are sort of connecting, configuring it is very different to a non meditator non practiced meditation and I think there are different versions, probably of meditation.
00:54:52
We don’t probably think of in that way, so for example, I like to do yoga and I find that’s the only way that I can get my mind to sort of quell the ongoing chatter.
00:55:03
So it’s you’re moving, but it’s purposeful.
00:55:06
You just think about the move the next move ahead.
00:55:09
And some people find Tai Chi is very much like that.
00:55:11
It’s slow.
00:55:12
It’s sort of purposeful, and you’re just thinking that one move in a motorway.
00:55:18
So I think it’s more about knowing when you need to reduce the chatter and knowing when it’s actually productive for you to let your mind go and.
00:55:28
Knowing when it’s.
00:55:29
It’s a good.
00:55:30
Time to put the device down.
00:55:31
And actually just be.
00:55:32
With your thoughts and see what comes up because.
00:55:34
Often we’re just using our devices.
00:55:36
As the distraction, I think.
00:55:38
So that’s another example of getting out of that state of anxiety or whatever negative thing I put onto it at the time I I will go and sit at my piano.
00:55:47
I I can’t play piano very well.
00:55:49
I’m learning piano, but.
00:55:50
The active learning piano.
00:55:51
I feel sort of using both sides of the brain.
00:55:54
What I’m doing.
00:55:55
It is somewhat meditative for me is that.
00:55:58
A similar kind of.
00:55:59
Thing going on the brain there or is that a completely different?
00:56:02
Yeah, I think that’s interesting as well I.
00:56:04
Mean sort of linking in with these other activities like.
00:56:07
You know Tai chi.
00:56:08
Yoga, but it’s got a motor component so I think that’s quite interesting that we’re it’s almost like we need to engage the physicality of our bodies to sort of override that ongoing sort of home.
00:56:21
Drummer chatter that’s maladaptive in the brain.
00:56:24
If we’re if it’s causing us distress and I think with music it is.
00:56:27
It’s really interesting because.
00:56:28
A lot of the processes.
00:56:30
Associated with, you know, music.
00:56:32
Beasts and Perception do tend to activate the right side of.
00:56:36
The brain much.
00:56:37
More so than the left hand side.
00:56:39
You would be using the left hand side in terms of your knowledge and you know verbal and trying to understand and conceptualize and comprehend what you’re doing.
00:56:50
And then you have this.
00:56:50
Motor component as well.
00:56:52
If you’re using both sides both hands, you’re going to be engaging the loader cortex or motor cortices of both sides of the brain, so it’s a highly involved, very focused.
00:57:02
And yes, I could see how it could be felt as being meditated because you’re very actively involved in it, so it kind of takes you away from those ruminating or anxiety driven thoughts and brings you back into a a very task oriented space.
00:57:16
Have there been studies done around that kind of motor skill meditation where it’s not really meditation, but even when you drive and you kind of go into that autopilot mode, is there anything kind of backing that up?
00:57:28
But that’s equally.
00:57:29
As good for us.
00:57:30
As sitting down and trying to OM.
00:57:32
I’m so I think this there is a a very large literature looking at this sort of toggle between that core network that I mentioned which enables us to mind wander and enables us to to remember and to imagine and how that actually is in opposition with an attentional network in the brain.
00:57:52
Which, you know one is always active while the other is deactivated and they switch.
00:57:58
So this can account for that phenomenon where you’re driving and suddenly you’re at a new set of traffic lights, and you think I don’t even know how I got here, and it may have been just that you a car horn or something brought you back into the present moment, so it had this sort of salient alerting and effect that brings your attentional network, kicks it back in, and then suppresses.
00:58:19
Or inhibits the activation in that core default mode network and there’s a lot of the studies that are looking at how information flows across these two systems.
00:58:29
How one system activates the other one is sort of suppressed and vice versa.
00:58:33
And I’m not.
00:58:35
As sure whether they’ve.
00:58:36
Looked at this in terms of like motor skills and meditation and whether they’ve brought all of this together.
00:58:41
I’m sure there’s people working on these topics, though, because it’s a very end current line of investigation within the literature at the moment.
00:58:50
Now, as strange as.
00:58:51
It might sound we started to understand in fact be some value in trauma which Kimberly helped us to unpack.
00:58:53
The one.
00:58:59
Trauma can be a catalyst for lots of different outcomes, both psychologically as well as neurologically, so actually in terms of the brain structure and function and what we do know is that essentially that pathway following trauma.
00:59:14
So whether somebody is able, as you say 2 to strength and resolve to be.
00:59:19
Resilient versus experiencing longer term distress.
00:59:24
As a result of the traumatic experience actually relates to a combination of factors, one being the way their brain was working at the time, so if they had a, uh, neurochemical imbalance, for any reason.
