Rehearsals,Confession, and Confabulations: Psychotherapy and The Synaptic Self

Several novel therapeutic approaches are explored around a brain-based premise. The conceptual platform is Baltes’s holistic “Bio-cultural Co-constructivism,” which situates humans in their environmental and biological settings. Rehearsal and habit are at the core of this approach, which leads to gene-expression and obviates the need for the construct psyche. Clinics are viewed as confessionals for purging pathogenic secrets, and therapists are regarded as spin doctors, complicit with their clients in confabulating virtual realities in which they can lead happier lives. Such therapies promote dendritic and synaptic change, which loop back into adaptive behavior.     

A memory-based theory of verbal cognition

The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these constraints in working memory. Lexical information is extracted directly from text using a version of the expectation maximization algorithm. In this article, the model is described and then illustrated on a number of phenomena, including sentence processing, semantic categorization and rating, short-term serial recall, and analogical and logical inference. Subsequently, the model is used to answer questions about a corpus of tennis news articles taken from the Internet. The model's success demonstrates that it is possible to extract propositional information from naturally occurring text without employing a grammar, defining a set of heuristics, or specifying a priori a set of semantic roles.