Learning
and Personality Theory
from a new prospective.
Early in the 90's, I learned to do a healing process that involves tapping on acupressure points. While using it with one of my patients, she felt a tickle under her nose. Upon inquiry, I found that her subconscious had caused a tickle on one of her acupressure points. This led me to find out that the subconscious could heal from the inside. This theory is based upon a paper I presented a paper to the International Society for the Study of Chaos in Biology Sciences and Psychology in 1974. In this paper, I explained a emerging treatment, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, in terms of Walter Freeman's notions on self-organized chaos. (Click to download this EMDR paper). This theory appear to be very consistent with B. F. Skinner's understanding of behavior and how it works, and even with the ideas offered in his book on language, Verbal Behavior.
I worked
with many multiple personality disordered patients and gradually learned
to use this theory to establish rapport with all personalities in a
patient This made treatment very safe and respectful. 
The
figure shows a paradigm that has good validity with all of my patients.
The Active experience is learned neural structure that operates on all
internal and external sensory input, the current behavior, and learned
processes like, composing and editing of language, and all memories
that are elicited into the active expedience by the content and emotions
in the active experience. This recurrent process is what generates our
ongoing overt and covert behavior. A couple of interesting things about
this theory is that 1. it eliminates extinction as a brain process and
conceptualizes all change as learning and, 2. classical conditioning
becomes a special case of this theory since the UCS interferes with
the normal cognitive process. It is probably the cognitive process that
is involved in operant learning that facilitates higher order learning
or the power of discriminative stimuli.
It turns out that this learning theory describes the processes that
appear to operate on every memory driven process in the brain and body,
namely, all behavior, muscle activity, organ activity, brain functions,
etc. It explains other phenomena such as the etiology of the personality
and subconscious, and other stuff such as hypnosis, amnisic and dissociative
parts, repression, sensory intrusions, learned symptoms, the healing
process, safe healing processes, therapy, etc.
So if you want to
find out more about the personality from a learning theory point of
view, learn about the extremes of human behavior, and stimulate your
ideas about explaining human behavior with learning theory, click to
go to a more detailed history, theory,
or description of this process. If you
want to experience by your subconscious, then take the free Process
Healing course.
(Rev. 11-30-01)
Copyright
© 1997-2002 Garry A. Flint, Ph.D. All
Rights Reserved.