Dual-Brain Psychology: A novel theory and treatment based on cerebral laterality and psychopathology.

Dual-Brain Psychology is a theory and its clinical applications that come out of the author's clinical observations and from the Split-brain Studies. The theory posits, based on decades of rigorous, peer-reviewed experiments and clinical reports, that, in most patients, one brain's cerebral hemisphere (either left or right) when stimulated by simple lateral visual field stimulation, or unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation, reveals a dramatic change in personality such that stimulating one hemisphere evokes, as a trait, a personality that is more childlike and more presently affected by childhood maltreatments that are usually not presently appreciated but are the proximal cause of the patient's symptoms. The personality associated with the other hemisphere is much more mature, less affected by the traumas, and less symptomatic.

Individual Differences in Hemispheric Emotional Valence by Computerized Test Correlate with Lateralized Differences in Nucleus Accumbens, Hippocampal and Amygdala Volumes.

Purpose: Conventional theories of hemispheric emotional valence (HEV) postulate fixed hemispheric differences in emotional processing. Schiffer's dual brain psychology proposes that there are prominent individual differences with a substantial subset showing a reversed laterality pattern. He further proposed that hemispheric differences were more akin to differences in personality than in emotional processing.

An Effective and Safe Novel Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder: Unilateral Transcranial Photobiomodulation.

The opioid epidemic is a global tragedy even with current treatments, and a novel, safe, and effective treatment would be welcomed. We report here our findings from our second randomized controlled trial to evaluate unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation as a treatment for opioid use disorder. We enrolled 39 participants with active opioid cravings at 2 sites, 19 received the active treatment which consisted of a 4-min twice weekly (every 3 or 4 days) application of a light-emitting diode at 810 nm with an irradiance of 250 mW/cm and a fluence of 60 J/cm to the forehead over either the left or right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with a fluence to the brain of 2.

Unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation for opioid addiction in a clinical practice: A clinical overview and case series.

Introduction: Opioid Use Disorders (OUD) cause great disfunction and pain to individuals, families, and societies. There are few good treatments. This paper presents a novel, easily applied, painless, therapy that can be applied as an adjunct to psychotherapies and medications.

A Novel Treatment of Opioid Cravings With an Effect Size of .73 for Unilateral Transcranial Photobiomodulation Over Sham.

Background: Opioid use disorders (OUDs) are an epidemic causing catastrophic consequences to individuals, families, and society despite treatments including psychotherapy, substitution therapy or receptor blockers, and psychoeducation. We have developed a novel treatment that combines unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation (t-PBM) to the hemisphere with a more positive valence by Dual Brain Psychology (DBP).

Methods: We used a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled protocol in which 22 patients with significant opioid cravings and a history of recent or current OUD attended three 1-h weekly sessions.

The physical nature of subjective experience and its interaction with the brain.

Penrose and Hameroff assert that brain computations, including quantum computations, involving hydrophobic areas of microtubules whose electron clouds go into orchestrated superpositions and reductions that lead to proto-conscious elements, or "bings" that become orchestrated into conscious experiences. Their assertion, however, like the findings of the neural correlates of consciousness, does not explain subjectivity, but rather describes necessary conditions for it. Many scientists, including Panksepp, Demasio, and Tononi, have each made great contributions to the field, but none explains how material biological processes acquire subjectivity.

Psychological benefits 2 and 4 weeks after a single treatment with near infrared light to the forehead: a pilot study of 10 patients with major depression and anxiety.

Background: Many studies have reported beneficial effects from the application of near-infrared (NIR) light photobiomodulation (PBM) to the body, and one group has reported beneficial effects applying it to the brain in stroke patients. We have reported that the measurement of a patient's left and right hemispheric emotional valence (HEV) may clarify data and guide lateralized treatments. We sought to test whether a NIR treatment could 1.

Prediction of clinical outcomes from rTMS in depressed patients with lateral visual field stimulation: a replication.

The authors sought to replicate an earlier finding that baseline lateral visual field stimulation, a procedure shown to activate the contralateral hemisphere and induce affective changes, predicted the clinical outcomes of a 10-day course of left-sided rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). For 23 patients there was a significant 1-tailed Pearson correlation between the percent improvement in response to rTMS and their lateralized affective responses to lateral visual field stimulation. These correlations, across the whole group and within genders, were almost identical to those previously reported from 37 patients studied at a different site.

Determination of hemispheric emotional valence in individual subjects: a new approach with research and therapeutic implications.

Background: Much has been theorized about the emotional properties of the hemispheres. Our review of the dominant hypotheses put forth by Schore, Joseph, Davidson, and Harmon-Jones on hemispheric emotional valences (HEV) shows that none are supported by robust data. Instead, we propose that individual's hemispheres are organized to have differing HEVs that can be lateralized in either direction.

Lateral visual field stimulation reveals extrastriate cortical activation in the contralateral hemisphere: an fMRI study.

We examined whether lateral visual field stimulation (LSTM) could activate contralateral extrastriate cortical areas as predicted by a large experimental literature. We asked seven unscreened, control subjects to wear glasses designed to allow vision out of either the left (LVF) or right lateral visual field (RVF) depending upon which side the subject looked toward. Each subject participated in a block design functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study with alternating 30-s epochs in which he was asked to look to one side and then the other for a total of five epochs.

Prediction of clinical response to transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression by baseline lateral visual-field stimulation.

Objective: We examined whether baseline-affective responses to lateral visual-field stimulation could predict clinical responses to left, prefrontal, transcranial, magnetic stimulation (TMS) in patients who are depressed.

Background: Schiffer et al have reported that left and right lateral visual-field stimulation can often evoke different (positive versus negative) psychologic responses in a given patient. Some had improvements while looking to the left and others while looking to the right.