Integrating transcendental wisdom practices and innovative experiential methods with psychology to promote human growth, potential, and healing.
- Entries : Category [ Interviews with Leaders in the Field ]
- Each month, we conduct an interview with someone whom we feel has contributed a great deal to our mission either in practice or research.
25 February
2004
Interview with Barbara Kerr
Letters to a Medicine Man: An Apprenticeship in Spiritual Intelligence (2002)
Barbara Kerr, Ph.D. is a professor of counseling psychology at Arizona State University. She is a leader in the fields of Gender and Giftedness, Spiritual Intelligence, Creativity, and Counseling Gifted Students. Her most recent book is Letters to a Medicine Man: The shaping of spiritual intelligence.
A: You used the term Shamanic methods of psychological healing, could you describe what some of those are?
B: I think Shamanic methods of psychological healing are those methods that take into account, the altered states of consciousness. Most Shamanic healing takes place by accessing levels of consciousness that we don't normally think of as being able to access when conscious. Now, the funny thing is that truthfully most great therapists already do use other states of consciousness, when they are in a state of empathy, when they are in a state of flow with the client. They are already there, they just don't call it that. But, shamanic ways of healing service a sine qua nan in the use of consciousness. I should say the use of consciousness to first access the therapist's intuition, and second to prepare and make the client more open to change.
A: Tell me about the audience you intended your book to reach?
B: Well, I wanted it to be a cross-over book, a book that would reach out to scholars, especially in the area of giftedness and psychology. I also wanted it to reach out to people who were just beginning their spiritual journey. In other words, I wasn't preaching to the choir, I wanted to reach an audience that had not previously been reached.
A: In modern psychotherapy, what do you think the role of intuition has been?
B: Well, I think the role of intuition has been discounted for many, many years. That therapists have been encouraged to use data that is gathered through assessment, through clinical assessment as well as objective assessment. To use that data and have been discouraged to actually use their intuition. Although, again, I repeat, the best therapists have ignored that and have continued to use their intuition, particularly in the creation of interpretation.
A. What is your own orientation towards therapy?
B. Well, I have been through several great changes, but I would say that my orientation toward therapy is truly a shamanic orientation, and that is also the way that I train my students. Now, that being said, I continue to use the best of the technology that has been assembled by the field of psychology. Therefore, I use verbal tracking and verbal following and open ended questions, in order to connect with the clients' world views. I use reflection in order to establish a profound state of empathy and I attempt to use level five reflections in order to do that. When it comes time to make interpretations, that is when I attempt to calm and center myself and to use everything from my own breathing techniques to access a quieter state, in which my ego boundaries tend to be more diffuse. I access that and my interpretations come out of that state. Of course the interpretations have to be followed up with goal setting, homework, and all of the usual stuff.
A. I think you talk about in your book about the transformation of helper to a healer. Can you elaborate on that and the processes involved in that?
B. Yes. It is sad how inadequate our language is because the word healer is not really one that is used by indigenous people. The word healer assumes that there is a person doing the healing and a person being healed whereas most indigenous traditions of shamanism don't see it that way. Instead they see one person that comes to another person, and they both journey together into what the psychologist would call the unconscious world and into what the indigenous people call the spirit world. They journey together, and through that connected process, help comes from the great mystery, that is how it is perceived. So, I have to give that preface to saying that healers in the first place are people that recognize that the help that is coming is not necessarily coming just from their own brain, but may be coming by accessing a deeper unconscious or a deeper connection with the universe. So, that is how a healer is different from a helper, a helper uses only the resources of his or her own rational mind, which can be pretty good too. But, not as powerful, I don't think.
A. There is obviously a lot of narrative in your book, and I am really interested in how you think that narrative is important in your spiritual journey?
B. Well, I have found that story is critical to all our understanding of our lives. So, narrative is important on several levels in Letters to a Medicine Man. On one level, the telling of the story was part of my healing process. In other words to recast these events that happened to me, some of them very disturbing, some of them frightening, some of them very beautiful, but to recast those in a story that made sense. That was very important. Then, on another level, the Letters to a Medicine Man is showing how other people can react a spiritual narrative that fits their lives. On another level it is a story that is didactic and that teaches about the stages and the technology of shamanic training.
A. You talk about a deep inner experience, what I've read about in the literature as the dark night of the soul, and you talk about the early parts of the spiritual journey being somewhat about imitation, and then there is that part that is very individual. Can you talk a little bit about the dark night of the soul, or whatever you prefer to call it?
B. Well, I think that great transformation occurs through the walk through that darkness, and I refer you to a wonderful book by Jonathan Zeuss, The Wisdom of Depression, which he shows that in common depression or simple depression, people are entering into a dark night of the soul, and that it is the body-mind's own way of healing that we all have. In the state of depression we become isolated, we isolate ourselves, we tend to become very tired, we tend to eat very little, and we tend to sleep a lot and to dream a lot. Now, that describes exactly the dark night of the soul and the visioning that takes place during the dark night of the soul, so that Zeuss says that we are made, we are creatures that are made to have these experiences so that we can heal through transformation. He is not talking about complicated depression or severe depression where people get stuck. I do believe that the dark night of the soul that I went through was a very good example of spiritual transformation and personal transformation that can take place, by allowing the process of depression to occur while surrounded by a safe and loving community.
A. It really came across how important the community has been in your journey, and I believe that is tremendously important.
B. Very much so, I don't think that I would have survived it alone. (Pause) I am trying to think of other things to say about that, except of course it is that it is also true to indigenous healing, that it always takes place within community.
A. Sometimes I think that it is odd to bring spiritual experience and academic life together, and in a lot of ways they oppose each other and I am really curious about the use of the term intelligence. Spiritual intelligence. Can you describe that and also describe how you can bring together science and spirituality?
B. For me spiritual intelligence is the construct that forms the bridge. That if we see spiritual intelligence as being the capacity to manage and deliver altered consciousness in the service of oneself to others, then that is a very important idea. Spiritual intelligence is the ability to manage it and deliberately alter consciousness in the service of self and others. If we see it that way, it then becomes possible to build a conceptual bridge between the spiritual world and the scientific world. By that I mean it makes it clear that spiritual events take place outside of rational consciousness, whereas science takes place within, for the most part, within rational consciousness. Spiritual intelligence allows us to apply science to the process of shamanism for instance, because we can use science to measure it. We now have available to us the tools for measuring the degree to which people are changing their consciousness, in the therapeutic process.
A. Can you briefly describe the tools you are familiar with?
B. What we are exploring here at Arizona State University (ASU) is, first of all, the consciousness state of flow that has been very well researched by Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues. The newest dissertation to come out of this is my student, Jeanne Copperstone, whose dissertation was examining the possibility of training flow of consciousness in counselors. She was successful in being able to create a flow of consciousness in counselors. Our next step is to see what impact flow of consciousness has on clients. Do clients perceive counselors who are in the state of flow of consciousness as having more empathy and being more intuitive? That is what we want to look at next, so that would be an example of how we are using spiritual intelligence and in this case a part of spiritual intelligence would be the capacity to create a state of flow in oneself, as well as in the client. That would be the variable we would be exploring.
A. What are some of the other things that you think are really important in the field of psychology or, of course, other related disciplines to what we are doing?
B. Well, it is pretty exciting; it is a pretty exciting time in psychology right now. The whole world has opened up. We couldnt even use the word spiritual 15 years ago. It was not okay. It labeled you as a quack. We couldnt talk about altered states of consciousness, because that was considered to be a hippie thing that went away in the 70s, and it was always associated with drug use, which is one of the minor, and it is really not that important a way of altering consciousness. It is too unpredictable to use drugs, when people are perfectly capable of creating these states through breathing and conscious control of arousal levels.
A. I am personally Buddhist, so the role of the breath is very important to me. How do you use breathing in your own practice?
B. Well, first of all in the preparation of therapy. I use breathing in order to calm myself and in order to focus on the present moment. As you know, in Buddhist traditions, breathing is the key toward getting into the present. It is also the key to transcending ego boundaries that comes later in therapy for me. First, I just center myself and get into the present tense and get some of the messages of the ego out of the way. The junk like, Im hungry, I'm tired, I don't know if I am going to like this client, that kind of crap. The breathing tends to clear that. Then in the therapy in the session, I use a number of focus techniques. For instance, I manage my attention in such a way that I attempt to be absorbing every cue that is being given to me, through eye contact and body movements. In other words I am scanning the entire environment and am attempting to pick up from the client every possible cue. So I am trying to pick that up on a very intuitive level in a relaxed way. I am allowing messages to come to me about the client. Sometimes, some very surprising messages that are coming, the things that the client isn't saying and isn't even giving off very much nonverbally, but the whole, the attempting to receive the whole of the client allows some pretty strong messages to come through. I continue to use breathing, soft breathing, and focusing on the client to enter the client's worldview. There usually comes a place, as I am using the verbal following and the reflection as a tool, there comes a place where flow begins to occur, a sense of timelessness as a sense of being in a state of challenge, where you are very challenged by what is happening and yet you have a sense that you are equal to it. So, there begins to be a sense of movement, where you and the client are moving together in tandem as a team. The client's resistances are no longer interfering and one's own resistances are no longer interfering. Rather there is a complete openness and receptivity on both parts, and then we begin to journey together. At some point, interpretations begin to emerge and I allow myself to speak of them as they come, not to sensor, but to simply speak them as they flow out of my mind, and I encourage the client to do the same thing. Then we kind of play, we play together, with the words that have come up. For instance a client and I are talking about a state of numbness in a relationship, a feeling of not being sexually attractive or feelings of former passion and love that used to be in a relationship. And I work with that person and the person describes it, some part of you begins to notice that the words that are being used by that client seem to have to do with competition. I may not be noticing this on a rational level, but I am feeling almost a sense of competitiveness from the client, a one-upmanship, so out of somewhere comes the statement I make, It seems to me that for you love is about a competition. Then the person is struck and may resist that a bit, or in a really wonderful state of flow the person will say, Well yeah, in a way it is, but I don't know how to get at that, I mean I really do. So, this is some sort of what I want to achieve, something with this person, and then we play, and she is competing, and we play with the ideas that somehow this relationship has been a competition from which this person is backing out. Then we might explore some alternative ways of looking at love rather than a competition but to see it as an experience of openness and intimacy. Even in the here and now, I might look at what we are doing now, and how is this different from what is going on in your relationship, and then we might use our own relationship as a way of exploring what is going wrong in the other. Then, we can move to the rational again, and that involves some teaching, and then if that is not working, we move back into an intuitive state. So, it really is like a lovely dance of moving from intuition to rationality and back and forth. The client makes discoveries and I reaffirm those discoveries.
