Moth to the Flame

In this first installment of the “Science of Connection in a Disconnected World”, we will explore how the brain, self, and interpersonal relationships form an umwelt. An umwelt is the world of any organism as it is experienced by it. The inspiration for this piece comes from the non-fiction science writing of Ed Jong. You can read more about umwelten in his book “An Immense World”. We are all having an experience of the world that is unique to our individual set of senses that inform our behavior. Just as a spider uses its web to sense and feel the world around it, we use our web of social relationships. We don’t need to buy any special gear or achieve any great feat to connect with each other. Like the spider, we have the innate capacity to create a web of connection that will bring us what we need to thrive.

I like the concept of an umwelt because it brings our attention to some important philosophical issues that influence how the science of psychotherapy is derived, applied, and experienced by consumers. I will focus on the psychotherapy I use in my practice, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). I’ll also refer to my own published work (Cotraccia, 2012, 2022) where you’ll find these ideas in the context of a scientific journal. An umwelt by definition suggests that we are embedded in our environment and that what connects us to our environment is information processing. We and all life forms are engaged in constant exchanges of information with our environment. While psychotherapy involves a formal relationship outside of our natural surroundings, I believe there is much to learn by modeling it after how our umwelt works. I believe relationships can cause changes in our brain that help us, for instance, heal from trauma. To understand how, we need to re-imagine the way we do science in the mental health field.

Philosophy and science have always provided checks and balances for each other to keep us honest. The philosophy of science can provide logic and wisdom to our collection and use of data. “What is psychotherapy?”, “What is the difference between EMDR and other psychotherapies?”, “What good is psychotherapy to us?”, “Where do the causal properties of EMDR come from?”, these questions are the mainstay of the philosopher-clinician. We can see how philosophy and science partner together in the American Psychological Association’s definition of evidenced based practice.

“The integration of the best available research with clinical expertise, in the context of patient characteristics, culture and preferences.”

EMDR’s theoretical orientation is described as involving adaptive information processing (AIP). Until 2012 the AIP model has been portrayed as a neurophysiological/neuropsychological model that sees all of the change happening in the brain. It continues to be practiced and taught without a rigorous account of how psychosocial factors causally contribute. In 2012, and recently in my 2022 paper I offer one way to expand the model to include the brain, self, and relationships.

This theoretical expansion can be expressed like this, “Does our umwelt include each other?” That is, do we act for one another as the environment we are embedded in? If so, how do we understand the physical properties of the psychosocial end of the equation? In EMDR theory there is an innate healing system thought to bring about the healing properties of the therapy by adaptively processing autobiographical memory. However, most clinicians, researchers, theoreticians, and clients think of the self and relationships in non-physical terms. I believe we now have the scientific data to show that the innate healing system is a non-dualistic, physical, biopsychosocial system. I also believe that this system is involved in everyday life and our model for EMDR methods can stem from it. Like the spider and its web, we are actively engaged in constructing a web of relationships that physically determine positive outcomes in trauma therapy by adaptively processing information.

As I walked over the Delaware river on a footbridge this morning, the spider webs were easy to spot. The sun was shining through dew drops hanging on them. I was enamored with the varying sizes and shapes, wondering what the life of each spider was like. Some of the webs were clustered around the bridge lamps hanging under the threshold of each tower, a place where other bugs are drawn. I learned from Ed’s book that some spiders have learned to precisely cut strands of another’s web so they can sneak up and prey on them. Other predatory bugs learn to walk so quietly on the web that the host spider can’t sense they are there. These stories remind me of when in psychotherapy we work on boundary issues. The nervous systems of clients who lack a history of connection often lack sensitivity to similar predatory behaviors in people. Describing boundaries is not so easy when it comes to the state of our social webs. How does a therapist keep up with all the nuances of a client whose web can’t be seen or easily measured? If the web that connects our body, brain, self, and relationships is physical, why can’t we see it?

