Robert DePaolo

By Robert DePaolo

Abstract

This article discusses the phenomenon of closure seeking as a mechanism for modulating brain arousal, superimposing structure on the aversive, chaotic dispersion of brain activity and how that process might have influenced the evolution of human language and of mind itself. This concept of mind is used to explain certain behavioral and developmental features of autism.

Internal/External Evolution

One ostensible drawback of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that it focuses almost exclusively on the interaction between organisms and the environment. That is clearly an important aspect of evolution, particularly in a biological sense, since all creatures must adapt to the climate, terrain, food resources and the competition arising within its ecology.

Yet there is another side to evolution, which is perhaps more in the domain of physics than biology; specifically that all organisms are also systems that can only remain functional and intact through internal biochemical, intra-cellular and intercellular regulatory configurations and interactions. The second law of thermodynamics mandates that all system will ultimately be prone to entropy, but also that the duration of their existence depends in large part on the capacity of their sub-parts to operate in integrative, complementary fashion so that each organ system and each component of singular organ systems are in sync. In simple terms, the organism must have an effective noise-reducing capacity, i.e. a functional means of assuring that messages sent between brain and heart, brain and lungs, hormones and various muscles and bones are not blurred – irrespective of what’s going on in the outside world.

[Read more…] about Autism and the Closure Response: A Discussion of Brain Evolution and Future Treatments

By Robert DePaolo

Abstract

 

This article discusses pleasure as a necessary concomitant of organic behavior and consequently as an impetus in the evolution of increasingly complex behavior patterns. Pleasure is viewed as a function of uncertainty reduction – as per information theory principles, and since uncertainty bears some relationship to systemic complexity the size of bodies and brains is tied to ever-increasing capacity for pleasure, as well as an expanding evolutionary-based behavioral repertoire.

Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new field with intriguing implications. Among the most interesting is the idea that humans share many common behavior patterns with other creatures and that such primal/genetically determined patterns are, while viewed as immoral or antisocial in many instances, ultimately natural to man and more important necessary to our survival. (Miller (2000), (Symms 1979) (Elkadar & Wilson 2008).

Certain aspects of the EP thesis seem paradoxical. For example the supposition that acts of jealousy, sexual opportunism and social deception are necessary to survival (Buss 1992) is hard to reconcile with the fact that such acts often lead to social discord and counteractions that actually entail aggression and jeopardize the survival of members within the group.

Some advocates of EP would logically assert that as Darwin proposed, survival is multifaceted. Individuals do what they must to pass on their own genes, but also act to ensure that the generic family line is continued. Therefore while jealousy and promiscuity might somehow enhance reproduction rates for an individual, altruism might do the same for the group (Trivers1971).

Others have offered similar criticisms of conflict of EP, for example Gannon (2002) and Buller (2005) but in this discussion the author would like to focus on one element of the theory in particular. It has to do with the Raison d’etre of behavioral evolution, which is not survival per se but the pleasure response. No organism, with the possible exception of  homo sapiens, has any sense that its behavior has long term evolutionary consequences. Most creatures do what they do in response to immediate concerns. For instance, low energy states (glucose depletion in particular) lead to hunger which prompts food finding behaviors. Hormonal tensions and signs of estrus lead to mating behaviors and so on. Thus in the truest, existential sense, behavior, and consequently behavioral evolution are driven by the pursuit of pleasure, which is the intermediary, short term, perceptible code by which long-term adaptation is facilitated.

[Read more…] about Pleasure Parameters and Behavioral Evolution

By Robert DePaolo

Abstract

This article discusses the advent of human language grammar as a concomitant of the fine motor planning and executive skills that also facilitated advanced tool making. Neither skill is viewed as antecedent. Instead the point is made that they were essentially concurrent and interdependent in human evolution; that the brain’s capacity to orchestrate manual behaviors toward a pre-planned outcome as seen in tool making extended to oral-motor cortical regions (and vice versa), enabling early humans to develop simultaneously a manual and linguistic grammar.

The idea that human language derives from tool making has been supported by a number of researchers and theoreticians, for example Sample (2010) and Stout (2011).That is in part due to the anatomical, functional and neurological interrelationship between oral and fine motor expression.
Around 75,000 years ago the human brain reached its current volume of roughly 1200 centimeters. Its expansion featured an outward growth of the outer layer – known as the cerebral cortex. Not only did this brain section expand substantially, it also folded up in development so as to maximize its size and experiential influence without overriding the size of the human skull case. The cause of cortical expansion – to the extent that one can insert determinism into the evolutionary process – is uncertain.

There are several possibilities. One is that the primate brain has always had a higher probability of encephalization due to its need to adapt to the sensory-motor demands of an arboreal existence. Implicit in this idea is that Darwin’s concept of chance mutations is inaccurate; that the genetic history of any given organism skews its mutative drift. At the risk of invoking the Aristotelian notion of inside-out teleological development, it would seem lions are more likely to develop changes in coat color and canines than to develop gill slits. Thus “predisposition theory” (which holds that mutations are skewed in terms of a prior ontogenetic template) might provide one answer.

[Read more…] about The Co-evolution of Manual Dexterity and Language Grammar

 

By
Robert DePaolo

Abstract

This article discusses
clinical practice in terms of the medical model, particularly with regard to
the Freudian notion of a psychic homeostat, and more broadly, the tendency in
physiological and psychological systems to re-integrate in response to systemic
disruptions. The point is made that the personality automatically moves toward
re-stabilization and state restoration when under duress and that clinical
intervention can either enhance or interfere with that process; thus raising
the question of whether counseling is appropriate, whether the ostensible
pathology can be culturally,  as opposed
to existentially defined, and how clinicians might proceed to establish a new
stasis that coincides most closely with the client’s natural restorative
responses and cognitions.

With respect to the process of psychotherapy there is nothing unusual or derelict about “leaving
the client to his own devices” – even in the aftermath of duress (Aubrey, Bond et. al. 1997). Since  Sigmund and Anna
Freud (1967) first developed a framework for the use of defense mechanisms (which Sigmund likened to the immune reactions to disease in the soma)
clinicians have come to agree that defense mechanisms work to restore stability. In that sense they operate much the same way as any system in nature
– seeking, as it were, to revert to a prior state. All such systems, which could encompass everything from physiology to cognition to atoms to the
structure of human language require some degree of redundancy. Indeed one could draw a parallel between quantum mechanics and clinical psychology by suggesting
that, like the photon, the personality has a memory of its inherent structure and is disinclined to deviate from that.

[Read more…] about A Discussion of the Medical Model in Clinical Practice