A: I think that is a beautiful way to describe it. What is the role of the heat in the sweat lodge in psychological healing, from your perspective?
B. It's just a vehicle. I think that the heat moves people into an altered state much more rapidly than other techniques. It raises arousal level and when people are in high state of arousal, when they are a bit frightened and uncomfortable they tend to be more open to interpretations that will help resolve that arousal. They can attribute their resolution of the arousal to that interpretation, so that in the sweat lodge, within 5 minutes, people are sweating and hot and kind of scared and in that state, they are looking - remember it is dark, so in that state of almost no stimulation except the heat and the closeness, they are looking for a way of resolving their anxiety and fear. Often, the particular prayers and interpretations that are made give the person a way out, a way out of that state of fear and arousal, so that if something as simple as telling a story of Atomi and the 49 warriors, there is an interpretation-at the end of the story- it says: and so we realize that Atomi's warriors of fear and doubt are merely illusions. This statement of fear and doubt are illusions if it is timed exactly right, the person has an euphoria sometimes, a catharsis where they recognize not only the fear of the sweat lodge, the fear of the heat and darkness. Somehow it generalizes to their other fears and they recognize their fears are illusionary in their lives.
A. Fear becomes a very powerful emotion.
B. In a way we turn fear back on itself, we turn Atomi's warriors and get them into retreat by showing the illusionary nature of fear. We also show we have control. We have power to control our fear. People learn that the singing and drumming also helps that and they learn a number of ways of managing their fear. In therapy of course, there are procedures like Gestalt techniques that are very confrontive that do the same thing. They raise arousal level to the point the people are just casting around looking for some way for resolving this horrible state that they are in, in fear. And when an interpretation comes around they will often grab at it.
A. You mentioned singing and dancing, are they other ways, that you are aware of that you think have the same power that heat, singing and dancing have?
B. Yes. I think any kind of rigors that we expose ourselves to, again within a safe environment, that essentially make our brain chemicals and our body more ready for change. That is why fasting tends to put people in very receptive states, fasting, various kinds of deprivation and rigors such as running, dancing, these kinds of things. Of course, the dancing is changing heart rate and that sort of thing. So, some rigors sort of just prepare us to be more receptive and some rigors that we encounter just flip the consciousness. One thing I am very interested in looking at is the flip from sympathetic to parasympathetic, there seems to be some sort of move from sympathetic to parasympathetic response that seems to be a very fertile and fruitful time for change to occur.
A. Near the end of your book there is Ten White Bears, telling a story and one of the lessons in the story, he says, "You are the mystery and the mystery is you. You cannot change this and if you think of yourself as separate, you will have a hard life full of sickness, difficulty, and disease." I would like to get your thoughts on how you think American society values affect this realization.
B. Oh, it is so difficult in American society to come to the realization that you are the mystery and the mystery is you, in other words that we are all connected and that we are part of the universe, and that the universe flows in and through us and that we are not separate bags of chemicals. Everything in our society tends to help us to see ourselves as separate, to see ourselves as separate consumers of capitalism, kind of puts us in a position as being separate. Science puts us in the position of being separate bags of chemicals. Religion, even many institutionalized religions have this tremendous polarization where you have God and self and those are separate, as if God is somewhere up in Heaven and somehow separate from ourselves, as if we are not so great in expression of God. I think one of the most powerful moments I have had since the book was written was in a sweat lodge one time. It was really powerful, I lay by myself for awhile and I had absolute transparency when there was no ego at all and which I had a sensation that the universe was, I was simply a clear lens through which the universe was perceiving itself. And that was pretty cool, and I think that was a tremendous moment of recognition of you are the mystery and the mystery is you, that most of the time we are a pretty cloudy lens (laughs), clouded by our physicality. Certainly Buddhism and many Native American traditions teach us ways of allowing ourselves to become transparent. So, you are the mystery and the mystery is you, it's pretty hard to get to in our society, and science teaches us to be suspicious of the transcended moments.
A. You mentioned earlier that it is almost your orientation or is your orientation to use Shamanic methods in therapy. When you have somebody that comes in and doesn't have a spiritual background, how do you begin to introduce that into therapy?
B. Well, I don't even use the S-word, I just put myself into the states I have talked about and gently lead the person into a meditative state or I use Gestalt techniques or very confrontive techniques to raise their arousal. I try to explain to them what I am doing. So, that in a way there is a metatherapy going on. I really believe in informed consent, so I want my clients to know that I am going to use some techniques that will sometimes frighten them and techniques that will make them uncomfortable, but I assure them that they are safe there and I like what Fritz Perls said, he said that therapy is a safe emergency. So I don't even need to use spiritual words to get there, and I respect that if a person is not at present practicing a present spirituality, it is not their time. Maybe through the therapeutic process, they may come to that, but if not, it is not my role to promote any particular spirituality.
A. Thank you for your time, we have gone over the scheduled time.
B. It is thrilling that there are students in psychology that are interested in these things and that the topic is now open.
A. It is an exciting time. There is so much to learn, especially as young students in this area.
B. So much, and everywhere along the path you will find people, they will emerge, the teachers really do come.
01 May
2004
Interview with John Krumboltz
by Joseph Dunnigan and Stephen Colmant
Dunnigan: The first question we wanted to ask you is: Is there anything that you are currently working on that you are real excited about?
Krumboltz: Oh, always. Lots of things that I’m working on that I’m excited about. One of my research projects is what I call “The Virtual Job Experience”.
The idea is to create a simulation of what it would be like to actually work at different kinds of jobs to give people an idea of . . . lots of students are wondering in career counseling what kind of career they might want to try out and they often don’t have any idea of what the people in these kinds of different occupations really do. And so why not use computer simulation to give them a realistic idea of what people in these jobs do. So I’ve developed one prototype on this and have applied for a National Science Foundation grant to create a second one and do some research on it. That’s one idea that I’m really excited about.
Dunnigan: So basically you’re using the idea of simulation but actually applying it to virtual reality, in a way so a person could actually sit down at a computer and experience what the job is like.
Krumboltz: Exactly.
Dunnigan: Wow! Very cool!
Krumboltz: Yea. Yea. So I think it should be a very useful idea.
Dunnigan: Right. Yea. Very much so I would think so.
Krumboltz: Yea, so that’s something that I’m really excited about. Another idea is this notion about what we’ve been calling Planned Happenstance.
Dunnigan: Right. Right.
Krumboltz: Which is the idea that really its not necessary to map out your entire career in advance. That a more important activity is to get involved in actions that are fun at the moment and please you and are exciting to you and do the best you can at them, see where that goes and if you like it, do more of it and if you don’t, try something else and you never know what might happen.
Dunnigan: Right, exactly.
Krumboltz: Actually, in real life this is the way it almost always happens. But we’ve got this notion in our heads that we ought to try to plan our entire career in advance and if we can’t, then we are diagnosed as being indecisive. I think what this notion of Happenstance does is to liberate us from the notion that we have to plan our futures in advance and we can’t do it. I mean . . nobody is smart enough to do it in reality but yet we have the expectation that we should be able to do it.
Dunnigan: And that expectation causes us so much conflict and strife because . . .
Krumboltz: Exactly! An anxiety. That’s right. And why put ourselves through all this suffering?
Dunnigan: Exactly. I totally agree. I remember when I was reading over the work you’ve done, I really liked the Planned Happenstance piece. I think that’s really interesting, cause it just, like you said, it’s very freeing and it really takes into account that you know, things just happen to you.
Krumboltz: That’s right.
Dunnigan: And you have to be willing to accept things as they come.
Krumboltz: Well I wouldn’t quite say it that way.
Dunnigan: Oh OK.
Krumboltz: I’m not saying that you have to accept (chuckle) what happens to you. But I’m saying that what happens to you gives you choices and you can accept what is dished up to you. You can also refuse to accept it and try something else. So its not as if . . . its not accepting fate. In other words, its not that you have a destiny or a fate (chuckle) that you have to accept. But its more that, if you are active you are going to have opportunities to do things and they may not be the opportunities that you thought you were going to have, but you still make choices from among things that are options and you try them out. And you evaluate them and you see how they go.
Dunnigan: Right. This is kind of a question I have from what you are talking about. Do you think that a person should just live for their career or they should always have other things around them?
Krumboltz: I think life is much more than a career. Much more. And I think that career counselors ought to be aware of that. I’ve written one article basically proposing that we make a bigger effort to integrate career and personal counseling because the two are intertwined.
Dunnigan: Oh I completely agree with you.
Krumboltz: Your work affects your personal life. It affects if you’ve got a wife or a husband or a partner. You’ve got somebody else to consider and you can’t make one decision without affecting other aspects of your life. So there’s a relationship part of your life. And then there’s a recreational part of your life. There’s a athletic part of your life. And you have to have a home and a place to sleep and something to eat and interesting friends to have and hobbies.
Dunnigan: Right. People don’t live in a bubble.
Krumboltz: (Laughs). Well, maybe people live in a bubble but it’s a really big bubble.
Dunnigan: Exactly! (Laughs) Awsome. Great. OK and I guess a final thought from you is if you have any ideas of what the future direction . . . I guess we already talked about it a little bit but what kind of the future directions that career counseling should be taking?
Krumboltz: Well, uh . . .
Dunnigan: I know, that’s a big question.
Krumboltz: Well, it is and I think I’ve already mentioned two of the directions. One of them is to integrate more of it with other kinds of counseling. I’ve been proposing, just recently in the last few weeks. I’ve been writing an article in which I’m suggesting maybe we ought to even drop the name of career counseling, because in a sense the name itself implies a very narrow focus and a somewhat broader title would be Transition Counseling.
Dunnigan: OK.
