To many psychoanalysts dreams are a central source of knowledge of the unconscious-the specific research object of psychoanalysis. The dialog with the neurosciences, devoted to the testing of hypotheses on human behavior and neurophysiology with objective methods, has added to psychoanalytic conceptualizations on emotion, memory, sleep and dreams, conflict and trauma. To psychoanalysts as well as neuroscientists, the neurological basis of psychic functioning, particularly concerning trauma, is of special interest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychother Psychosom Med Psychol
February 2004
We used psychotherapeutic measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the effect of a combined psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral treatment of a patient suffering from a severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The clinical outcome was controlled by a detailed case description and psychometric test instruments. Intensive exploration of the patient made possible the creation of an idiosyncratic imagination paradigm suitable for fMRI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutobiographic memory is usually affect-laden, either positively or negatively. A central question is whether the retrieval of both emotive forms of memory engages the same or a different neural net. To test this we studied 13 normal subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they retrieved a number of distinct episodes, all of which were either rated as strongly positive (happy) or strongly negative (sad) in affect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExperimental behavioral data show that written action descriptions are remembered better when encoded by enacting them compared with merely verbal encoding. To explore this facilitating effect of encoding by performing actions ('enactment effect'), a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was conducted with n=18 normal subjects. During a learning condition, subjects encoded action phrases like 'cut the bread' either by reading aloud or by enacting them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe triple-code theory of numerical processing postulates an abstract-semantic "number sense." Neuropsychology points to intraparietal cortex as a potential substrate, but previous functional neuroimaging studies did not dissociate the representation of numerical magnitude from task-driven effects on intraparietal activation. In an event-related fMRI study, we presented numbers, letters, and colors in the visual and auditory modality, asking subjects to respond to target items within each category.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite good clinical criteria for diagnosing optic neuritis (ON), only a few techniques can precisely assess its impact on visual brain function. The authors studied whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of visual activation reliably reflects the cerebral consequences of acute unilateral ON, and how fMRI correlates with clinical function and visual evoked potentials (VEPs). Twenty ON patients, before and after steroid treatment, were compared to 20 controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLooking at bistable visual stimuli, the observer experiences striking transitions between two competing percepts while the physical stimulus remains the same. Using functional imaging techniques, it is therefore possible to isolate neural correlates of perceptual changes that are independent of the low-level aspects of the stimulus. Previous experiments have demonstrated distributed activations in human extrastriate visual cortex related to switches between competing percepts.
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