00:59:37
Then they’re much more likely to experience distress if they’ve had a history of social or emotional disadvantage.
00:59:47
They’re much more likely to experience distress.
00:59:50
However, people who are in a fairly stable environment, or are able to use their.
00:59:57
Their experiences are way too again, strengthen their resolve or to pursue new opera.
01:00:02
Unity’s then we do see incredibly resilient outcomes and even growth outcomes, and we call that post traumatic growth.
01:00:10
And although we’ve known about the fact that some people inexplicably sometimes seem to thrive following trauma, we really have only been closely studying that.
01:00:22
Group of people for maybe 20 to 30 years.
01:00:25
So we still know a lot more about people who suffered a stress than people who experience positive outcomes.
01:00:33
It really seems like a a foreign concept and in concept to think that there could be a post.
01:00:37
Traumatic growth.
01:00:39
’cause we do hear so much about post traumatic stress which obviously is very important for us to acknowledge and deal with that.
01:00:44
Most definitely.
01:00:45
Could there be some value in looking at some of the ways people do grow?
01:00:50
Out of from it.
01:00:51
I I have to declare my bias right here because I’m absolutely one of those researchers, so.
01:00:57
I’ll be good.
01:00:58
That’s it, so my my.
01:00:59
Biases are very much that, and as you say, it is vitally important we understand how to support people who do experience distress.
01:01:09
And it’s very important for us to understand the factors that lead to that distress, because it helps us then focus on effective and evidence based treatment.
01:01:18
My question has always been what can we learn from people who thrive that can both help them to continue to thrive.
01:01:26
Protect people in the future, but also possibly and hopefully help people who have experienced distress and basically we call that a Salita genic paradigm where you recognize that there can be both positive and negative at the same time, and for a comprehensive understanding you need to acknowledge both.
01:01:46
Then we pre plan for trauma to.
01:01:48
A degree to a degree.
01:01:50
So when we talking about pre planning for trauma it is about cultivating cognitive flexibility, flexibility.
01:01:56
That’s a really big part.
01:01:57
But it’s also about cultivating social support networks, so having networks of support from people who are safe, who we can trust and who we have, that sense of connection and belonging because that ties back to the idea of purpose and meaning and what we do find is that.
01:02:18
People who have those strong relationship ties before a trauma.
01:02:22
The reason they can mobilise, and although this word might seem strange but capitalized during a trauma is because they have that sense of purpose in meaning.
01:02:32
That my purpose here is to support the people who are important to me.
01:02:36
And in doing so, that shared experience, so collective undertaking and collective success.
01:02:45
Survival then in turn gives more purpose and meaning to that sense of belonging.
01:02:51
And we call that an upward spiral of positive emotion.
01:02:54
It sounds like what it goes on when you know, so, uh, uh, a rape survivor or something like that that has been in a horrific situation then goes on to publicly speak about it and create change and awareness.
01:03:08
Re reactivating or re re talking about their trauma, but doing it in a way now that actually makes change.
01:03:16
And there’s some important things there.
01:03:17
As you said that these individuals are incredibly courageous and incredibly brave to be willing to be vulnerable in that way to speak about their experience.
01:03:28
But in doing so, there are so many powerful outcomes for themselves as well As for people who have.
01:03:35
Experienced similar traumas, so number one is this sense of validation in other words.
01:03:41
It is not OK.
01:03:43
It did happen and it needs to change rather than.
01:03:47
That’s not something we talk about.
01:03:48
It’s also about, as you say, mobilizing change and mobilizing people because that’s a sense of purpose.
01:03:56
You know whether it be raped, whether it be another form of trauma, most innovative themselves.
01:04:01
A horrific and they’re senseless.
01:04:04
However, when a survivor takes control of their narrative and what I mean by that is that they.
01:04:12
Are able to publicly speak about this, whether it be within their own social circles, whether it be at a higher platform, whether it be through media, whether it be through police, whatever, Ave that fits for them, they are actually taking control of the situation and through taking control.
01:04:28
We know that that increases the likelihood of Brazilian.
01:04:32
Outcomes, but it also gives them a sense of meaning to their experience.
01:04:36
The event itself remains senseless and completely unnecessary, but what they do with their survival gives them a sense of purpose and meaning, and in doing so empowers themselves and others.
01:04:49
Myuran also spoke about the benefit of trauma in creating positive change think.
01:04:55
Again, this really does come down to the nature of the trauma and the individual personality and resilience of the person and the support that they have around them so.
01:05:06
I think I would be.
01:05:08
Very reluctant to say that you know trauma.
01:05:10
Is beneficial because.
01:05:12
Ideally we shouldn’t be living in a world where people are exposed to some of the horrors that we hear about in the news.