Krumboltz: Because people have all kinds of transitions in their life that they’re trying to negotiate at one time or another. I mean you could say going from home to kindergarten is a big transition for a five year old and the five year old’s parents and sometimes that poses problems. Like school phobia is often a problem at that age. And there’s problems of going from, the traditional one is going from school to work, but that’s not the only transition. There’s also going from work back to school. Because sometimes people get tired of their jobs or they get laid off and they decide that maybe they ought to go back to school, and if so, what ought they to study and that’s another important transition. Then there’s the transition from being single to being married. That’s a big one. And then there’s the transition from being married to being divorced. Or from being married to being widowed. Those are big transitions that people go through. There’s the transition from say being employed to being retired. And then of course there’s always that last transition of being alive to being dead. And people need help with all of these transitions. Not only the people that are going through it, but the people who are with the people who are going through it. So there is no end of work that needs to be done. And the problems involved in all of these transitions is monumental and complex and one of my big complaints about career counseling is that it is, the way that it is usually conceptualized is so . . . simplistic, that it makes it seem as if it’s a really sort of a no brainer affair.
Dunnigan: Right, like a real formula driven type stuff.
Krumboltz: Exactly. I mean, you know, the formula was formulated by Frank Parsons in 1909. Know yourself, know occupations, and then make a match. A three step process that just overly simplifies the whole thing. And I see it as being just so much more complicated, in fact I think career counseling is more complicated than personal counseling because it incorporates both personal counseling AND the world of work.
Dunnigan: Right. Right. Well also I think a lot of times its almost impossible to do one without the other.
Krumboltz: Well, I agree.
Dunnigan: You know, I mean you could have someone coming to you for personal counseling and they’re going to talk about their careers at some point. Someone comes to you for career counseling, they’re almost definitely going to talk about personal issues.
Krumboltz: Absolutely. Its all a part of the one big ball of wax.
Dunnigan: It’s a lot more dynamic than just, you know, a simple A + B = C.
Krumboltz: Exactly. And yet we’ve got people that are still thinking along this line of just do this match and if somebody can’t make the match, well then, diagnose them as indecisive and blame them for not being able to do it. And of course my point of view is that the people that are unable to decide what they want to do with the rest of their life are really sensible people. And I myself am one such person. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life but I’m having fun right now.
Dunnigan: Actually, I was just going to ask you that. How do you feel about your career decision?
Krumboltz: Well I’ve never made one.
Dunnigan: Oh, Really? (Laughs)
Krumboltz: No. No I’ve never made one. You know I’ve tried a lot of different things and I’ve had a lot of fun doing a lot of different things and I’m still having fun doing lots of different things. And I continue to want to have fun doing lots of different things. And if I get tired of doing something, why I’m gonna try doing something else.
Dunnigan: Awsome.
Krumboltz: But I’m not making a commitment as to what kind of work I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of opportunities are going to crop up in the future. I don’t know how my interests are going to change. So why should I commit to doing something for the rest of my life when I don’t have the slightest idea what its going to be. And I don’t want to be obligated to fulfill some kind of a promise that on which I might change my mind.
Dunnigan: Right. Great. Well thank you. I really like that. That’s awesome.
Krumboltz: Well, I’m glad you think so.
Dunnigan: Well that’s just a good way to think about it, you know. Why commit yourself to something that there’s a good chance its going to change. Actually its almost guaranteed to change.
Krumboltz: Almost guaranteed. In fact I’ve done some surveys of various people that I’ve talked to and I will often ask a group of people if I’m talking to them you know. A group of adults. You know, how many of you are now working at the job that you thought you chose when you were 18 years old. I get maybe one to two percent of a group of people that will say Yes. And if I pin em down even more specifically like, “Did you know you were going to be working at this particular company, or this particular school district?” They say, “Oh no I didn’t plan on that.” I mean nobody knows exactly what they are going to be doing or where.
Dunnigan: And if we did, what would be the point, it’d be so boring.
Krumboltz: Right! (Laughs) Wouldn’t it be awful? Right I think we should think of life as an adventure. A big gigantic adventure that you don’t know what’s going to happen next and that’s what makes it fun.
Dunnigan: I totally agree with you.
Krumboltz: So this notion of trying to pin down the future is not only impossible but its counterproductive to leading a happy life.
Dunnigan: Wow. Those are words to live by. They really are.
Krumboltz: Feel free to share them with your friends and colleagues.
Dunnigan: I definitely will and I want to thank you again for all of your help with this. This has been very exciting and interesting.
Krumboltz: Well I’m glad we had a chance to talk and I hope your presentation goes very well.
Dunnigan: I think its going to. Its going to be quite exciting and quite interesting for everyone.
Krumboltz: Well good. Send me an email and let me know how it goes.
Dunnigan: I definitely will. I want to thank you very much and I hope you have a really good day.
Krumboltz: All right, thanks a lot Joseph.
06 July
2004
Interview with Emilio Gutierrez
Colmant, S. A. (2004). Heat treatment in Anorexia Nervosa: Interview with Emilio Gutierrez. In Interviews with Leaders in the Field [On-Line]. Available: www.PsychSymposium.com
HEAT TREATMENT IN ANOREXIA NERVOSA
COMPLETED: 8/5/04
Emilio Gutierrez, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist at the University of Santiago in Spain. Since 1997, Dr. Gutierrez and his colleagues have been investigating the use of heat treatment (including sauna) for people with anorexia nervosa (AN). Heat treatment was developed with the specific aim of helping patients to control strenuous exercising and other manifestations of hyperactivity. Excessive activity is a recurrent characteristic observed in people with AN since the first modern descriptions of the illness.
 
Stephen: My first question is, can you describe what research you are currently
working on related to heat treatment and anorexia nervosa?
Emilio: At present we are following three different routes. The first is continuing our work in the lab with the analogous model of anorexia nervosa in rats, known as activity-based anorexia (ABA). A doctoral student, Olaia Carrera is actually running several experiments in Sydney. We developed this line of research in collaboration with Prof. Robert Boakes. He has a very well equipped lab for this type of research. We consider the ABA studies as a window to study the deleterious interaction of excessive activity and restricted feeding in rats. However, we are not approaching this experimental work from a basic standpoint, but from an applied one. We are interested in the development of a non-pharmacological treatment for human patients. The whole idea of heat treatment for human patients was initially an insight about the overlooking of the role of ambient temperature (AT) on ABA studies. We found, quite surprisingly, that in the past thirty years of research combining restricted food schedules and wheel access in rats, that nobody has paid attention to the role of ambient temperature! Now, we know that AT is a potent modulator of the ABA effect. I think that the animal studies are a powerful source of insights. Not many people know that W. Gull was the first reporting the use of heat in the treatment of anorexia nervosa in 1874, and even less people know that Gull took this idea from the extraordinary work of a Swiss physiologist, Charles Chossat. In that sense, the first sophistication in the treatment of anorexia nervosa was heat treatment as an extrapolation from animal studies, if we consider that rest and food are obvious recommendations.
A second line is centered on the experience of sauna by anorexia nervosa (AN) patients. This line of research has been progressing very slowly, and is related with the neglect of ambient temperature in animal studies. There are zero reports in the standard databases (Medline, PsycLit, etc) about the use of sauna by AN patients. This absence of reports seemed to me a little bit puzzling, because it is not uncommon for overweight people, athletes, and even people in general to use sauna as a weight loss strategy. Even though sauna use is not an effective strategy for loosing weight. How could it be possible that the people in the world who are most interested in loosing weight were not taking saunas to do so? So, we are trying to check the possibility that the unreported sauna use could be misleading, and that in fact AN patients do take saunas and this detail has gone unnoticed. This possibility has gained credibility after we found in the unprompted mentions to the sauna made by self-referred AN patients in the chats of WebPages specializing in eating disorders. At present, we are trying a new step in a study being developed in Tampere, Finland. There, a colleague, Anu
Vähäsoini is doing the first study about actual sauna use by AN patients in treatment.
Our interest in the sauna leads to the third route of our work. The question about sauna use is related to the possibility that sauna could have a beneficial role in AN. This seems to be the case, as we have seven years of experience with sauna in the treatment of AN patients at the University of Santiago de Compostela. In fact, in 2001 we presented three cases of AN patients with excessive exercising who we treated exclusively using three different heat treatment strategies i.e., continuous round the clock warming of the patient by housing her in a warmed apartment; intermittent daily warming around meal times providing the patient with a thermal vest; and a weekly series of sauna baths using an infrared sauna. Since 1888 we do not know of any other study mentioning the use of heat in the treatment of AN patients. Besides our clinical experience with patients, we have already performed a randomized clinical trial with the collaboration of Prof. Laird Birmingham. As a consequence of the study, and of the satisfaction of patients with the thermal vests, their use is part of the routine treatment at the Eating Disorders Unit of the St. Paul Hospital in Vancouver. At the moment, this interview is being made while I am again in Vancouver to discuss with my colleague, Prof. Laird Birmingham, a new randomized trial using some brain imaging and more physiological parameters to track the effects of heat on AN patients.
Stephen: In reference to the “third route” of your work, can you say more about your plans for a study using a sauna with people with AN? One of the things I am curious about is if you are planning a randomized controlled study using a sauna?
Emilio: Of course, this is the study I am most interested to perform. However, I can’t give you a definite answer at the moment. Actually, I am in Vancouver to check out this possibility. I know that there would be a lot of difficulties to perform the ‘first’ study with sauna and AN patients. The ethics committee could pose a lot of difficulties. Four years ago, I managed to send Prof. Peter Beumont in Sydney, an infrared sauna. This was a very expensive enterprise and the sauna is still there. Regretfully, after the death Prof. Peter Beumont, I think that this sauna cabin will never be used. It is easier to do trials with new drugs, no matter how ineffective they happened to be, or how feeble the theoretical foundation could be. A problem with the sauna is that, in comparison with drugs, it seems half mysterious, half esoteric. Probably, we will need to move slowly and accumulate more direct and indirect evidence about the beneficial, preventative, protective effect of heat, and their risks too. An important clue in this respect will be what Anu Vähäsoini will find in her study in Finland about the current practice of sauna use by real AN patients. The whole idea about the role of heat in the treatment of AN will then be more ample than just performing a one-shot study (sauna, or whatever other device). Probably our next step after the first randomized trial with thermal vests here in Vancouver, will be a dose-response study with this strategy of heat application.
