I recently attended a scientific meeting in Boston on Acute Pain Management. Doctors in Massachusetts and many other states are required, for renewal of their license, to spend some hours of continuing medical education (CME) on a topic…
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TAGGED IN: acute pain management, addiction, antidepressants, anxiety, habit-forming drugs, medications, pain, psychotherapy, PTSD
Background Classical conditioning is a form of memory. The “classic” example of classical conditioning derives from the experimental studies of Ivan Pavlov with dogs. The sound of a bell, announcing the impending arrival of…
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TAGGED IN: Anxiety Disorders, Conditioning, Consolidation, Extinction, Memory, Memory Consolidation, Pavlov, PTSD, Reconsolidation, REM, Triggers
The caudate nucleus, buried beneath the cerebral cortex, is involved in habit formation. Evidence from brain imaging studies suggests that new habits may be established during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when our most vivid and…
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Michele Rosenthal is the lively and engaging hostess on a radio call-in show, “Changing Direction”, which airs on Mondays and Wednesdays at 2PM EST. I have now appeared on her show three times in the past few months (February 6, May…
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Recently it has become fashionable to criticize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as psychiatry is about to switch over from DSM-4 to DSM-5. Certainly the DSM has its limitations, but these are the limitations of…
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The caudate nucleus of the brain, part of the basal ganglia buried beneath the cerebral cortex, is known to be involved in habit formation. An example of habit formation comes from the field of navigation. When we travel to a place…
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One of the continuing mysteries about human existence is the topic of “why we dream”. Dreaming is not unique to humans. Mammals and birds probably dream as well, though we can’t be certain what they dream about. The same is…
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TAGGED IN: dream analysis, dream revision, dream revision therapy, dreaming, Freud, PTSD, REM, Why We Dream
At first glance, truth and fiction appear to be opposites, but if we think of Fiction, including novels, plays, poems, then truth and (great) fiction may actually be synonyms. Certainly there is truth in Tolstoy’s War and Peace,…
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Self-awareness — our sense of who we are — is one of our most prized possessions. Our well-developed sense of self may historically have led human beings to create and embrace the major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam,…
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In the world of PTSD sufferers, a “trigger” is a sensory experience (a sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or pain) that brings back (or “triggers”) memories of their original trauma. The memories, in turn, trigger flashbacks, and…
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