01:05:18
And we do see people rising up and becoming amazing.
01:05:21
Advocates against you know these horrific experiences, but I think.
01:05:26
For every case that.
01:05:28
We hear about that’s, you know, the exemplar and the amazing person who can rise above it.
01:05:33
There are countless nameless others.
01:05:35
Who have we terrible lives on the back of traumatic experiences and you actually can’t regroup.
01:05:41
So I personally would feel that you know it would be better to stamp out the cause of the trauma rather than you know using it to say that you know you can achieve great things on the back of it.
01:05:53
Yeah, I guess in the absence of being able to stamp out troll and I’m not saying that we should be going in and traumatizing people.
01:06:00
For progress, but is this something?
01:06:02
We can learn from the people who have.
01:06:04
Come out differently for most dramatic events that we could give to those who perhaps haven’t found a way to do that.
01:06:10
Possibly, but I guess as well, it really does speak to, you know, the differences that make us, but you know, just makes this tapestry of life so different and I.
01:06:20
Think it would.
01:06:21
It could come at a cost.
01:06:23
If we’re saying, well, look.
01:06:24
These people have been able to do XY and Z to overcome what they faced.
01:06:29
You should be able to do that too.
01:06:30
So I think we would have to be very careful about not being prescribe.
01:06:33
Active and trying to show people who’ve come through traumatic situations that there’s a way out because I mean nobody wants to be suffering from PTSD and it’s extremely debilitating and distressing condition.
01:06:48
And likewise, a lot of people don’t want to be addicted to substances and don’t want to have, you know.
01:06:53
Gambling addictions, and I think it’s very.
01:06:55
Difficult to hold.
01:06:56
Up people who have made it through.
01:06:58
And as a shining example, that could actually be demoralizing or demotivating as well.
01:07:04
For addictive substances, it’s a very, very potent biological effect, and it can end up being almost like that conditioned response that we’re talking about.
01:07:15
So it’s it goes beyond.
01:07:19
It becomes almost automatic that you’re you know you have this hit.
01:07:23
You have an instant response student immediately.
01:07:26
Once that has worn off, then you’re primed and craving for the next hit.
01:07:30
So there are some substances that are just so highly addictive.
01:07:33
It’s almost an instant cycle.
01:07:37
Of you know of.
01:07:38
Abuse and in looking for the next.
01:07:40
Hit those particular behaviors are very difficult to control or to to ameliorate, because it’s a very primaries and basic reward pathway that’s being operated on, and that that’s when we see people acting in ways that they wouldn’t ever have dreamed of prior.
01:07:57
You know to try and be substances.
01:08:00
So here’s the thing, the.
01:08:01
Conversations in re frame of mind explores some of the common ground war face when it comes to mental health and.
01:08:06
Our brains function.
01:08:08
So with our ladies of STEM in front of us, we were keen to explore what Cindy Mental Health toolkit Liam Carey shares her techniques based.
01:08:16
On her own learning.
01:08:17
Just going back to the idea that because this is so strongly founded on robust Pete principles of neuroplasticity and learning, and many of these principles actually came originally from looking at normal motor learning normal perceptual learning and then cross.
01:08:38
Calibrating that which we need to do with the brain following injury.
01:08:45
And I suppose if we think about even with some of the questions that you’ve asked, which I think are really important, perhaps even at that first level, we only making sure we have a select tasks that are meaningful and graded and varied.
01:09:02
That’ll help you transfer.
01:09:05
And when you’re engaged in the task, make sure that you’ve got a very clear goal in the task, and it could be a subgoal or it could be a task goal along the way, because that will make sure that you.
01:09:20
Then direct your attention in a meaningful way, because there’s this self organizing capacity as well within the brain.
01:09:28
So it’s really about if you get to the goal and let the brain do what it needs to do a little bit behind.
01:09:36
That’s important, and then you want to.
01:09:38
If we think about how the brain.
01:09:40
Works, you know, in networks and things, think about how we can use feedback and maybe even that calibration to match the experience.
01:09:50
I, I think the anticipation is another key goal that we could use.
01:09:57
You know, know what to expect to feel.
01:10:00
Tune into it.
01:10:01
So ready yourself for what it is.
01:10:04
That’s your goal for learning and then the other thing is.
01:10:09
You know the repeat in progress, so to bring that into the tab.
01:10:16
Ask, and especially one of the one that for us, if things are working well, that really might be.
01:10:26
The as important or more important is that strategy.
01:10:30
Learning like to really go in with the UM to discover.
01:10:36
What the task is presenting to you.
01:10:40
And how you can work with that task and manipulate it to achieve the goal or the outcome that works for you.