Stephen: In your 2002 article titled, "Do people with anorexia nervosa use sauna baths? A reconsideration of heat-treatment in anorexia nervosa", you wrote about the physiological effects of exercise and sauna. How do you think the physiological mechanisms of the two activities might be different concerning the impact on hyperactivity?
Emilio: Before trying to address your question, I think it is important to elucidate my views on hyperactivity. According to my view, hyperactivity is not just a secondary symptom in AN. As presented in that paper, I think that hyperactivity has been, and in great part continues to be, the Cinderella among symptoms of AN. Also, I do not agree with the consideration that hyperactivity –as in the case of strenuous exercising- is a volitional behavior to burn calories. I think that the whole spectrum of hyperactivity manifestations are the core features of the disorder. According to my view, to treat hyperactivity is to treat the core element of the disorder.
Now, with regard to your question, regretfully your curiosity goes ahead of what we know at this point. However, let me tell you some of my hypotheses about the difference that sauna makes on hyperactivity in comparison to exercise. First of all, there is an obvious self-reinforcing property of physical exercise in AN patients. It is a very established fact that patients do not improve while pursuing a fatiguing life of over-activity and excessive exercising. Exercise in itself does not seem to facilitate a better course of the disorder. On the contrary, exercise seems to worsen the physical and mental condition of AN patients. Even during hospitalization it is difficult is to prevent the patients from excessive physical activity. Excessive exercising has an inhibiting role over appetite and usually takes the form of a very obsessive behavior. No matter how hard they work, the patients feel the pressure to go on and on. The relief they feel is transient and soon after, they begin to feel obligated to perform more exercise.
The physiological effects of the sauna are quite similar to changes induced by physical exercise and are the result of the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal hormonal axis. However, unlike what happens in excessive exercising, the sauna experience is really anxiolityc for AN patients. Presumably, this is related to a difference between sauna and physical exercise with respect to cathecolamines’ secretion. Whereas the increase in noradrenaline in the sauna is similar to that induced by physical exercise, the concentration of adrenaline in blood seems not to increase during the sauna. This is an important difference, which is related to the absence of mental stress after the sauna. This relaxation effect of sauna is reinforced by β-endorphins’ release in response to thermal stress.
Furthermore, the relaxation effect of sauna on joint and muscle tension and its pain-reducing effect is another remarkable difference with exercising. Probably, the absence of mental stress, and the muscular relaxation are pivotal to the sauna’s sleep induction we have observed with almost every patient. Sleep improvement is one of the very early consequences right after the first sauna sessions. Probably, this sleep induction is related to the improvement in one of the few physical concerns acknowledged by the patients: Their feeling of cold in the extremities. Their hands and feet are chronically vasoconstricted, which is perceived as a feeling of numbness and pain. The heated environment of the sauna ameliorates the limited circulation in the extremities. Quite often, the patients show us with delight their previous acrocyanosed hands that turned to a healthy color after leaving the sauna.
There are quite a few differences between exercising and sauna on hyperactivity. I would like to mention one important thing about the experience of feeling warmed. In the randomized trial in Vancouver, even the patients of the control group asked for permission to plug in their vests. It is uncommon for patients with a diagnosis of AN to accept different treatments. There seems to be something very potent and promising in warming these patients and it seems to be very well received by the patients themselves. This was first mentioned by Gull in 1874 but completely overlooked until our 2001 paper.
Stephen: This is a two part question. My first is a dose-response question. In your experience, how often and intense does sauna use have to be in order for it to have a therapeutic effect with patients with AN? Secondly, if heat treatment helps people with AN by reducing hyperactivity, are you aware of attempts to reduce core AN symptoms by reducing hyperactivity through psychotropic medication?
Emilio: “What is the optimal dose of sauna?” is an interesting question. As a result of our experience in Santiago, most of the patients are treated with two saunas a week. This frequency works for the majority of the patients. With this frequency, the strenuous activity progressively recedes to a point where it is not a problem and the process of recovery is firmly established. In our experience, only a few patients will need a higher dosage for a period of time before changing to the twice a week pattern. Only two patients have needed to take five saunas a week for two weeks to make a difference in their pattern of hyperactivity. With regard to the intensity of the heat inside the sauna, it depends, first and foremost, on the previous experience of the patient with sauna. A normal sauna session will begin at 35º/40º C, and will finish ten minutes later with the cabin at 45-50º C. However, the comfort of the patient during any sauna session takes priority over any protocol. Some days patients ask for more intense heat but usually take the sauna as scheduled. We work with an infrared sauna so we can program the temperature and duration of the session. Remember, this is from the clinical experience of my colleagues and I and we have not yet studied the sauna in a randomized-controlled study. Interestingly, this dose-response question will be applied to the use of thermal vests by AN patients in my next study to be undertaken in Vancouver with my colleague, Laird Birmingham.
With respect to the second question, to the best of my knowledge, psychotropic medication has not been tried to reduce hyperactivity in AN patients; from chlorpromazine to the recent olanzapine. Also, besides the typical and atypical antipsychotic medication, antidepressants have been tried, but no medication has been found useful at all. However, bare in mind that hyperactivity has not been considered an important manifestation of the illness; it is considered a nuisance. As such, medication has not targeted this symptom in itself, probably with the exception of the use of antagonist of endogenous opiates - directed to abort the alleged addictive property of activity. I think we need to have a guiding hypothesis about what is the cause of hyperactivity before a remedy can be looked at. Unfortunately, it is very common for AN patients to receive a poly-pharmacy, not just an active principle on a trial and error basis. This is not only bad science but also worse practice. In my opinion, hyperactivity is not a purposeful and wishful behaviour of the patient fuelled by a desire to lose weight, and for this reason the cognitive approaches have failed in the treatment of hyperactivity and strenuous exercising. We have advanced just a simple idea: Hyperactivity is related in some way to hypothermia. Although this idea is testable, we have to wait until we have a definite answer to the problem of the source of increased activity in AN patients and an appropriate and efficacious management of it.
Stephen: This interview has been great! I want to thank you for your time and for the thoroughness of your answers to my questions.
Emilio: Mucha suerte amigo!
03 October
2004
Interview with Charles Scribe
Rivera-Colmant, Y. R. and Colmant, S. A. (2004). Integrating Native American Traditional Healing with Modern Health Care: An interview with a Medicine Man. In Interviews with Leaders in the Field [On-Line]. Available: www.PsychSymposium.com
Mr. Charles Scribe is a Medicine Man who lives in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. One of the community programs that he works with is the All Nations Traditional Healing Center Inc. The All Nations Traditional Healing Center provides both Native American traditional healing and contemporary mental health interventions to assist Residential School Survivors and their families who have been traumatized by physical and sexual abuse in the residential school system. This interview was conducted on 10/1/04 by Yvette Rivera-Colmant, MSW.
Yvette: Can you tell me how you use traditional healing to help people?
Charles: In what context are you referring?
Yvette: As far as healing emotional problems.
Charles: We use several methods actually to work with people. Most of them are methods that are passed down through the generations. A lot of them are related to the ceremonial ways of the ancestors. We deal with many types of ailments, physical ailments. When I started off working with a medicine man, I worked mainly with physical ailments. Things like diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. Things that affected people physically. But I soon learned that many of the ailments that affect people physically are related to their emotions. So we started getting into working with people’s emotions as well as their spirituality. Generally what we utilize is our ancestral ceremonies to deal with the various sicknesses that people experience. Just as an example, with cancer we began having women that were suffering with breast cancer and cancer in their reproductive systems. After awhile, we began to realize that about nine out of every ten of these women suffered some kind of problem when they were young, in their early or late teens. A lot of times there was trauma related to sexual abuse or some sort of rape. They didn’t seem to develop the cancer right away, not until they were older- in their late twenties or mid-thirties. Some of them even older than that and some didn’t develop the cancer until their late 50’s or 60’s. Usually there had to be a trigger somewhere along the line. There had to be something that triggered the cancer because it just didn’t start there when they experienced that trauma. Later on, as they grew older they experienced a second traumatic situation. It was usually the loss of a loved one, often their grandparents whom they were close too, or their parents. They usually developed cancer after a few years of loosing the loved one. In dealing with the cancer, we not only provided herbs but also dealt with their emotions and their spirituality. We had to educate them and help them regress by remembering the time that they experienced these situations. Once they dealt with the emotional issues that they held within themselves, the cancer began to clear up. In some cases it cleared up in several months. But, not all of them recovered. The success rate is about 60% depending how they themselves wanted to deal with these issues. A lot of these elderly people had these things so ingrained in them they couldn’t release, they had difficulty releasing.
Yvette: Was it that it had become a part of them that made it difficult for them to let it go?
