This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. Read Part 1 here.
In part two of my interview with Daniela Schiller, Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and Director of the Schiller Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience, we discuss how current neuroscience research is confirming many of the working hypotheses of psychotherapy and the role of narrative in creating memories.
Dale Kushner: There has been a lot of research about how our brains are wired for narrative.1 Your research,2 which we began discussing in Part 1, has to do with contextualizing a memory, that when a memory is contextualized that somehow mitigates the traumatic effects. How would you explain that?
Daniela Schiller: Yes. I think it’s important to emphasize that many of the insights I'm talking about are widely known and used in psychotherapy and psychological research. We've known for many decades that memories are not accurate, that there can be false memories, that they can be affected. And also that you need to create a narrative. Many therapy forms are about creating a narrative around memories because traumatic memories are fragmented.
In a way, neuroscience research is catching up or even occurring in parallel. When you interpret the neurobiological or neuroscientific findings, you see that, oh, it comes to the same conclusion as the therapists. Neuroscience brings a mechanism, whereas, for psychologists and psychiatrists, the therapy has been developed through trial and error or through hypothesis. It brings structure and constraints. But if there's a mechanism, together they can kind of constrain each other. Now there's a mechanism, now we know exactly what to target in a more well-defined treatment. The neuroscience resonates with many observations in psychology. It's........