We are looking at the brain all wrong…
Popular neuroscience…we know the drill. We all have our favorite airport bookstore pop psychologist/brain scientist. We listen to their podcast. We watch the documentaries and YouTube videos — 3D models that light up with primary colors to show us how the brain works when faced with common challenges of human living: money, stress, sex, happiness.
If it’s not the fMRI Lite Brite model, it’s the brain-as-a-neurotransmitter-petrie dish model accompanied by an instruction manual of which foods to avoid and which activities to embrace to ensure that we get the chemistry just right for maximum productivity, optimal orgasms, and transcendent inner peace.
But what if we are looking at the brain all wrong?
Introducing George Northoff’s Spatiotemporal Neuroscience
I have come to the conclusion that George Northoff is one of the most important neurophilosophical thinkers of our time. This declaration departs from the tone of my earlier article Where Does Consciousness Come From? wherein I covered Northoffs 2016 book Neuro-Philosophy (Northoff, 2016) and expressed my distaste for Northoff’s criticism of the work of Patricia Churchland (pioneer of the field of neurophilosophy and my academic crush at the time).
Northoff’s contribution to the series Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Neuropsychoanalysis (Northoff, 2023) highlights a significant blind spot in popular science’s and much of neuroscience-based mental health’s perspective of how the brain works and how it connects to psychological wellness.
George Northoff’s spatiotemporal neuroscience has the potential to completely overhaul the lay reader’s conceptualization of what goes on inside their head.
Northoff’s approach to neuropsychoanalysis flies in the face of the philosophical conclusions reached in my previous article about the postmodern thinker Richard Rorty. Postmodernism devalues the quest for a comprehensive materialist (brain-based) philosophy. Rorty even went further to say that it is more human to allow conversations to continue infinitely with ever-diverging complexity and irreconcilability rather than to attempt to create what he called “commensurate language” that gets to the bottom of truth, of how things really are. This stands in contrast to the efforts (from the likes of Northoff and others) to create a neurophilosophy that reduces what we know from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and neurobiology into a unified hard science that knits together the brain, the mind, and everything else.
I say this to contextualize the following discussion with my previous foray into postmodernism and to realign my dear reader, with my quest in the realm of aspiration and the deep dive we are about to take into neuropsychoanalysis, beginning with George Northoff’s Neuropsychoanalysis — A Contemporary Introduction.
But first, let’s look at some of the philosophical and neuroscientific straight jackets that Northoff’s spatiotemporal neuroscience could help us all wiggle free of.
Hermeneutical Stalemate & The Problem of the Hard Problem of Consciousness
As mentioned above, neurophilosophy is an outcome of the intellectual process of reductionism. Reductionism refers to the attempt to “reduce” two or more academic domains or approaches into a more fundamental and united theory. The ever-complexifying conversation of postmodern hermeneutics is the opposite of reductionism.
The postmodern hermeneutic turn presents at least two challenges for neurophilosophy’s progress (apart from the moderating good that a postmodern perspective can have on the overseriousness with which the domain may be tempted to take itself). The first challenge is that chalking up epistemology (the search for knowledge) to a never-ending conversation in varying lexicons can stall the creative questioning that drives scientific discovery. After all, the scientific method requires that one wonder about the possibility of a new truth (a psychological process) and subsequently test it with a formalized study (grounded in materialist science). The scientist must suspend any inclination toward postmodern pessimism that contests that their newfound discovery will eventually be deconstructed, negated, or superseded by new research in the future, or that their scientific process is no more than elaborate language about realities no different after being run through the mill of scientific inquiry than they were before. Indeed, a certain faith in the value of science’s epistemological efforts is required to drive the edifice of collected human knowledge.
Postmodern hermeneutics pop this faith bubble, asserting that while philosophy and neuroscience can continue to have conversations about mind, brain, consciousness, psychology, and the like, it is not important to bridge the epistemological gap between the domain with new reductive neurophilosophy.