Charles: Yeah, it was harder for them to let it go because it became a part of their life. It became a normal way of living for them. It shouldn’t have been. So they had difficulty releasing or letting go and they had difficulty finding forgiveness. That was one of the main ingredients in the cure that they had to be able to forgive the individual or person that did them wrong. As well as forgiving themselves, because a lot of times they held blame within themselves that really wasn’t necessary. Nonetheless, they felt the situation had occurred and that it was partially their fault. So it was like that, we dealt with all of these issues, some of them were easy to deal with while others we had to take deeper into the ceremony and help them understand that they had to release and they had to find closure with issues that have affected their lives. So that is one of the things that we did in terms of cancer. In working with people with diabetes it almost seemed like it was a similar situation. When people became emotional, they tended to overeat and they would indulge in sugars and different types of high fat foods that caused blockages in their pancreas.’ When these blockages occurred, their pancreas could no longer produce the insulin that they needed to digest the intake of sugar so they began to suffer from different types of sicknesses. It began affecting their internal organs and they started suffering from high blood pressure and as a result started having heart problems. A lot of them started having problems with their livers or their kidneys. In the advance stages of the diabetes, many of them started loosing limbs, starting from their digits, their fingers. We found several herbs that we use that flush the pancreas. Medical science is unable to do that. They have no cure for it. Basically what they do is just replace the insulin that the pancreas is unable to produce or a derivative of the insulin. One of the more difficult areas that we continue to work with is the depressions and the anxieties that people suffer. Usually there are many after effects of these anxieties and these depressions. The sad thing about it is that people, particularly from the reserves that haven’t been able to come out suffer from acute depression and anxieties. They suffer these sicknesses daily and it has become a normal way of life. They think that it is normal and when they come and begin talking to us in a depressed state. We have to educate them and try to get them out of their depressed state. It’s very difficult because of the economic situation on the reserve. The poverty is unbelievable. There is very little employment. Most people live on welfare. So they don’t have freedom, there’s no freedom. They can’t be free within there own land. So it makes it really difficult for them. It seems like in this society freedom costs money. You have to have money to be able to get into your car and travel anywhere in this land now-a-days. Most people that reside on the reserves don’t have that freedom. So they are caught in that, that, that . . . I guess you can call it a prison or a concentration camp. They are caught in there and they have no hope, no foresight for anything in their future. So it is difficult and we educate them. We let them know that as Indian people we have a sacred way of life. We do have a way of life that many people throughout the world are looking at and are trying to understand. It’s the way of life that Indian people have, the ceremonial life. So we have to educate our own people as well because many of them have been in the residential school system. Many of them have been told that their way of life is negative, that their ceremonial ways were paganism and that they were heathens. They were totally discredited and it made them depressed within their own community. So now they are trying to come out of that. Many of them are successful and many are able to come out of it. The ones that seem to come out of it returned toward their traditional ways. They developed their self-esteem and their pride in who they are. Then they learn how to function in society, they learn how to balance their ancestral way of life and finally become successful. What we do here as Traditional Healers or Medicine Men- people call us all kinds of things.
Yvette: What do you prefer to be called?
Charles: Charles (laughs). We have been working with a group of university students in the Access Program at the University of Manitoba. Quite a number of these individuals graduate. They use these traditional ways to give them the boost they need. So they would come to the sweat. Some of them even wrote their essays on the ceremonial way of life and they received really good marks. They graduated and achieved degrees. One of the things that we stress in our ceremonies, in our teaching and in our healing is that, in this day and age, an individual has to have letters behind their name. It’s necessary so that they can take those credentials and their ancestral way of life and balance the two. They start developing positive lifestyles and things work out really good for them. They abstain from any form of alcohol and drug which could lead to abuse. So those are some of the things we do using the ancestral ways. We have sweat lodges two or three times a week. We have a fair number of people coming, a comfortable number, 15 or 20. People come and go. Some come for a couple of weeks or a couple of months untill they find what they need and then they go. They may go and work with other tribes and it is good to do that because they get to learn from the many tribes that exist on Turtle Island. That is what we did too when we were seeking an understanding of our way of life. We met with many tribes, we sat in ceremonies with many tribes and we found out where we fit in. One of the things that we realized was that the tribes across Turtle Island all seem to have the same problems. They are very similar. It’s all related to lack of employment, lack of education, poverty. It’s all in the struggle.
Yvette: Lack of Freedom?
Charles: No freedom. No freedom at all. In order to have this freedom they need money.
Yvette: How did you become a traditional healer?
Charles: Well. I don’t really know. It just seemed to happen. My father was a war veteran. He was in the World War II. When he was young he was a trapper. He wanted to do something with his life so he joined the Army during the war. He ended up over seas. He was a Christian man. He was a trapper but he didn’t understand the ceremonial ways, the spirituality of the ancestors. Where he came from he had lost it earlier than the Plains tribes, simply because they stayed in one area longer, they settled in an area around the trading post and it was more fixed and missionaries came in with a church. The Plains tribes from my mother side, they weren’t as easy to Christianize. The reason why is because they were more nomadic, they would pick up and move. So if the missionaries would build a church there, it would be abandoned because they moved on and they traveled with the seasons, according to the animals and the harvesting of herbs and berries. They were more nomadic and they couldn’t be Christianized. So my mother is the one that kept me informed about the traditional ways. She took me back to her reservation when I was six-years-old and I witnessed a Sundance. It was the very first time that I witnessed the Sundance when I was six-years-old. I didn’t know what it was at that time. But, eventually I learn what it was about. My grandfather would talk to me quite a bit, her father. He would talk to me about the ceremonial ways but I wouldn’t pay much attention to him when I was younger. It wasn’t until I became older that I began understanding what he was talking about. One of the things that I learned in the 70’s when I was listening to elders and spiritual leaders was that everyone has a vision and that everyone has a dream and that they should try to realize that dream, whatever it is. My dream was to become a pilot. Going by what the elders said, I pursued that. I became a pilot and spent a little over 10 years in the aviation business, flying for people, flying for myself, bush flying. In 1983 my father became ill with cancer and I spent the last month of his life with him. I watched him, I watched his suffering. I saw how his suffering went, some days it seemed like he was going to recover and then the next day he would be really sick. It seemed to be going like that up and down, up and down. Then finally he couldn’t stand the pain anymore, just all of a sudden it seemed like he was fine one day and the next day he was really sick and then he passed away. That really made me angry, because at that time I had some faith in modern medical science. I had hope that the doctors that were working on him could cure him, but they were never able to. They never had a cure for cancer. They didn’t know how to deal with it. Basically all they did was three things with cancer. The first thing they seem to do is give people a high dose of chemicals, chemotherapy. If that didn’t work they radiated them and if that didn’t work they took their knife and tried to cut the cancer out, but there was really never a cure. So when I watched my father die, the anger that I had, I was able to turn it around and seek an alternative way. I knew that there must be an alternative way somewhere to deal with cancer, so I began seeking. I began seeking through our traditional ways; I began seeking an alternative cure. It took quite a number of years, he died in 1983 and it wasn’t until 1986 I ran into my first medicine man. I was really impressed with what he was doing and he did a lot of strange things to me, emotionally when I watched him work. My dad was a Christian and we understood that there was a healer that was able to make the blind see, the cripple walk and he was even able to raise the dead, he was even able to walk on water they said. We had that way of thinking and we didn’t realize that we had people among us that were capable of doing things like that, so it did strange things to me. I wanted to help him; I asked him if I could help him. I wanted to help him and I wanted to learn. So he was agreeable, I didn’t tell him what my reasons were, but during my time as a helper he seemed to zero in on cancer.
Yvette: He just knew?
Charles: Yeah. So I began to learn the four different types of cancer that can affect human beings and I began to see it. People would show up with cancer, from tumors to skin cancer. He had his own name for them too. But there were four groups of cancer.
Yvette: What are they?
Charles: There’s leukemia, the tumor, skin cancer, and the other that forms in the reproductive systems. He had a name for all of those and his own way. And he had cures for them and some of the cures were almost instant, particularly the skin cancer, and it was herbal medicines. And it started to give me insight into what our ancestors did. From there I began thinking about what my grandfather used to talk about and the elders that I used to listen to. I began understanding what they were talking about and I began to understand the connection that we have to the great mystery. Most human beings cannot see that connection that we have with this great mystery. Through the ceremonial ways and the fasting ceremonies, Sundance ceremony, an individual is able to set up a unique communication with the spirit and that is something that has to be learned. Not everybody can learn it. But a person has to make a tremendous sacrifice in order to take a few of the first steps, one of them as an example would be fasting- that is abstaining from food and water for four days. It doesn’t seem like a very long time to go without water or without food for four days, but it is very long, four days is a long time. The medicine people recommend that and it is four days in a row. The reason why they recommend that is because it takes three days for anything that you ate or drank to pass through your body and by that time you have thought about everything that you have done and you have had a chance to repent. So what happens is that you become purified- mind, body and spirit become pure and once you maintain that state, then the spirit makes contact. The spirit has to contact you and you can’t contact the spirit. So that’s the way it is, some people say, “Oh, I fast all the time but the spirit doesn’t come.” But there are some people that are able to go out there and be contacted. And that is very unique and my grandfather talked about it, but I couldn’t understand it until I did it myself. So if a person wants to understand it, they have to do these things themselves. They have to physically experience these things and if they don’t, they will never have the true understanding. They will only have the theory of it all, but they will never have the true understanding of the unique communication system that the elders talk about. It gives great meaning to Turtle Island, this spiritual island, the original inhabitants of this Turtle Island are a very spiritual people. One of their spiritual abilities included clairvoyance. So they are able to develop all of these things. They were able to live that way and they were able to live in harmony with nature. One of the things that the old people used to tells us was, look around you at nature, at the way nature is. If you begin to understand the way nature is, you will begin to understand about spirituality. What happens to the society is that it separates itself from the true meaning of nature. We take nature for granted. The most important thing about it is that life goes on, understanding the generations. How that Great Spirit allows life to go on. The Great Spirit allows life to go on one way and that is through the holy union of grandma and grandpa. This holy union applies to all living things- because all animals have a grandma and a grandpa, so that is the doorway, that is the only way that life can come out of this Earth. That is why Indian people look at everything that grows as having a spirit, because it does. All living things have a spirit. In this way of life, people are able to develop this unique way of communication system with it’s spirit. A medicine man for example can pick herbs and then use herbs, but they don’t have any meaning until they communicate with the spirit of that particular herb. So he has to ask the spirit of that herb through his song or his prayer or through his offering to do this work. Then it will work. You can take a lot of aspirin, but it really doesn’t do very much but it can do the same thing in a diamond willow bluff, you can do the ceremony in there and scrape the bark and get the same thing, with no effort. So that is the way it is and it is all respecting nature. Respecting the way the Great Spirit created it, so this way is all about respecting nature, it’s not a religion. The Great Spirit is everywhere; it is within all of us. Our ceremonies, when we get together and do our ceremonies we get together and pray and we are of one mind and one spirit and it’s strong. That’s because we have the Great Spirit in all of us. The way the Great Spirit created this earth is very wonderful, it’s very powerful. But society tends to separate itself from it and that is where the problem exists. They separate themselves and they take everything for granted. Water for example is very important. We begin our life in water. The water that is in our mother’s womb- that is how we begin our life. When that water flows we come onto this earth and we come into this earth with nothing. Then we leave this earth with nothing, we can’t take anything with us. So while we are on this earth we are all equal, (laughs), we think we are not but we are (laughs), because we are all equal. Nobody is more equal than anybody else. We are all created the same way and that is what people need to understand, it’s how the Great Spirit created us, the importance of water. Our ancestors didn’t let their child relieve themselves closer than 20 paces from any body of water, now-a-days we relieve ourselves right into it, that is why there is a change in the weather. That is why there are so many things happening in nature. People call it the greenhouse effect and sure everything is getting polluted and everything is being affected by all this pollution. That is because we disregard nature, we don’t respect nature at all and we live apart from it. The ancestors said back in the 70’s that Mother Earth was going to cleanse herself and that time is beginning. It is evident because we are seeing more hurricanes - there has never been a time when four hurricanes in a row has hit Florida. There were never so many eruptions of volcanoes. There were never so many earthquakes; it’s all starting to happen, what the ancestors foresaw. Everyone has to pay heed to what is going on for the sake of those future generations. We may not experience that great a catastrophe in our life, but what about our children and our grandchildren. What are they going to think? Changing the ecology, like putting in dams. When I was a pilot, I spoke to meteorologists. When Manitoba Hydro put dams in the North they changed the whole river systems. Not only did they change the whole river system, they changed the weather pattern and we noticed it, but we couldn’t prove anything until there was 20 years of statistics; it didn’t become fact until there was 20 years of statistics. Now, it is becoming evident, because the low pressure systems are swinging away to the South. Look at Southern Manitoba, look at our summer [This year Manitoba experienced the coldest summer on record]. That is why, changing ecology, changing the lay of the land, changing the rivers systems. That water is life giving, it gives us life. We begin our life in it and it also gives us life. Christian people say that God created us in his image, but actually God created us in the image of Mother Earth. Mother Earth is 80% water and so are we. So it is important that people begin to understand the traditional way of life. The residential school system told us it was Paganism and Hedonism: devil worship. I have been practicing as a medicine man since 1986. That is about 21 years and I have never seen a devil in it yet. I have never seen the devil. We are closer to God, we are closer to this Great Mystery, and we understand this Great Mystery more than most of the society.
