tele & mirror neurons

Wed Oct 11 08:55:01 CDT 2006

yes, a wonderful read and guide for us all.  She is quite proud of it  
and knows it will be a valuable resource to generations of  
psychodramatists.

Kate
On Oct 11, 2006, at 8:48 AM, edwschreiber at earthlink.net wrote:

> Thanks Adam for this note.
>
> What makes Moreno's genius realized - is Zerka (and all of us).
> Thanks for mentioning her book.
>
> The book is simply that:  her genius.
>
> The Quintessential Zerka:  Writings by Zerka Toeman Moreno
> on Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy.
>
> It is a comrehensive text book of the whole method, history,  
> application
> and philosophy.
>
> Of course I have a strong bias!
>
> Ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Adam Blatner <adam at blatner.com>
>> Sent: Oct 10, 2006 10:38 PM
>> To: list at grouptalkweb.org
>> Cc: edwhug at hotmail.com
>> Subject: tele & mirror neurons
>>
>> About that article on social cohesion and mirror neurons.
>>
>> Yes! I've been reading Zerka's paper on Tele (2000) in her book,  
>> and it has me thinking about other related topics, such as  
>> performance and its dynamics, etc. I'm thinking there's a category  
>> that includes all these dynamics--perhaps we might call it  
>> "resonance"-- deals with group cohesion due not just tele in the  
>> more personal psyche-tele sense, but also the development of tele  
>> in broader ways through group task, singing, dancing. Body energy  
>> dynamics, healing, there are a lot of possibilities when one  
>> considers the power of mind and social mind as a dimension within  
>> which we operate.
>>      It's fun to re-encounter tele all over again. In tele and  
>> performance, what goes on is the thick process of rapid feedback  
>> and development of tone based on a myriad of subtle cues. Perhaps  
>> even subtle pheromones get generated.  The point is that there is  
>> a building of of spontaneity or cooling-down depending on  
>> reciprocated feedback and cues, or the lack of such feedback.
>>        Moreno certainly was a genius for bringing in the mind- 
>> field and its rich complexities, to stretch the more  
>> reductionistic behaviorism and the slightly more complex but still  
>> fairly individualistic psychoanalysis and other psychological  
>> world-views up to that time.
>>       What makes certain persons geniuses may not require that  
>> they be perfect in every role, but that in a few roles, they  
>> generate ideas or methods that continue to be heuristic, the word  
>> suggesting not mere usefulness, but a positive power to generate  
>> ever-new hypotheses, method, further theoretical ideas, and so forth.
>>        Warmly, Adam
>>  ----- Original Message -----
>>  From: HV Psychodrama
>>  To: grouptalk
>>  Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 6:36 PM
>>  Subject: essay from today's NY TImes
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>    This is for those who couldn't get to the article thru the link  
>> I sent this morning.
>>
>>  Mental Health & Behavior
>>
>>  Essay
>>  Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing
>>  By DANIEL GOLEMAN
>>  Published: October 10, 2006
>>  A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more.  
>> Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the  
>> other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite  
>> dire prognoses to the contrary.
>>
>>  Skip to next paragraph
>>  Enlarge This Image
>>
>>  Ward Schumaker
>>
>>  My friend was the sort of college professor students remember  
>> fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest  
>> in them - in their studies, their progress through life, their  
>> fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves  
>> among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a  
>> steady stream of visitors to their home.
>>
>>  Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many  
>> ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love  
>> him.
>>
>>  Research on the link between relationships and physical health  
>> has established that people with rich personal networks - who are  
>> married, have close family and friends, are active in social and  
>> religious groups - recover more quickly from disease and live  
>> longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the  
>> study of how people's brains entrain as they interact, adds a  
>> missing piece to that data.
>>
>>  The most significant finding was the discovery of "mirror  
>> neurons," a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate  
>> like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow,  
>> movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and  
>> replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our  
>> brain the same areas active in the other person.
>>
>>  Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional  
>> contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of  
>> another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain  
>> link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research  
>> finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of  
>> people's posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In  
>> short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal  
>> orchestration of shifts in physiology.
>>
>>  Such coordination of emotions, cardiovascular reactions or brain  
>> states between two people has been studied in mothers with their  
>> infants, marital partners arguing and even among people in  
>> meetings. Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa  
>> G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the  
>> infelicitous term "a mutually regulating psychobiological unit" to  
>> describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected  
>> circuit. To the degree that this occurs, Dr. Diamond and Dr.  
>> Aspinwall argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one  
>> person to influence that of the other.
>>
>>  John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social  
>> Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, makes a parallel  
>> proposal: the emotional status of our main relationships has a  
>> significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and  
>> neuroendocrine activity. This radically expands the scope of  
>> biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain  
>> to looking at the interplay between two at a time. In short, my  
>> hostility bumps up your blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers  
>> mine. Potentially, we are each other's biological enemies or allies.
>>
>>  Even remotely suggesting health benefits from these  
>> interconnections will, no doubt, raise hackles in medical circles.  
>> No one can claim solid data showing a medically significant effect  
>> from the intermingling of physiologies.
>>
>>  At the same time, there is now no doubt that this same  
>> connectivity can offer a biologically grounded emotional solace.  
>> Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional  
>> suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance  
>> imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women  
>> endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that  
>> incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A.  
>> Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a  
>> stranger held the subject's hand as she waited, she found little  
>> relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm,  
>> but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of  
>> emotional rescue.
>>
>>  But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know,  
>> loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties  
>> in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of  
>> the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical  
>> pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A.  
>> (writing in a chapter in "Social Neuroscience: People Thinking  
>> About People," M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain's  
>> pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social  
>> banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human  
>> prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that  
>> describe a "broken heart" from rejection borrow the lexicon of  
>> physical hurt.
>>
>>  So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it  
>> may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of  
>> the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at  
>> Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal  
>> connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient's family  
>> and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know  
>> what to say.
>>
>>  My friend has reached that point where doctors see nothing else  
>> to try. On my last visit, he and his wife told me that he was  
>> starting hospice care.
>>
>>  One challenge, he told me, will be channeling the river of people  
>> who want to visit into the narrow range of hours in a week when he  
>> still has the energy to engage them.
>>
>>  As he said this, I felt myself tearing up, and responded: "You  
>> know, at least it's better to have this problem. So many people go  
>> through this all alone."
>>
>>  He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then he answered softly,  
>> "You're right."
>>
>>  Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New  
>> Science of Human Relationships."
>>
>>  hvpi.net
>>
>>
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Kate Hudgins, Ph.D., TEP

Clinical Psychologist
Director of Training
Therapeutic Spiral International, LLC
ww.therapeuticspiral.org
drkatetsi at mac.com

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