Interaction of conscious and unconscious behavioral control

Abstract

Human behavior is essentially driven by the unconscious. The site of the unconscious is the limbic system. The limbic centers, above all amygdala and hippocampus, evaluate everything our brain and body do and experience according to the criteria “positive" or “pleasant" and therefore to repeat, or “negative" or “painful" and therefore to avoid, and store these results in the emotional experiential memory. Limbic centers are incapable of fast and detailed recognition of complex situations. For that reason, the conscious cognitive cortex is activated whenever complex cognition and planning of actions in novel situations are required. The cognitive cortex only makes “suggestions" and gives “advices" but does not make decisions on its own. From a neurobiological perspective, psychic conflicts arise through dysfunctional “connections" within neuronal networks in limbic centers due to abnormal emotional conditioning or traumatic experience. As a consequence, psychotherapy could be effective in essentially three ways:

(1) by strengthening the inhibitory influence of the cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex on abnormal states in the amygdala and restitute the conscious control of such drives;

(2) by repairing the misconnected limbic networks; and

(3) by inducing the formation of new networks in limbic centers on the basis of positive experience; these new networks could “encapsulate" the negative networks and attain their own access to the centers of action control. Therapy, thus, would consist in the induction of such compensatory networks