Yvette: It seems like there is also responsibility with it. You are just not taking from the Earth, you are making sure that you are taking care of the Earth. When you do take from it you give back. So it is not hedonistic, it’s responsible.
Charles: Yeah, it is because our people never took anything from the Earth without putting something back in return. As an example, when the medicine people harvested their herbs, they left an offering. They never just took it, they always offered their prayer, and they always offered their song and they offered their cloth or their materials or whatever they felt they needed to offer, they offered it. Then they took that medicine and they didn’t synthesize it, they just used it in their natural state- and it is very effective, it’s a very effective healing medicine. One of the things that I learned as a medicine man is that there is medicine out there that we don’t see. When you talk about spirituality and that every living thing that God created has a spirit there are some medicine out there that people have not seen yet. We had a chance to see it. I have seen people walk over medicine that they didn’t even know it was there, and I never said anything. The medicine is very effective; we have friends that are doctors that want to find out more about these medicines. But, there are some medicines that are secret because they are sacred, you can see the spirit in them, we just don’t want them abused, but they are very effective for the health of our people or anyone that wants to use them. I don’t know what else you want to know.
Yvette: Something that pops into my mind is when you spoke about theory versus really knowing. I guess theory is talk about the mechanics versus having a true understanding.
Charles: Other doctors learn from books most of the stuff they know they learned from books. Most of everything they know is theory. They never actually went and experienced these things. They don’t pray before they work with a patient. If they feel that there is any type of spirituality required, they send for another person. If they think that it is an emotional problem, they send for a psychiatrist, so its all different people none of them know each other. So they interrupt things using this theory not really understanding what they are interrupting. A lot of decisions are made based on this theory and a lot of people are effected by it and there are some cases when people die because of misdiagnosing, a lot of malpractice. That is because a lot of the doctors are taking guesses, they look at you and they take a guess- there is another force out there that they are going by and it has to do with the amount of medicine they prescribe. We have had patients come here that have had so many pills that it is unbelievable; they had a pill for everything and more. Half of the time, that was what was making them sick; they were developing ulcers from Tylenol. They were admitting that they were getting addicted because their tolerance to these drugs were increasing and so in order to make it take effect, they had to add more drugs to it, like codeine as an example- Tylenol 3 with codeine. We have had patients come here that were addicted to codeine prescriptions. They go to the doctor with a particular problem and they look at them and prescribe them Tylenol. I know a lady that had a bottle of 300 Tylenol, I couldn’t believe it. In one day she would take 15 of them and she was wondering why she was sick, (laughs), she was wondering what was going on. I told her to throw her Tylenol away, you don’t need it. One of my doctor friends took sick and he became a very good friend of mine, we work together with natural herbs. He was telling me that when he took sick that his colleagues couldn’t help him. He had to find his own cure and he did and it was natural medicines and we were able to work together, so we shared our information, but not all of it. There are certain things that a person has to earn and it takes time. You have another question?
Yvette: You were talking about working with a doctor. I am going to ask you a related
question. Do you work with Psychologists, Psychiatrists, and Social Workers?
Charles: Yeah, we do. We have clients with Child and Family Services that are under the care of Psychologists, so we did have some contact with Psychologists. General these types of people are reluctant to be with us. Our natural medicines are unorthodox. So, they don’t really bother with us, even though they know our medicine is effective. We get referrals from some doctors- about 5% -10% of our clients is from doctors. You can say that the doctors can’t understand what the ailments are, probably because it is emotionally based. We do work with religious people, people that are ministers, psychiatrist- we do work with some indirectly. We can work together. Where we Sundance, we have a medical doctor, we call him Doc (laughs), he lives in Denver and he is a Sundancer too. I have known him for 18 years. He not only practices modern medicine, he also works with Native and Chinese medicine- acupuncture. He is an interesting character and he Sundances, we watched his son grow up in the Sundance since he was a little boy, now he is a doctor- 18 years later. So we do run across many professional people- Priests, lawyers, monks. All kinds of people Sundance. They come from everywhere, they don’t have to necessarily have to be Indian to Sundance. We have had people come from Japan. We get people from Germany and South America- people come from all over the world to Sundance. It is interesting we get to learn the different cultures all over the world. We even have Druids come- indigenous people from England before the Roman Empire, so we have all walks of life. It is really nice to have that kind of experience where you can meet people from everywhere. We also practice traditional medicines and it is very similar- the procedures might be a little different, but most the herbal medicines are the same. The Chinese people use Sage, but they use it in a different way but the effects- the cure is the same. We do work with many professional people, professors from the colleges. Does that answer your question?
Yvette: Western sciences uses the DSM to conceptualize problems, do you conceptualize problems differently? DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- Categorizing
Charles: So basically what they are doing is treating people on the commonality of the sicknesses? We do that to some degree. Because we learned as I stated earlier- for an example- a family in New Mexico and a family in Northern Manitoba are sometimes very similar. There really is no difference in the types of problems they experience; they just experience it in a different part of Turtle Island. Generally it’s the same type of sickness or ailment or issues that occurs in the family. So we do- it took awhile to learn how to diagnose people. When we first started, it took 2-3 hours per person. That was back in 1993. Now it takes us about 2 minutes to diagnose people and to determine what type of herbal medicine they need. So we can go through quite a number of people very quickly. We also have ways of verifying too- by their bodies, marks on their bodies. So we have our ways of helping people and this way you can determine ways of helping people by knowing what they are suffering from- cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure, heart problems. We do have our own instruments. So we are able to do that, but it comes with training, quite a number of years of training, I would say it is even longer than the medical professions training. We do have our methods of operating; we have a way of leaving no scars. For us it is something that needs to be learned over a long period of time.
Yvette: I have kept you for a while now. Is there anything you would like to close with, something that you think needs to be said?
Charles: People need to begin understanding that nature needs to be respected. It’s very important that anything that is taken from nature needs to be put back. Otherwise it’s not going to last and our ancestors prophesized that. We can see what they were talking about in the 70’s, we can see that today. The society needs to begin to respect nature, how to use the resources more effectively, there is a lot of wastage, too much wastage. I have friends that are from Germany. The German people are living in their own land so they have more respect for their land. So they utilize their resources more effectively. When they came over, one of the things they told me was that everything over here seemed artificial, everything around here seems temporary. You look at the building and they look like they are temporary. So the society comes here thinking that way, they know this isn’t their land, they know that they are trespassing, they know that they owe a lot to Turtle Island. They have taken advantage of the resources that exist, to the point where they have become a superpower, the resources within Turtle Island have made this society the superpower it is. Their atomic bombs, their war armaments, to be able to control the world, those resources are from Turtle Island. Also they owe a lot to Turtle Island. To the people that will continue to live on Turtle Island, 500, 600, 700 years, they owe a lot because the destruction that has taken place so far is immense, its immeasurable, you can’t measure the destruction. You can’t measure the effects it has had on the inhabitants, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, you can’t measure it, it’s very destructive. That is basically in the way that society has to think. We deal with things like racism for example, and all the time society doesn’t understand why they are racist themselves, there is no need for them to be racist. It is something that is intergenerational from there forefathers. Their forefathers came here with a point of view they were looking for the American dream, they were looking for wealth, they were looking for prosperity, and it didn’t matter how they got it. They pillaged and raped to get it, and it caused a lot of destruction. As a result the society today has this guilt and they don’t realize that they have it, so they discriminate against dark skinned people. The society has to be educated too. They have to stop being in denial and that is what seems to happen, you can see the subtle racism vividly, but when you tell them that they are racist, they deny it. So there has to be a lot of education going on. So, we are prepared to sit down and talk with people, we always have been, our people are always willing to share this land, that’s the way they are naturally, they have been taken advantage of. The damaged that has been cause can never be measured. There is no reason for Indians to continue to live on reservations in poverty, in despair, suffering from depression and anxiety. There is no need for them to be there at all. Some of us make it out of there- the prison, the concentration camp. We find our freedom by being able to balance the values of ancestors with modern day society. That is what it is, an everyday walk of life. That is what it is, so we can function any place. I don’t know what else I can say.
Yvette: Thank You.
27 January
2005
Interview with Arne Dietrich: Altered States of Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.