This has implications, especially for psychology that could be relegated to theories of human cognition supported only by behavioral and self-report measures with no material link to the brain and the neuroscientist’s fMRI — truly a “soft science”. Similarly, a discouraged philosophy could choose to stay in its lane rather than ask important questions that could link metaphysical questions about being, morality, truth, faith, spirit, suffering, joy, and the like to the material, hard science of the brain.
This leads to another problem for neurophilosophy — the hard (and the “really hard” — more on this in another article) problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness (how the physical organ of the brain creates the felt experience of consciousness) has been the obsession of philosophers and neuroscientists for so many years (specifically, since 1996 when Chalmers coined the term) that it is high time we ask ourselves where we have gone wrong. The historical trajectory (whiggishness) of philosophy and neuroscience, the language we use to describe our human experience (philosophy and psychology), and that with which we ask neuroscientific questions about the brain’s functioning have led us to an impasse. Even the word “problem” feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The “hard problem of consciousness” (from the hermeneutic perspective) could be interpreted as a challenge caused by the incommensurability within the languages that have developed over time in the relevant domains.
That’s right, I said it: The hard problem of consciousness disappears when we ask different questions about the link between the brain and mind. Fresh approaches for conceptualizing mind and brain (like spatiotemporal neuroscience) could shake things up.
While neuroscience doubles down on its quest for resolution to the hard problem of consciousness, it neglects to ask alternative questions that could sidestep the issue. Neurophilosophical reductionism carries some blame for this. All searches in the realm of aspiration (Kane, 2010) have blinders. (As I allude to this in the trailer of this podcast, attempting to pursue aspirational knowledge — in this case, a solution to the hard problem of consciousness — can lead to blindness to other ways of thinking). Functionalist neuroscience and neurophilosophy appear to have a blind spot that leads them inevitably to the hard problem.
Could neglecting space and time (spatiotemporality) be this very blind spot?
If embraced by the field, Northoff’s spatiotemporal approach could drastically alter the way we conceptualize the brain and consciousness, and how they relate, driving scientific discovery in a fresh new direction, one that could avoid both hermeneutic stalemates and the problem of the hard problem of consciousness.
Finding “Common Currency” in Spatio-Temporal Neuroscience
After talking about progress connecting neuroscience with psychology by Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, Karl Friston, and others, Northoff directly addresses the lingering gap between psychology and functional neuroscience in the following quote:
“Despite all progress, neuroscientific approaches adhere to a scientific psychology that, as traditionally conceived, is based on specific functions and the third-person perspective…The brain is conceived in terms of specific functions showing extrinsic contents, affective, cognitive, or social: these are localized in particular regions of the brain…this amounts largely to a non-energetic, mostly static, content-based, and third-person-based view of the brain.” (Northoff, 2023, p.2)
Functional neuroscience is misaligned with the dynamic and temporal nature of psychoanalysis, a clinical approach and conceptual framework for psychic activity . (Psychoanalysis can seem like an obscure clinical practice nowadays, but remember that attachment psychology, traumatology, and other popular interpersonal therapies essentially grew out of psychoanalysis). But to bring psychoanalysis into the realm of the material science of the brain, conceptual language must be found that establishes a common denominator between psychoanalysis and the hard science of the neuroscientist’s brain scanner. This is not just a matter of legitimizing psychoanalysis. It is the creation of an epistemology that connects psychology and the brain in new ways, opening up new dimensions of scientific questioning.
Northoff refers to this as “common currency”. When a common currency is established that connects a psychoanalytic concept and a neuroscientific one, a firm link can be made between philosophy/psychology and the brain. This becomes a jumping-off point to harden up the soft science.
Northoff puts it this way:
“Brain and psyche can then be conceived of in analogous terms with the ultimate hope that these features are shared by brain and psyche as their ‘common currency’” (Northoff, 2023, p.3).