My answers to questions like these will unfold throughout this series. To help us along the way, let’s take a look at how the philosophy of science can guide us. In philosophy there is a tradition of scientific thinking called phronesis.

Phronesis: “Wisdom in determining ends and the means of attaining them, practical understanding, sound judgement.” — Dictionary.com

I find it to be a helpful counter-balance to the blind faith in data I often encounter in competitive professional settings where the science is often derived and interpreted with a bias toward episteme, or the use of universal laws that guide what the scientist observes both before, during, and after experimentation. When our logic is confined by a strict adherence to rules about what we see in the lab coupled with a dismissal of the role of time and context, we aren’t able to see how a hypercomplex information processing system (like us) works. We won’t ever see the boundaries that our brain derives, monitors vis-a-vis our self-system, and extends toward others. Just as the evolutionary development of the spider and its web needs to be seen in the context of its environmental pressures and genetically determined options for behavior, the same holds true for us.

For example, I often see requests in professional EMDR forums like, “Does anyone have any research/data on ________”, in the absence of a discussion about a particular client’s history and cultural context. While this is a completely reasonable question, it can belie a tradition of thinking that data is the sin qua non of evidence-based practice and that can undermine your skills. The assumption is that the therapy works because we have objectively learned in the lab what parts of the brain we need to perturb to neutralize the trauma and that we can know ahead of time all we need to know. The alternative would be to use the therapeutic relationship to form an information rich interpersonal environment that reveals how each client’s history and current context has shaped what is possible for them to attend to and therefore, process adaptively. We can stand ready with our interventions to nudge things as we learn how it all fits together, but there is no way to know ahead of time what has been traumatizing to someone and how it has disrupted their life. It’s always a surprise. Phronesis tells us to be ready to adjust as the circumstance calls for adjustment rather than fixate on what we thought was a universal law of trauma.

What is an information rich relationship? A brain, self, and relationship that are a part of the same innate system that optimizes fluid intelligence (Catell, 1963), which is to flexibly pay attention. The self constrains the attention of the brain to give rise to an informed life support system (Cotraccia, 2012, 2022) by communicating to others how life is going. In my 2022 paper I describe the self by highlighting its role in giving us control of our attention. It is a self-system made up of mental models that along with information regarding identity and personhood includes a model of attention as described in attention schema theory. Attention schema theory is a leading theory of consciousness supported by a wealth of data and excellent logic, developed by Michael Graziano. The central claim Mike makes with attention schema theory is that consciousness is our brain’s model of itself paying attention. It’s a “rough sketch” of attention our brain uses to help us control our attention and as such it’s more akin to a perception, something we sense and feel. That is, our brain produces consciousness vis-à-vis processing information related to us paying attention. Along with that, consciousness is also us perceiving that others are also paying attention.

We will revisit attention, consciousness, and mental models later in the series; for now, just imagine that Mike is correct and what we experience as consciousness is our brain giving us only enough information of ourselves paying attention to help us control it and because of that, it isn’t completely representing attention, leaving us with a sense there is something non-physical inside us (Graziano, 2013). This would make consciousness akin to a sense of attention. Our umwelt would include others who we sense are paying attention also. When we sense that others are paying attention and we confirm that vis-à-vis social communication we get what I call connection. Rather than a spider web, we feel connected when we sense what we and others are paying attention as if connected by a web of silk that transmits information. We physically feel more or less connected depending on how our brain processes information related to our model of attention and our model of others attention.

To sufficiently track our own life processes and inform our behavior with our own life experiences, we need to have had a history of doing this. To get that, we need to live in a culture that supports it. Our historical self can exist in relationship to the social world around us in way that increases the likelihood that we will pay attention to what is good for us. This is how I think of boundary work. It’s important because sometimes we grow up over time in a culture where our attention is redirected toward what we think others are paying attention to, a phenomenon I call extra-personal attunement (Cotraccia, 2022). In which case we will not experience ourselves maintaining boundaries that support our life so much as those that are oriented toward others at the cost of ours.