E-mail: arne.dietrich@aub.edu.lb
Allen: You talk about these altered states of consciousness, that they share this common neuro-mechanism, the transient decrease in the prefrontal cortex or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Can you briefly describe the transient hypofrontality hypothesis for our readers?
Dietrich: The idea that sprung up to it literally is what we call in sports - like for instance when you climb a mountain and you get high enough at an oxygen depth zone where breathing becomes more and more heavy, you sort of peel the layers of consciousness, like you peel an onion, every few 100 meters or yards, you go up you peel a layer of consciousness and a layer of cognitive thinking that you lose and become reduced to your basic core. And I had this idea that when you build a hierarchy of the most sophisticated cognitive functions and most sophisticated emotional functions, you essentially peel off the ones that you can afford to lose, you will lose those first. Those are main the functions and abilities that are ascribed to the prefrontal cortex. That’s when the idea hit me that when you have an altered state of consciousness, it should affect the highest layer of consciousness and that layer is produced in the prefrontal cortex. As you go on and on and on. For instance I give you the example in running, but you can also do it mediation, and hypnosis and you can also do it with drugs. The deeper you go into the altered state of consciousness the more you lose those higher cognitive functions. Also, I think it hit me that one of the things people misunderstand about altered states of consciousness, they think that you reach a higher state of consciousness, which I do not think happens at all. All altered states of consciousness are reduced levels of consciousness as you peel off the layer. In mediation, I believe the same is true. Although meditators will dispute with me on this. But, I don’t believe that you reach a higher plane of consciousness at all. The highest plane of consciousness that we humans can reach is our default consciousness, it is the one that you have and I have right now, anything altered from there is a reduction and not an increase in any way. That peeling of layers gave rise to the idea, and when you connect those two, the hierarchy of cognitive and emotional functions and the brain, you peel off clearly from the dorsal axial prefrontal cortex, that makes the most sense, and that’s what I built the entire theory of the transient hypofrontality on, that when you enter an altered state, you have to have as a requirement to enter an altered state a reduction of neuro activity in the prefrontal cortex, a hypofrontality.
Allen: Tell me about how you came to be where you are today and how you became interested in altered states of consciousness.
Dietrich: You always are interested in consciousness when you study psychology. When you study neuroscience, it’s part of it, as being a behavioral neuroscientist or cognitive neuroscientist. You are a clinician in psychology?
Allen: Yes
Dietrich: For me this is the most essential problem of neuroscience. Ultimately some people gravitate to it and others do not, I do. I come from it probably because I spend a lot of time in altered states and question it, mainly because I am an endurance athlete. I run a lot and I bike a lot and I swim a lot and whenever you do these activities for a long periods of time, you become clearly in an altered state of consciousness. Some people dispute this, but then I experience this almost every other day and I think that is why I become interested from that point of view-which is quite unusual. I also do some other things that produce altered states of consciousness, particularly mediation. Although that activity is fairly recent, just in the past few years. Let’s say I’ve been trying to mediate but not too successfully. I enjoy it and it calms me down. All the other altered states of consciousness I am interested in more of a scientific point of view rather than an experiential point of view. Hypnosis is a good example, I cannot be hypnotized. I am not one of those hypnotizable people. But, of course I am interested in it, because I am into trying to understand altered states of consciousness. It is actually not my training. I started in graduate school working with rats and it is very doubtful that they have altered states of consciousness. (Laughs)
Allen: You talk about these altered states of consciousness, that they share this common neuro-mechanism, the transient decrease in the prefrontal cortex or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Can you briefly describe the transient hypofrontality hypothesis for our readers?
Dietrich: The idea that sprung up to it literally is what we call in sports - like for instance when you climb a mountain and you get high enough at an oxygen depth zone where breathing becomes more and more heavy, you sort of peel the layers of consciousness, like you peel an onion, every few 100 meters or yards, you go up you peel a layer of consciousness and a layer of cognitive thinking that you lose and become reduced to your basic core. And I had this idea that when you build a hierarchy of the most sophisticated cognitive functions and most sophisticated emotional functions, you essentially peel off the ones that you can afford to lose, you will lose those first. Those are main the functions and abilities that are ascribed to the prefrontal cortex. That’s when the idea hit me that when you have an altered state of consciousness, it should affect the highest layer of consciousness and that layer is produced in the prefrontal cortex. As you go on and on and on. For instance I give you the example in running, but you can also do it mediation, and hypnosis and you can also do it with drugs. The deeper you go into the altered state of consciousness the more you lose those higher cognitive functions. Also, I think it hit me that one of the things people misunderstand about altered states of consciousness, they think that you reach a higher state of consciousness, which I do not think happens at all. All altered states of consciousness are reduced levels of consciousness as you peel off the layer. In mediation, I believe the same is true. Although meditators will dispute with me on this. But, I don’t believe that you reach a higher plane of consciousness at all. The highest plane of consciousness that we humans can reach is our default consciousness, it is the one that you have and I have right now, anything altered from there is a reduction and not an increase in any way. That peeling of layers gave rise to the idea, and when you connect those two, the hierarchy of cognitive and emotional functions and the brain, you peel off clearly from the dorsal axial prefrontal cortex, that makes the most sense, and that’s what I built the entire theory of the transient hypofrontality on, that when you enter an altered state, you have to have as a requirement to enter an altered state a reduction of neuro activity in the prefrontal cortex, a hypofrontality.
Allen: Given this debate of a reduction of consciousness or a higher consciousness, what are the advantages being in an altered state?
Dietrich: I’ll give a few. Again I think the easiest way is to do it with mediation or with exercise. Both these altered states do it too, as well as hypnosis and drugs. The result is that you relax and you have less stress and less anxiety. The reason why that occurs in my opinion is that many of our stressors and anxiety and even depression and sorrows and worries come from the fact that our prefrontal cortex is able to comprehend some very sophisticated dangers. For instance as an example if the stock market crashes tomorrow I’m going to get worried about what will happen to my retirement account. The reason why my dog is not bothered by it is because she doesn’t understand because she doesn’t have a prefrontal cortex to understand it. So you can only be afraid of something that you understand, and if there is something temporally removed, that means it happens 20 years down the line, for instance the threat of nuclear war or the threat of smoking cigarettes, this is a danger that isn’t as blatant, or in your face like a snake, it is several levels of understanding and commission removed, but it is still a very real threat to your life. So is the threat of the crash market as well as eating McDonald’s junk food. So, one of the real advantages of an altered state is that you shut down the very neuro-structure that has the computational ability to comprehend such sophisticated dangers. With that for instance you can also shut down some of the pathological triggers that make anxieties for instance in obsessive compulsive disorder- that is clearly related to the prefrontal cortex. You could use this sort of thing as a therapy as general relaxation of making life less stressful, less anxious, less anxiety provoking. One clear advantage of an altered state of consciousness is being clearly aware of absolutely everything around you is not always an advantage. The fact that throughout human history humans have always looked at and used ways to alter consciousness is a powerful indicator that there are some beneficial effects, just experientially being in a reduced state of consciousness.
Allen: Are there limits to how long a person can sustain the down regulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?
Dietrich: I can not answer this empirically. I don’t think there is any evidence to suggest one way or the other. It would be my hunch to say, yes I think so. In the sense that you can have of course a very mild prefrontal damage and you can have that for the rest of your life. You would just function at a lower level of consciousness for the rest of your life. That is, I think, the hierarchy I was trying to build, all that happens when you peel off a layer, you just function on the next highest layer and of course you can do that permanently, and you will never be able to understand the consequences of when the stock market crashes, but I don’t see any reason why you still couldn’t function for the rest of your life like that. For instance, if you have a car accident and you have permanent frontal damage, that is an altered state of consciousness, not altered in the sense of what we think of as an altered state of consciousness, but for that person it is still altered and it is altered permanently.
Allen: What are your views on role of emotion and neurological processing as they relate to altered states of consciousness?
Dietrich: I don’t view emotion as anything different from cognition from a neurological point of view. Emotions to me are no more than neurological computations. Those neurocomputations give rise to a certain content of consciousness. For instance, you are aware of Demasio’s ideas about that playing a critical role in decision making, just as cognition does and whenever you alter consciousness, one of the first things that you also alter are higher levels of emotions that we can experience. The medial prefrontal cortex produces some pretty sophisticated emotions and picks up social cues that are also altered. That process contributes quite significantly to having an altered state of consciousness. I give you an example that I give my students all of the time: if you are madly in love with somebody, would you consider that an altered state of consciousness? If you are, and I am sure you have, as everyone else on this planet, when you are madly in love you cannot think of anything else.
Allen: Right.
Dietrich: If that is not an altered state of consciousness, I don’t know what is. So, emotional processes are absolutely critical at least as much as cognitive processes and perceptual processes.
Allen: I’d like to use a clinical example here. There is some evidence that feeling that you know something is almost as important as objectively knowing it. Like for instance a person with obsessive compulsive disorder objectively knows that she has checked the door 20 times, but she doesn’t feel like she has done it. Then a person who has schizophrenia can objectively can confirm that the hallucinations he experiences are not real, however he feels that they are real. Can you explain how important feeling that knowing that something is real is processed neurologically?
