Description: Have you heard of E.M.D.R. therapy? It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. This is an unfair oversimplification, but it involves a patient thinking of a past traumatic event while guided by a therapist to engage in some form of bilateral stimulation such as following the therapist’s finger moving from side to… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Clinical Neuropsychology
Seeing Brain Plasticity in Real Time
Description: Have you heard of the phantom limb phenomenon? It occurs sometimes in people who have lost a limb but who, at least in the early weeks after the loss feel pain in the limb that is not here anymore. The explanation usually offered is that the areas of the brain associated with receiving pain… Read more »
Can We Treat Depression with De-Magicked Mushrooms?
Description: It is not a big secret so you have likely heard or read references to findings that antidepressant medications do not work for somewhere around 30% of those to whom they are prescribed and that most of those for whom they DO work will find at some point that they no longer work, and… Read more »
When Fat Cells Talk Does the Brain Listen?
Description: The standard introductory psychology account of how our systems maintains consistent levels of food intake used to involve a couple of components. The first involves close areas within the hypothalamus which seem to be implicated in appetite regulation. The most dramatic data involved rats who had one or the other of these areas surgically… Read more »
Would Addiction be More Treatable if it Was Not a Crime?
Description: Think about how you would answer this question. Why do we arrest people found in possession of personal use amounts of addictive drugs and often send them to jail? Is it because we think that the threat of arrest will be a deterrent to becoming addicted? How is that working out for us? What… Read more »
MDMA and Relationship Work?
Description: Imagine that a couple you know is having relationship difficulties that have been going on for a while. Imagine farther that you think that one if the things contributing to their difficulties is that seem to be having problems talking to one another about things that matter to them in their relationship (e.g., having… Read more »
Neurofeedback: Breakthrough or Meh?
Description: Using even limited brain wave recording equipment such as externally applied recording electrodes rather than expensive brain scanning devices, it is possible to detect and describe patterns of brain wave activity and to distinguish between brain wave patterns associated with, say, a lack of attention (in ADHD) as compared to between brain wave patterns… Read more »
Predicting Early Onset Psychiatric Issues: How Many Factors?
Description: If you wanted to try and predict which individuals in a group of children would later develop one of a number of early onset psychiatric problems such as depression, anxiety, addictions, dyslexia, bulimia, or ADHD what would you include in your list of predictors? How long would you list be? How accurately would your… Read more »
Getting Lost While Grocery Shopping
Description: The two (same chain) large grocery stores near my neighbourhood have been undergoing renovations over the past 2 months. In both cases this has involved changes in the layout of each store and the relocation of where particular things can be found. I used to know both of these stores well. I could easily… Read more »
Mushrooms in Palliative Care?
Description: Consider these two questions for a moment. 1. Who uses cannabis, psilocybin, or LSD? and 2. Who should (under a doctor’s supervision) use cannabis, psilocybin, or LSD? Unless your answer to the second question is “Anyone who wants to” the number of people, if any, that you have in your second list will likely… Read more »
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