If we imagine that our umwelt includes other people, we can see why we are vulnerable to extra-personal attunement. Understanding the role of culture in psychotherapy also becomes essential. In a future installment we will dive into the this more by exploring a spectrum of connected-AIP system and a disconnected-AIP system orientations we can find ourselves in. For now, let’s consider that a connected-AIP system (C-AIP), describes the ability to attune to what we and others are paying attention to, and it is how we survive and thrive in our world. Just as some cave dwelling fish no longer rely on visual information to live in their umwelt or catfish have taste buds all over their body to support their life experience, we perceive and sense levels of consciousness in each other as a way to move toward what is life sustaining.

In my psychotherapy practice I use a string to demonstrate how a C-AIP system works with its invisible web of connectivity. First we hold the string between us and I describe how a good connection means the string is taut enough they can feel the vibration created when I pluck my end of it. If it is too loose, the signal is scrambled. If it is too tight (as if it were a steel rod) the signal dies on its way across the string. Then I pluck it to create a vibration. I ask my client to sense and feel how many times the string is plucked. The felt sense of the string and the ability to process the signal, (one, two, or three plucks) is the information processing system. While we don’t have a physical connection between us when we normally communicate, we can feel what it’s like when someone is paying attention to us and when they are not. Moreover, we can sense and feel what it’s like to pay attention to ourselves or not.

Now, we need to consider how our brain, self, and relationships are in one sense separate and yet integrated around the goal of processing information that is important to our survival by staying focused on how life is going. So, I ask my client to imagine doing therapy with me and what it would be like if I paid attention to them or looked away at the clock, out the window, or stared at my notes. They usually laugh. Then I follow up with another metaphor. “Imagine your brain is like a maid or a butler whose job it is to be of service but not noticed. Whatever you need it will fetch for you, but you need to signal it. In this case, rather than bring you a cup of tea, the your brain links neural pathways that bring you information about what is going on. That’s your brain’s job. Now imagine I’m out here as well, with my own search engine service. Whatever cue word I put in it will determine what connections my brain makes and what answer float up on my screen (become available for me to act on). Our goal is to do EMDR. A person alone and two people together can create goals intentionally. This is our job.”

Then I continue, “To do EMDR requires us to do something called mental time travel. We will walk through time and all the while practice directing our attention and letting it go, like structured mind wandering, until your brain links the trauma memory we are working on with adaptive neural networks. When we do this, we rely on your brain to fetch what we tell it to, we don’t cause those connections to happen immediately, but if what we are working only truly is a trauma, then your brain for some reason hasn’t been able to spontaneously make the connections to resolve it. That’s why you are here, in a place where our job is to set boundaries with your brain that keep it on track. We are causing the adaptive processing because while it seems our self and others around us are separate, we are actually designed to share information about how life is going. While we don’t force connections to be made, the way a drug or surgery might try to, we rely on our relationship to increase the likelihood that information that needs to link together in the brain, does. Afterall, the experience of self, and our experience of others is all physically processed by our brain as part of one innate healing system.”

When Ed Jong describes how different organisms display intelligence relevant to life in their umwelt, he gives us all an opportunity to humbly acknowledge that we don’t have a corner on the market when it comes to being smart. While it’s not easy to observe and measure how we are embedded in our environment like some other life forms, it’s essential to understanding how robust EMDR can be. The lure of psychotherapies that dismiss history and context can be great and difficult for consumers to perceive. Like the feature image suggests, we get a very different view of life when we extract it from the environment.

Ed describes how the umwelt of insects has been disturbed in modern times leading to a global decimation of the population. Moths for instance, who are believed to have evolved to rely on the light of the sun and the moon for navigation are unable to resist being drawn into street lamps. They can’t tell up from down and inevitably get too close to the lamp or die of exhaustion, unable to escape the innate pull to remain in its orbit. So too, can our innate pull to make sense our unique lives and use our understanding to thrive, ultimately lead us away from ourselves. We need a philosophy of science that can guide our methods and help us see what is really there to be seen.