Dietrich: Well, the emotional is a feeling that you have knowledge - as we call it intuition. Intuition is a sensation, you have knowledge without effortful reasoning, you just know something and that is what we call intuition. And it is based on emotional processes, which of course evaluate the salience of an environmental stimulus. These processes are bottom-up processes. That means they come from the sensory system and are evaluated through a number of different neurostructures. For a person with OCD, particularly their prefrontal needs, are in the frontal cortex and they do their business completely under the conscious radar screen. That means they compute information and they bring it up to consciousness, bring up to a global workspace, and then you have this idea, this sensation, you have this feeling that you know this but you have made no effort at coming to that conclusion. If you involve consciousness, it is an entirely different process. It gives rise to and comes to the sensory system but then it is processed by chronicle structures particularly in temporal and frontal cortex. These then give rise to the ability to form conceptualizations of what happened and, of course, knowledge that you have done something. These two can collide, essentially the information takes two different routes, whether it is an emotional computation or cognitive computation, and they collide in sort of a global workspace in the dorsal axial prefrontal cortex, in the working memory buffer so that you have both, you have both, you have the sensation and the knowledge. One comes with effort and one comes without effort about the same thing. One thing is that you think, you feel like you closed the door and the other is that you are not sure whether you have really done it, so you keep checking. And to trust one or the other can be very tricky because both can be wrong and both computations are littered and riddled with computations that are false. In essence the reason why these two different kinds of knowledge occur, one you come about by effort and the other you do not. It is simply because we have two entirely different set of brain structures who compute different things for different reasons and then make both of their end product available for consideration in the global workspace. For instance, if you were to have an altered state of consciousness, again, you mainly effect one process and not the other. The one that you consciously make an effort to reason something out, that I consciously know that I went and closed that door 20 times and you know it. If you started an altered state of consciousness that is the first layer that you would peel, you would not peel the one that comes popping up from the emotions. You would peel it sooner or later, also depending on how deep the altered state is, you get to that level too. But the cognitive level, the level of consciously knowing would be peeled first, and if you enter an altered state of consciousness, you will effect one process more than the other. I think that the beauty of this hierarchy of knowledge of altered state of consciousness, the peeling of the onion, if you so will.
Allen: The anterior cingulate has also been implicated in altered states of consciousness. Have you investigated that as well? Have you any thoughts on that?
Dietrich: Yes of course. I have read the literature on it, but have left it out of my paper for simplicity sake. One of the reasons was that the paper you refer to is a very ambitious paper, and I had to argue with my reviewers to get it through because I already combined six altered states of consciousness into one big neuro mechanism. It was very difficult to swallow for many people. So, I didn’t want to make it anymore complicated, so I left the cingulate cortex out. The cingulate cortex, it appears, is mainly involved in the detection of the violation of what you think you know. It is something unusual, something that violates your common sense, your belief or expectation. For instance if there are certain rules that things should occur and all of a sudden some stimulus occurs and doesn’t follow the rules, the cingulate cortex usually shows quite a bit of activity in CAT scans and MRI scans when you have an experienced an unexpected event. Also, when you enter an altered state of consciousness, you may not be aware and not process that this violated some rule because you have been down regulated so the cingulate cortex may not come into play. So, it would be ultimately peeled off, but yet again because it is the cingulate cortex from a neurohierarchy of structures, this is a structure much lower in the hierarchy, and therefore would be peeled off only if you delve deep down in your level of mediation or whatever you are after.
Allen: Are there any other states of consciousness that you looked at but that you didn’t include in your article. Or intentional processes that you believe essentially do the same thing as what we have talked about before?
Dietrich: Yes and Yes on both. The first one, I looked at all others to see if there was some global-truly encompassing and comprehensive mechanism that I was after and of course I’m biased because I looked at everything through my theory. So my opinion is quite a biased one, but if you look at others. They will not do anything else other than that, they will whirl around and sooner or later, they will down regulate their frontal cortexes, same thing if you swim too long or run too long. They use motion, Voodoo dancing is the same, you become into sort of rhythmic activity that is so strenuous that in that particular case you have to have a shifting of the very fixed amount of metabolic resources in the neurostructure that maintain emotion, like in the cerebellum, nuclei, thalamus, and the brain stem, and so on and so on. So, if you don’t have much juice left in the frontal cortex, the first thing that you can possibly down regulate is the frontal cortex, and that gives you the same sensations that you would get if you, for instance, enter a drug state or if you enter some other altered state. The reason why all these altered states are so different is because the frontal cortex is such an integrated structure, and depending on the substructures or neurocircuits that are connected to other parts of the brain, that you down regulate, you have logical distinction between different altered states. All of them share in common, that it effects somehow on a global scale the frontal cortex. I had to be very careful in formulating that because we don’t know enough yet about different areas in the frontal cortex and how altered states affect them. So this truly at a state that you call it no more than a hypothesis, it is definitely not a theory, so that has to be worked on considerably more. The only ways we can do it are to over the next 20, 30, 40 years, get better brain scanners, with better resolution to hunt down locations.
Allen: I wanted to ask you about your neuropsychology and creativity research. Is there anything else to say about your article on altered states of consciousness?
Dietrich: I think you asked really important questions. The only thing that I would add is when you describe altered states as being all compacted into one neat little neuromechanism like in the way that I have done, you always expose yourself to danger. I think the most important thing on this hypothesis is that people start to get at it empirically, and this is the most critical message that I have for everyone. I can only do so much. This hypothesis itself is a lifetime of work if you want to put all altered states together and substantiate them empirically. The more that get into it and see what part of that hypothesis works and what part of that hypothesis does not work, it’s the only hypothesis of its kind- it’s the only theory of it’s kind. It is also pretty much out on a limb scientifically speaking. It’s certainly a hypothesis that as such would not stand, it’s just simply too speculative. I think that the more people that we get into this area because it still has the reputation of being somewhat quacky. That is the only thing that I would add to that particular paper.
Dietrich: My creativity paper is completely a different ball of wax.
Allen: Can you briefly describe the research you are doing on creativity and neuropsychology?
Dietrich: I have written this particular paper that comes out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, whenever it comes out, I submitted it over a year and a half ago. It apparently takes a great deal of time. That paper does the same thing for creativity that I think I have done for other states of altered consciousness.
Allen: Wow
Dietrich: I proposed a completely new mechanism that reorganizes the vast majority of creativity research in the last century. I had a little idea of how to do that and that sparked the idea of the paper. Creativity can actually be the result of four separate mechanisms. I delineated them and gave an example of how that could possibly happen, mainly integrating three different areas that so far had absolutely no contact: creativity research, neuroscience and cognitive science. I think creativity research had been in complete isolation, and they had not kept up with the last 20 years of neuroscience and the last 30 years of cognitive science and cognitive psychology. In the last 20 years there has been nothing done of any significance within creativity and in especially in relation to the brain. Two years ago, I typed creativity and cortex into Medline and PsycINFO, and I got eleven results.
Allen: Wow
Dietrich: Essentially no neuroscientists have done anything in creativity research, and creativity researchers are completely illiterate when it comes to the brain. So, I sort of put them together a little bit, hoping that creativity research will get some respect from neuroscientists, to sort of kick creativity researchers a bit in the ass to get going and understand the brain mechanisms, for without them you can forget about writing about anything in human behavior anymore. I have been engaged in some other empirical work as well. For instance, I have people exercise on the treadmill and let them solve problems that depend on the frontal cortical functions. And they perform them while they are running, and they all cannot do it. I have also asked them while they are running to perform intelligence tests. I’ve given them the Wechsler test, I’ve given them the brief Kaufman. I’ve projected them on big screens so that they can solve them while they are running. They have no problem with intelligence tests but as soon as there is a frontal component into it they fail.
Allen: Wow
Dietrich: That is my idea of peeling off the first layer, or the frontal cortex. But, I am sure if I ran them for four hours they couldn’t do anything anymore - that is what I mean by peeling off layers, they come one after another. I have also done that with creativity research, and it turns out that certain creativity problems are solved easier when the frontal cortex is down regulated, and some creativity problems cannot be solved at all if the frontal cortex is down regulated. So that gave me the idea, that for some creative work you need the frontal cortex and for others you do not. That is where my starting point first was, and those papers are actually quite involved, and I hope that you read them and spread them.
Allen: Yes. I am certainly impressed with the work you have done and think you are doing some ground breaking stuff.
Dietrich: Thanks
Allen: That is all the questions that I have for you.
Dietrich: Tell me about that website that you putting this on, that web site sounds quite interesting.
Allen: Essentially our goal is to look at traditional healing practices that have been practiced throughout time and throughout the world. They are often developed independently in various areas across the world. Our area that we are most interested in is sweat therapy - therapy in saunas compared to therapy in a normal office setting. We’ve started doing empirical tests with this, and we also saw all over the world, there were different forms of group sweating practices such as here in America, there is the Native American Sweat Lodge, and then the Russian Bania and the Schivitz and so on and so on.
Dietrich: Interesting. You know of course how I would approach this knowing the frontality shift that occurs. Once you start sweating and putting that sort of stress on, there are physiological shifts in the brain that are need to maintain certain other functions. Homeostasis becomes more important with that sort of stress, so you need to peel the first layer. When you sweat, you cannot solve high level problems, you have to at very first down regulate parts of the brain that you can afford to down regulate, that you don’t need for bare survival, and of course, the first one that you can is the frontal cortex. So, I would think again the sweating practice as compared to sitting in an office increases the chances that person has a slight altered state, and you have a higher chance that this person has neuro-shifts away from the frontal cortex - that is what I would say.
Allen: What we have found is that people are more likely to self-disclose.
Dietrich: That is inhibition.
Allen: Yeah.
Dietrich: You can see that already. You can see that with people with frontal lobe damage, it’s inhibition. You see that in runners too, runners after they run for 20 miles, we are all a little bit more uninhibited, we are feeling a little more loose, you change in front of a car you know and things that you would not do if you hadn’t run, you know?
Allen: Yeah.
Dietrich: Self disclosure is one of those other things too. Frontal lobe damaged patients have no problems with self-disclosure, they will tell the most embarrassing things straight to your face.
Allen: That’s true. As far as the evolution of the human brain, where do you think we are headed? You are certainly addressing some ground breaking creativity and altered states about us being able to use our full consciousness, per say. What are some of your ideas about that?
Dietrich: Where we are heading with our brain evolution?
A: Yeah.
Dietrich: Nowhere unfortunately. We as a species have soft evolution, what biologist will call a period of extremely weak selection because of course in the human race, human species, the weak don’t die. The weak are the ones that are doing the best at reproducing, so of course we have no more of a selection process. We have softened evolution, and we have no more brain evolution and in that way we are not headed anywhere. In that sense, I think that my idea about a higher level of consciousness would be if we had, for instance, a second working memory buffer and instead of juggling only seven plus or minus two items, we could juggle fifteen plus or minus four items that would give us, for instance in creativity, a huge difference in the computation that you can handle. That would of course give you much more creative ideas, and so I think that is much more an idea that I think of as a higher state of consciousness rather than, for instance, meditation.
Allen: Great. I really appreciated this.
Dietrich: Your welcome.
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