"A Role for Volition and Attention in the Generation of New Brain Circuitry"

What's the role of volition and attention in reshaping our brains through self-directed neuroplasticity? Here's the answer straight from the mouth of the man who coined the term "self-directed neuroplasticity." This article to which I link below focuses on treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but its author Dr. Jeff Schwartz in his new book You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life has shown how volition and attention can be used to make other changes in one's life.

Excerpt:

The use of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) as a means of enabling people suffering from OCD to overcome their repetitive responses to bothersome intrusive conscious phenomena offers a valuable source of data to those interested in the study of the mind-brain interface. Because there is strong evidence that the core experience common to essentially all OCD symptoms — a gnawing, intrusive, inescapable and predominantly passively experienced sense that ‘something is wrong’ — is generated by faulty brain circuitry (for review see Schwartz, 1997a; 1998a), a close examination of the mental processes used by people learning how to wilfully alter their behavioural responses to OCD can yield significant insights about the processes whereby changes in the meaning or value one places on distressing conscious phenomena can result in active changes in how one responds to those phenomena. The training techniques which are used to accomplish that clinical goal explicitly encourage OCD sufferers to arrive at a new understanding of the relationship between their brain, their conscious experience, and their choice of behavioural responses to that experience (Schwartz, 1996). Since an understanding of the basic brain circuitry involved in OCD forms a key part in the theoretical basis of the cognitive training techniques we utilize at UCLA, and since significant alterations in the metabolic activity of those circuits occurs in response to successful treatment, a brief review of the basic brain mechanisms of OCD seems in order.

Click to read the rest of "A Role for Volition and Attention in the Generation of New Brain Circuitry: Toward A Neurobiology of Mental Force" (Journal of Consciousness Studies) [posted with the author's permission].

Comments

[Todd I. Stark]

I do get the argument against reducing intentional agency to mechanics. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were futile to describe traffic jams in terms of quarks either. Maybe the interaction of neurons just doesn't help us understand volition very well. I just don't see *how* non-locality or mental force legitimately solve that problem. I'm thinking that neurology has traditionally been a very narrow-thinking discipline traditionally and a lot of his attitude with respect to "mechanism" is a reaction to that narrow thinking rather than a real substantive objection to the actual broader causal models in science.