In 1950 Alan Turing published a paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he detailed a procedure that would come to be known as “The Turing Test,” questioning what would be required to demonstrate that machines could think. “The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer,” Turing wrote.
Since the advent of the modern computer, the metaphor of the human brain as an information processor has taken root across disciplines. Within neuroscience alone, over 9,000 papers have been published on the topic of neural coding within the last decade. Billions of dollars have poured into researching and developing neural networks, predictive coding, and the like.
The metaphor is faulty: Your brain is not a computer. Neither is your mind. The inability of anyone to agree on even foundational definitions of consciousness belies the point that, as complex organisms that evolved over eons, our methods of sense-making supersede any computational analogies or capabilities.
However, I found myself falling into this metaphor when, in 2021, I underwent a new neuroscience therapy called “The Flash Technique.” The therapeutic treatment was developed in 2017 in Berkeley, California by Dr. Phil Manfield, and has been proven in clinical studies to be highly effective for reducing the disturbance associated with traumatic or other distressing memories. It has its roots in EMDR (eye movement desensitization reprogramming therapy,) which was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987 as a treatment for those suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). The major innovation of Flash is that, unlike EMDR, it does not require the patient to consciously engage with the traumatic memory; that enables them to decrease the valence on distressing memories without re-experiencing them.
Prior to my exposure to Flash, I had assumed, like many, that the only way to bring down the emotional valence and recurrence of disturbing memories was to talk them out in the psychoanalytic or cognitive science traditions, and that anxiety and depression were due to chemical imbalances in the brain, best dealt with pharmacologically. When these options did not work for me, my psychiatrist at the time recommended I reach out to a practitioner of the Flash Technique, Dr. Sik Lam Wong, who had seen the new method demonstrated at a conference in 2020 at Harvard University.
The effects of the Flash Technique are as remarkable as the method itself is strange to the uninitiated. Research shows that within relatively few sessions, patients no longer meet the criteria for a host of issues, including anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mild and severe dissociation, depression, PTSD, and more.
The experience itself is difficult to understand, and researchers have yet to develop an explanatory model for why it works so well. A Flash Technique-trained therapist will begin by asking the patient to try to identify a trauma memory that feels connected with their symptom(s). Then, the therapist will ask the patient to identify an image or picture of the distressing memory, along with any negatively held beliefs about it, and to identify where it is physically felt within the body. The therapist then has the patient temporarily put the memory aside, and leads them through a short “protocol:” a series of breathing, tapping, and blinking.
This repeats for a 50 minute session, during which the “picture” becomes more and more difficult to visualize or inhabit as the valence of the memory dissipates. This so-called “processing” of the target memory is accomplished without the client consciously attending to the original disturbing memory. This might seem fantastical, perhaps recalling the memory-erasing procedure central to the plot of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the Flash Technique doesn’t seek to incinerate the past. It’s not as if your memories are gone — it’s that they no longer carry a high emotional valence.
Personally, after even just a first session, memories that had plagued me went down in valence overnight. The metaphor of the brain-as-computer seemed to apply — it made sense to me to explain the Flash Technique as “processing memory,” dumping core beliefs or “corrupted lines of code,” and freeing up memory or “RAM space” in the mind.
However, as tempting as it may be to latch onto readily available technological metaphors to explain this as an information processing feat, it’s critical to remember that the computer analogy is only the newest incarnation within the intellectual history of utilizing the language of technology to explain the brain or mind. Previously, hydraulics, gears and levers, and the telegram, among others, all had their day.
The advances the Flash Technique is making in our understanding of mind, body, and illness will undoubtedly expand what metaphors we find efficacious. While the originators of the Flash Technique did not offer a detailed mechanism of action, they have proposed various theories regarding why the method is effective, including that the patient’s periaqueductal gray (PAG) takes over during the protocol, senses the reminder of the traumatic memory and reflexively triggers the amygdala. It is hypothesized that this PAG works reflexively to assess danger without going through the conscious brain. Recent fMRI data show that for PTSD patients, there is enhanced connectivity from the amygdala to the left hippocampus. As a result, triggering the amygdala may, in turn, activate the left hippocampus, which may then provide a brief access to the traumatic memory. Given the brief access, there is not enough time for the amygdala to go into overactivation. This is repeated many times during blinking in Flash sessions, to allow memory reconsolidation to proceed, in some cases, to completion. As a result, traumatic memories are no longer inhabited or felt as happening in the present moment — they become real memories, that now inhabit the past and are not triggered into a physiological re-experiencing within the present.
“There are many ways to look at the brain. Memory perspective is one way,” says Dr. Wong. “The pathology part of it is more complicated. From the counseling point, there are some reflexive processes in the brain we were not aware of. When we do the Flash Technique — you’re not trying to do anything. But something happened. Why? Because there is something reflexive in the brain we’re tapping into. When we know how the brain works reflexively, we can use that to train your brain to be calmer in the face of a trauma. If you can be calm in the face of trauma, things are no longer traumatic for you.”
Ultimately, we don’t understand how the brain works, where the mind is truly located, nor do we agree on a definitional framework of consciousness. As the philosopher Henri Bergson outlined in his 1896 book “Matter & Memory,” we know our bodies from without, via perceptions, but also from within, by affections. The nature of the brain is simultaneously integrated and composite. An active organ, the brain does not simply represent information — it constructs it. While computers operate by storing, retrieving, and processing symbolic representations via algorithms, “The continuous and heterogeneous multiplicity of consciousness is given immediately, that is, without the mediation of symbols,” Bergson says. Writing well before the first computer was powered up, Bergson offers a fundamental challenge to the notion that the mind can ever be anything like a machine.
The fact that numerous researchers are now enthralled with the idea of the mind as an operating system running on neural hardware, reaching certain computation states, indicates that the explanatory power of the brain as computer metaphor has reached a point where the understanding it allows is outweighed by the limitations it imposes. Metaphors that ground human experience in the mechanical eschew the opportunity for a deeper understanding of what it means to be an organism that is, itself, nature — and encourage fundamental misunderstandings of the map as the territory. Instead of pouring billions of dollars into failed and theoretically flawed attempts to simulate the brain state of even a single thought, we should direct our attention and resources towards providing further explanatory grounding into neuroscience that is actually pointing towards an evidence based approach forward for the treatment of illness.
The Flash Technique offers a highly efficacious and non-invasive approach to relieving serious health issues that have otherwise been understood as having biochemical or mechanistic causes. If we are to better grasp what the brain or mind truly are, perhaps we should focus our attention on understanding how it works.
