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In working with various meditation techniques for the sake of anger management, impulse control, anxiety management and what-have-you, I discovered that simple attentiveness to body sensations would reliably speed up the process of autonomic nervous system function (in the parasympathetic side of the sympathetic-parasympathetic equation). I think the guy who originally either discovered or just wrote about this was Kabat-Zinn, and he called it "mindfulness meditation." I call it the "drop drill" (probably because I had to do -that- in school when I was a kid). In any event, MM or DD appears to displace affective (emotional and body sensation) "white noise" so sufficiently that it also reduces the impulse to think in symbolic language to mask off the uncomfortable emotions. There's an excellent description of the 30-second (or so) process on page 280 in Paine-Gernee & Hunt's Emotional Healing: A Program for Emotional Sobriety, but essentially, I'm just talking about a very quick, focus of consciousness on a body inventory that can easily be done by nonpathological and neurotic-level people. One does not need to learn a bunch of "Eastern religious hocus-pocus" to do this. Borderline-level patients can be taught to do it, usually via repeated experience with Benson's "relaxation response" or Perls' "guided meditation." Psychotic-level patients have a very hard time with it, unless they are effectively brought up to the borderline level with medications.

"I don't think you can say how much alcohol is addictive, there is a predisposition to it." Yup. Definite nature -and- nurture. Several genes associated with a predisposition have been located, and the pharma boys (and girls) are working on specific agonists or antagonists to those genetic expressions. Steve Stahl is a good source on this. But the behavior (as well as the chemical excitotoxicity) of alcoholism -also- play a major role in maintaining the addiction. Michael Bozarth has summed all this up in pretty readable detail. He thinks all addictions work this way, and so far, everything I have seen at the microbiological, as well as behavioral, level supports Bozarth's views. Are you hip to the "cycle of addiction?"

"Certainly the dopaminic receptors within the limbic system play an important role. Is it possible to know the numbers of these receptors in a person?" Not in absolute terms. A receptor is nothing more than a big amine molecule on the surface of one end of a neuron or the other. Too small to count, BUT... we can tell when there are more or less of them in specific locales by watching fMRI scans and/or (to some extent) by how the person responds to various specific stimulations. I expect Cozzolino, LeDoux, Stahl, and maybe Panksepp or Watt would have something more definitive to say about this. "And can this number be altered?" Evidently, yes. And by a variety of interventions that run the gamut from repetitious pharmacological all the way to repetitious behavioral. We do it all the time. H**l, I'm doing it by posting on this forum. (It's -true-.)

I ran into this one a couple of years ago. Seigel, Daniel: Toward an interpersonal neurobiology of the developing mind: Attachment relationships, “mindsight,” and neural integration, in Infant Mental Health Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1 & 2, 2001. "The mind develops at the interface between human relationships and the unfolding structure and function of the brain. Recent discoveries... [show] how the brain gives rise to mental processes and is directly shaped [physiologically] by interpersonal experiences." I think you can get it as a free .pdf online. 24 pages long on the copy I have. Worth the effort if you're really into this.

If you want to get waaaaaay down into how babies communicate (which appears to be driven by their need to survive), dig into Margaret Mahler (from the '50s I think) to get grounded, then look at Daniel Stern and Alan Schore, two millennial-era researchers who have really drilled down into this topic. One of the things one has to keep in mind is that human infants are born with incomplete brains, compared to those of adults. They cannot process with symbolic language (yet), but, boy does their need to get fed, held, burped, and changed motivate them to figure out to communicate in a hurry. Their neuronal stacks actually grow in response to successful "communications" with their caregivers. Unfortunately, however, their neuronal stacks can also grow "oddly" if their caregivers confuse them with inappropriate, negative or inconsistent responses. See Bruce Perry on "Romanian babies" and all the rest of the wretched stuff that can happen when the feedback loop between Ma and Junior is poorly established. Ta.

Nature vs. Nurture. Meds vs. Processing Modifications. Psychiatry vs. Psychology. Arguments for one or the other since the '50s that I know of. Millennial era psych school PoV is typically, "Address biogentic predispositions and acute emotional problems with meds. Address social impacts and distorted thinking processes with psychotherapy." Post-millennial thinking (see the "Compact Clinicals" series of brief books on empirically verified combo strategies for what to do for this or that diagnosis) is pretty much, 1) Stabilize with meds to the point the pt. can function well enough to participate in psychotherapy, 2) earn the pt's trust and develop a therapeutic partnership, 3) determine (or at least hypothesize) the reasons why the pt. thinks as he does, 4) get the pt. on board with those reasons, 5) address those reasons with an appropriate combination of emotion-management and cognitive restructuring therapies, 6) teach the pt. enough to manage on his own. In order (though the discrete phases overlap and recycle): Denial > Contemplation > Identification (a.k.a.: Acceptance) > Committment (where the actual therapy takes place) > Relapse Prevention (more or less Prochaska and DiClemente's model). With respect to non-verbal mammals, one has to use non-verbal behavior modification (see Skinner and Bandura, as well as The Dog Whisperer on TV). Because they are far more affected by nature than nurture, animal motivations are vastly less complex than human motivations and can be very quickly analyzed and addressed. Food, stimulus-seeking, dominance vs. submission, stimulus pairings. Psychologists thot this stuff would work well with humans in the '50 and '60s, and "behaviorism" dominated in the psych schools of that era. Cognitive-behavioral strategies expanded the useful aspects of behavior mod in the '70s and '80s (see Beck, Bandura, Ellis, Seligman, Wessler, Young, et al) into the more complex reasoning abilities of the human brain. Since the very late '80s, the predominant direction is "neuropsychology" wherein mapping of brain functions and understanding of neurochemistry guides the specific uses of cognitive-behavioral techniques (see Garrett, Kaszniak, Panksepp, Perry, Pinker, Van der Kolk, Watt, et al).

Ref: the original post... Ever hear an elderly Cantonese-speaking Chinese person (you can still find them in urban "Chinatowns" now and again) speak "pigeon English?" It sounds about like what you used as an example of less gramatically structured "free flow." Perhaps the Chinese who needed to communicate with English speakers were less concerned with proper grammar than they were with getting their message across. Just a thot.

I hate to disabuse anyone, but while this may be true for the originator of the thread here in particular, it appears to be a myth in general. This was the notion behind "thought-stopping" a pseudo-psychotherapeutic technique used 30 and more years ago in early cognitive psychotherapy. Research demonstrated, however, that while thinking of "something else" blocked conscious awareness of whatever it was one was attempting to block very briefly, the processing of the original material actually continued in the background. Today, we use "thought-questioning" rather than thought-stopping to break up the (il)logical feedback looping that fuels obsessional thinking.

The rate at which a mammal becomes addicted to alcohol is affected by numerous variables, but none (it seems) moreso than a genetic expression of greater numbers of dopamine receptors on the receiving ends of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain. People with unusually high concentration of dopamine receptors in this region are known to be better candidates for addiction, not only to alcohol but to all manner of substance and behavioral process addictions. Most alcoholics are likely to be addicts to other substances and behavioral processes, according to Shaffer, H.; LaPlante, D., La Brie, R.; et al: Toward a Syndrome Model of Addiction: Multiple Expressions, Common Etiology; in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 12, 2004. Michael Bozarth seems to be the reigning expert on the neurobiology of all this at this time. See Bozarth, M.: Drug addiction as a psychobiological process, in Warburton, D. (ed.): Addiction controversies, London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990; and Bozarth, M.: Pleasure systems in the brain, in Warburton, D. (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994.

Human behavior. Rationalism & empiricism. Critical thinking.