EMDR as it is… Sensing and Remembering
In this fourth installment of EMDR as it is… we enter an area that most EMDR therapists and clients begin with: memory. Up until now we have seen that information processing involves much more than memory and memory consolidation. It happens at the molecular level and is fundamental to moving around in the world to meet our needs. It is the basis of perception and self experience, and very much about the structuring our present moment. Our ability to walk through time together is naturally adaptive and can be life enhancing when taking place in a context of biopsychosocial connectivity. One of the features of a connected AIP (adaptive information processing) system is the capacity to intersubjectively walk through time (more on this later). That’s where I believe the robustness of the approach comes from. Moreover memory consolidation and everyday problem solving are simultaneous targets for processing.
Memory is information we bring forward in time to use and it involves much more than merely facts and names of things. The time and context within which we engage with things and people is also stored and brought forth to help with everyday problem solving. The traditional approach to understanding memory is grounded in Pavlovian conditioning. You may be aware of the story of Pavlov’s dogs being trained to salivate at the ring of a bell after it was rung in conjunction with the presentation of meat. However, the concept of synaptic strength does not adequately explain how a bird with a brain only weighing a few grams can remember where it hides its food, who was watching at the time, where to find its favorite food once hidden, and when to get the tastiest morsels before they rot!
One of my favorite examples of the complexity of memory in adaptive information processing is the scrub jay. The scrub jay, like the magpie (Installment 3) is also of the corvid family of birds and stands out from all other birds because it is known to create episodic memories! Why is that so exciting? Until scrub jays were observed it was believed only humans had experiences of remembering more than mere facts. In fact, according to computational neuroscientists Randy Gallistel and Adam King, many scientists believed animals would need language to have episodic memory. Of course a human-centric perspective would assume talking is necessary to create, access, and communicate about them, but its not. What we would call non-verbal memories exist in birds and allow for information processing of much more than what meets the eye.
There are many types of memory, muscle memory (procedural), semantic memory (meaning), and autobiographical memory (personal history) for instance. In Memory and the Computational Brain, Gallistel and King explore the ability to remember the time, place, and other properties of an episode. Since bird don’t talk, the scrub jay research provides a fascinating perspective from which to imagine the important role information processing has in our daily lives. As we learn about the scrub jay, let’s imagine ourselves as children and how much goes on in our brains as we sense and remember, that we might otherwise overlook. Our ability to know our place in time and context has long been vital (meaning for millions of years!) to living well.
Scrub jay caching food
The research on scrub jays challenges our notions of how memory is stored and what the relationship between memory and learning may be. It can help us see that we and dogs are much more complex than the image of Pavlovian dogs have led us to imagine. It can also help us understand how robust EMDR is when we move away from simple notions of forceful memory networks that trigger us to do things because of repeated or intense experiences. Gallistel and King draw our attention to an “awkward” scientific observation reported in behavioral studies (like those Pavlov did), that is, that the dog seemed to remember the duration between the ring of the bell and presentation of the meat. As we will see, information processing, like that the calculation of time, has casual properties that physically determine what we do without requiring a disturbance or obvious push-pull exertion of energy (synaptic strength).
This is important to the Biopsychosocial-AIP model of EMDR because its methods focus more on supporting our ability to engage in mental time travel rather than merely desensitizing memory networks. However, let’s keep it simple - back to the scrub jay. According to biologist Stephen Vander Wall at the University of Nevada, birds cache (hide/hoard) food over miles of territory creating thousands of hidden storage units. They return in the winter, months later, to retrieve what they have hidden. Nicola Clayton and Anthony Dickenson have studied caching behavior in scrub jays with brilliant experiments that revealed these birds can find where they hid their meals, keep track of what kind of food it was, whether or not another bird watched them hide it, recall when they stored it, and whether or not they already visited the cache.
According to Gallistel and King, in order to carry out these behaviors the jays would need to carry forward various pieces of information from disparate sources that the bird would not have known at the time of hiding the food to be important. In their estimation, what is called associative learning (Classical & Operant conditioning) can not account for the information processing capacity required to do these calculations. Yet, the scrub jay can. It can not only remember when something was hidden, but also when it was hidden in relation to when something else was hidden (temporal relations). For instance, if its favorite dish of meal worms rots over a certain length of time and its less favorite food, peanuts, stays fresh longer, it will remember to uncover the meal worms before the peanuts! Just as astounding, it remembers if another bird watched it bury its precious meal worms after only one exposure!
It wouldn’t be a surprise to think, according to associative learning, that it takes multiple, repeated exposures to remember something. In addition, the idea that we have to have an intense experience occur (state dependent learning) to remember something is ubiquitous. However, I suspect a jay noticing a crow eyeing its stash of meal worms isn’t always so exciting. Yet with one rather boring experience, the jay remembers something it may never have had to remember (that a crow was there at the time the food was hidden and it may need to return to that place and re-bury it) which they have been observed to do! In over 20 years of practicing EMDR, I have yet to be surprised at what important details need to be revisited by my clients in order to fully process memories, details they and those around them initially dismissed because of what most of us believe about memory and learning.
There is information processing taking place within the sub-personal, personal, and interpersonal levels and within them. It can help to imagine the parallel processing in the brain taking place by revisiting what we know of the organisms in this series. EMDR can be a very robust psychotherapy because information processing is involved in the past, present, and future when we are formally engaging in trauma processing or devising the case formulation! It’s happening in all 8 phases of EMDR. Therapist and client only need to experience what is taking place and not become overly distracted by talking about what they think is important. When we remember the scrub jay it’s not hard to imagine of we as children have remembered events that may not have been repeated or intense that nonetheless cause us as adults to engage in defensive actions.
Adaptive information processing can help understand answer this question - information causes things to happen differently than forceful events. Consider the example of learning to put our foot on the brake when we see a stop sign. The sign doesn’t need to hit us on the head nor did we need to have been in an accident before we remember to stop. Information processing is powerful and has physical consequences. In my 2012 paper on the Biopsychosocial-AIP model of EMDR I consider the social state of each of us and how it may contribute to traumatization. Like the scrub jay, remembering who was around as we learned to do life is important. I call that demographics. The information about our race, gender, class, education, geography, and age matter when understanding why we defend when we might want to connect. Events (episodes) don’t need to be objectively bad, just relevant. They may be more or less intense when we remember them, but if they their intensity is not always what makes them a target for processing.
I like to encourage my clients to marvel at the profound information processing going on with other organisms in our everyday life. It’s all around us. In microscopic life, plant life, insect life, and animal life. Even non-living information processing teaches us about life. Information processing causes things to happen. We are constantly sensing, moving, perceiving, imaging, and remembering all the time!