01:10:48
So that’s sort of that need for cognition for the strategy learning as well.
01:10:54
We’ve learned a lot about the brain in these conversations and we were curious to ask Marion whether we’ve got a thorough enough understanding at this point, or whether we’re just scratching the surface.
01:11:05
I think this is.
01:11:05
One of the great things about the the discipline that I’m working in.
01:11:09
It’s like you cheap away, but every every time you do a study that you think you’ve kind.
01:11:15
Of you know.
01:11:16
Isolated a little piece.
01:11:17
Of the puzzle.
01:11:19
Inevitably, it raises more questions and.
01:11:21
So you think oh now I need to, we didn’t.
01:11:24
Think about that.
01:11:24
Or you know.
01:11:25
To get comments back from reviewers on your papers and they’ll say, oh, it’s very interesting.
01:11:29
How do you feel about?
01:11:30
This and you know I’m working on topics now, but maybe five years ago I hadn’t even considered.
01:11:37
And I think.
01:11:38
That’s one of the things I love.
01:11:39
It’s like I don’t, you know, you wouldn’t want to just solve everything, because then that’s the end of the journey.
01:11:44
So it’s it’s like a constant sort of like a voyage where you’re just learning discovering.
01:11:50
There’s new advances, new techniques, new collaborations, and I think that’s why it’s just so great to be a scientist, ’cause you’re just constantly learning and discovering.
01:12:00
And Leanne helped us to.
01:12:01
Answer An age old question.
01:12:04
A very common thing.
01:12:05
We here throughout societies that you.
01:12:07
Can’t teach an old.
01:12:08
Dog new tricks, but it seems that any dog.
01:12:10
If willing, myself included.
01:12:12
I think this dog is kind of learned that I can learn anything right up until the time I I leave the earth.
01:12:18
So their teaching old dog new tricks is not right.
01:12:24
So you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
01:12:27
I mean the saying is not right, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
01:12:30
But even better than teaching the old dog new tricks is to teach the dog how to discover new ways of doing things and, and to me, this is when I hear feedback from stroke survivors.
01:12:39
Love it.
01:12:46
That to me is mostly of enforcing of this therapy.
01:12:50
They actually.
01:12:51
Learn the how to do it and so then when I hear that they’re using it in everyday activities and I catch up with them years later.
01:13:00
This out on still using their comparatively, so do their and such and such.
01:13:04
They had a problem.
01:13:05
I told them how to do it and then it’s yeah so it’s being open.
01:13:11
And believing in that discovery of learning.
01:13:15
But also having ways that you can bring it together with principles such as this which are very robust in neuroscience to actually staff on that pathway and continue on it to change.
01:13:31
And you know it comes back to what we started.
01:13:34
If I mean if you think about reframe the mind, it’s about adapting and learning neural plasticity of the brain.
01:13:42
Is the mechanism or the phenomenon that supports that adaptation and learning.
01:13:48
And if we.
01:13:48
Be engaging the tasks and we believe in this and we’ve got a little bit of that.
01:13:54
Know how how.
01:13:55
To do it.
01:13:56
Then we can achieve that change with both the discovery and the knowledge.
01:14:01
One of the things I wrote down today that is going to be my big take away is change your behavior, change the brain and I would have actually always put it as the other way around so.
01:14:11
That’s an eye opener.
01:14:12
Umm the Eddies and I open air and I think it does.
01:14:15
Challenge is to recognize the reciprocal nature, but also to realize that the control is back with us in terms of.
01:14:28
What we can do, not only what we can do to challenge and make that change, but also how we experience what we do are in terms of making that change.
01:14:42
So the locus is back with us.
01:14:45
Next time on reframe of blind will revisit what motivators giving this new knowledge on brain plasticity with.
01:14:51
A little bit of help from scientist Professor Joe Focus AM.
01:14:55
Typically people make those sorts of decisions once they have more information, you won’t leave your job until you have a better one.
01:15:03
You don’t leave your spouse until you have a better one.
01:15:06
I mean, people typically hedge their bets and try to get more information.
01:15:10
You you very rarely jump into the the unknown if you can help it.
01:15:17
You’ve been hearing our story now.
01:15:18
We really want to hear yours.
01:15:20
Connect with at re frame of mind on Instagram Facebook Tik.
01:15:23
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01:15:24
Or connect with add welcome, Change Media on LinkedIn.
01:15:27
You can also contact us via re frame of mind comma you with your stories or suggestions for future topics.
01:15:33
We’d like to thank today’s guests for sharing their personal stories and insights and For more information on any of the subjects, guests or references used in this episode, please see.
01:15:42
Our show notes.
01:15:43
Or reframeofmind.com dot AU.
01:15:45
Re frame of mind is a welcome.
01:15:47
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