The common currency must include the dynamic nature of the psyche, that is, the movement of psychic contents over space (spatio) and time (temporal). This leads Northoff to coin the term “spatiotemptoral neuroscience”.
Novel Approaches to the Self and the Subconscious
Let’s look at two familiar psychological concepts to see how a spatiotemporal perspective, rather than the traditional functional one, yields fresh insights into the workings of the mind.
The Self
The first example is the spatiotemporal view of the self. Instead of speaking of the self in purely psychological terms, or by looking at brain areas that light up on an fMRI when you think about yourself, Northoff uses wavelength strength and persistence across time to frame aspects of the self. The self is connected to memory, not in the old-fashioned computer data retrieval analogy that appeared ad nauseam in pop neuroscience literature in the past two decades, but from a temporal perspective. The self essentially becomes the memory of (or reoccurrence in consciousness over time) a self-referential psychic object.
Here’s how it works:
The brain’s electrical activity can be measured in waves and their dynamic movement over time (categorized as infraslow, over slow, ultra slow, and ultra fast). Slower waves maintain their power more persistently over time compared to fast waves. Additionally, waves can nest within each other (temporally speaking) with faster waves occurring within the movement of the longer frequencies. The correlation between slow and fast frequencies over time is referred to as “long-range temporal correlation (LRTC)” (Northoff, 2023, p.19). LRTC of slow and fast waves in the brain determines their Power Law Exponent (PLE — a measure of the balance of power between slow and fast frequencies in the brain).
PLE has been studied extensively as it connects to elements of self-based cognition, such as self-consciousness and intrinsically-focused thought vs extrinsically-focused task activity (Northoff, 2023, p. 20). Northoff concludes that PLE can be used to measure certain aspects of self and personality.
Northoff provides one example:
“The degree to which that temporal structure, the LRTC of the self, is developed strongly shapes the kinds of contents we can recall and remember in our consciousness. For instance, stronger power in slower frequencies (with high LRTC) biases us towards sad contents in our memory, as it is typical of depression, while stronger power in the faster frequencies favors happy and joyful contents, resulting in mania in the most extreme cases” (Northoff, 2023, p. 20)
This is a huge theoretical shift. In spatiotemporal neuroscience, depression and mania are not said to be found in brain areas or measured in neurochemical imbalances, they are framed as the memory of specifically valenced psychic content over time and rooted in the power dynamics of the brain’s slow and fast wave electrical activity.
Paradigm shift.
Consciousness & the Subconscious
Another fresh approach to a common conceptualization of the mind is Northoff’s explanation of the conscious and subconscious. Functional neuroscience places the subconscious in the limbic areas of the brain, bubbling beneath the surface of the explicit or narrative cognition of the prefrontal cortex. Processing the unconscious from a clinical standpoint involves enhancing neural plasticity across the divide between the limbic and cortical systems . Northoff’s spatiotemporal approach, as promised, conceptualizes the difference between the conscious and the subconscious from a temporal and dynamic perspective.
Northoff explains that the entrance of psychic content into phenomenological or “access consciousness” (consciousness that is experienced and can be reflected upon) relates to how stimulus-induced activity interacts with pre-stimulus, resting state activity in the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). The dynamic interplay of pre-stimulus, resting state activity and stimulus-induced activity determines whether a psychic object can be reflected upon in explicit (phenomenological) consciousness or remains in the subconscious.
Exploring this further, research suggests that repression of subconscious content from access to consciousness (which can lead to a slew of mental health concerns including depression and anxiety) is correlated with a decrease in alpha power in the NCC when shifting from resting state to task-related activity. Alpha power (defined as the strength of neural oscillations in the frequency range of 8–12 Hz) becomes a sort of gate between the subconscious and the conscious.
Northoff connects the dots:
“What psychodynamically is described as repression may, tentatively hypothesized, corresponds neuronally to the level or degree of pre stimulus alpha power: how the latter is modulated, that is, decreased by the actual content of the preconscious may “decide” whether the “alpha gate” “releases” the content from its repression by “opening” the gate for the content to become conscious.” (Northoff, 2023, p.94)
The Clinical Usefulness of a Spatiotemporal Psychotherapy
Imagining a neuroscientific psychoanalysis, wherein a clinician manipulates alpha power in the client’s NCC to induce receptivity of repressed unconscious material to phenomenological consciousness such that adverse mental health outcomes are reduced is thrilling.
Unfortunately, in my copy of Neuropsychoanalysis — A Contemporary Introduction, Northoff offers no practical guidance on how to implement his spatiotemporal psychotherapy.
That being said, here are two conceptualizations from spatiotemporal psychotherapy that I found to be of particular interest for the clinician.
Attachment & Trauma
Northoff sees attachment from a neuroecological perspective. The LRTC of the self is nested within that of a larger social and natural ecology. Attachment (and the trauma that results from disrupted attachment) results from the quality of this nesting and dynamic influence on the infant’s pre-affective brain (the brain that has not yet developed the sophistication even for affect and cognition). Northoff quotes from Brockman who says that “attachment begins before emotions, and indeed belongs to a different biological system than emotions” (Northoff from Brokman 2002, 90).
Viewing the infant brain as a biological system, the temporospatial dynamic of which nests within that of the mother’s brain and the social and natural world that she is part of (like nested Russian dolls, Northoff, 2023) is another paradigm shift for how we conceptualize developmental health in a child.
(Northff, how can we recreate healthy temporodynamic nesting in the therapeutic chamber such that it stimulates neuroplasticity in brains harmed by early attachment trauma?)
Depression
Northoff’s discussion of depression in Neuropsychoanalysis (as in his 2016 Neuro-Philosophy) dovetails nicely with recent approaches to mental wellness that focus on dynamic balancing and neural plasticity across brain areas (as in Cozzolino, 2017) Northoff highlights the regulatory function of counter-inhibitory neural networks in the brain. Two of these networks are the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Central Executive Network (CEN). In depression, the modulation between the DMN and CEN becomes out of balance, marked by hyperconnectivity within the DMN and hypoconnectivity in the CEN. Since the DMN correlates to self-related cognition and the CEN with environment, it could be said that depression tends the mind toward rumination of the self and away from interaction with one’s environment, as in social isolation and decreased motivation (Northoff, 2023).
I am concerned that this conclusion could stigmatize the depressed, suggesting that a person is depressed because they are self-centered. Regardless, if an individual’s cognition appears to be circling around matters of the self, a gentle redirection toward the environment (as in mindfulness practice) or the artful manipulation of a client’s attention toward and away from the self (as in the Zen master’s trickery) could affect a dynamic rebalancing between the DMN and the CEN, eventually enhancing the plasticity of these neuronal shifts such that they occur more readily in the future. Over time this neuronal aptitude could lead to improvement in the cognitive and affective wellness of the client and a reduction in depressive symptoms.
The Future of the Brain
Although psychoanalysis is not as popular in therapy culture as it once was, neuropsychoanalysis is doing incredible work knitting together the disciplines of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychotherapy into a unified perspective.
The brain’s activity extends dynamically across space and time. So does the psychic content that appears in consciousness — the stuff we call us, me, the world, love, life.
There’s more to learn. And spatiotemporal neuroscience is taking us there.
It’s exciting.
Originally published at https://thomaswmoore.substack.com.
References:
Northoff, G. (2016). Neuro-philosophy and the healthy mind: Learning from the unwell brain. WW Norton & Company.
Northoff, G. (2023). Neuropsychoanalysis: a contemporary introduction. Routledge.
Kane, R. (2010). Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom. Cambridge University Press.
Cozolino, L. (2017). The neuroscience of psychotherapy: Healing the social brain (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.
