As I observe popular ideas in therapy and counseling, I’m often surprised at how far behind the research many of these ideas are. I wonder: Why do so many outdated and disconfirmed concepts persist in therapy and counseling?
I am not laying blame, because I have a related question: How can practitioners possibly stay current with research when their careers require so much time and energy — in regard to client care, reporting duties, business management, and the labyrinth of insurance regulations?
And why isn’t the most updated research available to the very people who could make the best use of it?
The built-in pitfalls of the research process
I’ve been asking these questions for decades, and since 2015, I’ve taught a research course for non-scientists in my Dynamic Emotional Integration licensing program. We focus on emotions, empathy, and psychological well-being — and while most of my licensees do not have clinical training (my model is nonclinical), they need to understand basic concepts in neurology and psychology.
As a social science researcher, I built a course to invite my students into the strange and often inaccessible world of research, and to help them understand why research can be so difficult to understand (and apply).
This is vital information to have today, because the relatively young fields of neurology and neurophysiology are growing by leaps and bounds. A great deal of what we think we know has been overturned, such that almost anything we hear about the brain (and trauma) in popular culture may either be poorly understood, hotly debated, or just plain mistaken.
Too many mistaken ideas, such as the left-right brain myth, the “using ten percent of your brain” myth, the mirror neuron myth, and the lizard brain myth are circulated as if they’re accepted science. They’re not, and it’s important to understand why these disconfirmed ideas persist in what is often demeaned as “pop (popular) psychology.”
If you are sensing that there are in-crowds and out-groups involved, you are correct. There is a very real gulf between what researchers know and what clinicians and the general public can access. Yet there are important — and understandable — reasons for this gulf.
The elite — and elitist — nature of research
In my research course, which is called Research Is a Social World, I help my students understand how popular misconceptions (and outdated ideas) about science can be traced to the strange norms of the research community itself.
The research community is elite (meaning that relatively few people are able to devote themselves to a life of research) and elitist (meaning that there are powerful barriers to entry and acceptance, not the least of which include finding the time, energy, and money to complete a Ph.D.).
This insularity has meant that the general public (and clinicians) are unable to access up-to-date scientific developments, because they are not a part of the research in-crowd.
The research lag is also a huge obstacle
There is also a well-documented and surprisingly lengthy lag between what is known in the elite worlds of research, and what is known by clinicians and the public. One meta study found that the lag in medicine is approximately seventeen years — and both psychology and neuroscience are impacted by a similar gap between what researchers know and what is known to clinicians and lay people.
This lag has meant that new medical advances are not immediately available (except to fortunate people who are connected to medical researchers). It has also meant that disconfirmed theories in neuroscience and psychology are not updated, that textbooks are not corrected, and that we are left to our own devices — to muddle through with incomplete information until the lag finally catches up to us.
And the publication process is not accessible
There is yet another problem caused by the norms of the research community, which is unequal access. Unless you’re connected to a university with free access to research journals, keeping up with your field can be expensive, with most elite research journals costing hundreds of dollars per year.
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Many journals also require paid membership in their research societies, most of which are geared toward university lecturers and professional researchers.
Keeping up with your field can also be time-consuming, as research studies tend to be long and filled with references to people you may not know, ideas you may not have encountered, and language that is unnecessarily complex. Entering the exclusionary world of research as an outsider can be daunting — more of a slog than an opportunity — and many clinicians simply don’t have the time for it. That’s understandable.
But even with all these obstacles, research itself — when it’s undertaken with dedication and ethics — is an irreplaceable enterprise that helps us discover new ideas, understand the complex world around us, and correct our mistakes.
The lizard brain mistake is a case in point
The lizard brain (or triune brain) concept was developed by neuroscientist Paul MacLean from the 1940s to the 1960s. MacLean assumed that the brain had three distinct layers, each connected to a specific evolutionary period.
You may have heard of the primitive “lower (or lizard) brain,” where the autonomic nervous system supposedly resided — or the more evolved “mammalian (or middle) brain” which was allegedly where emotions, memory, and mammalian behaviors lived.
And on top of these two imagined regions, the “neocortex (or newer) brain” was assumed to be the most evolved part of the brain, where human language, reason, and logic helped us control the impulses of our seemingly irrational and animalistic lower brains.
This explanation made sense to people, though it was understood to be incorrect all the way back in the 1990s (we don’t have a triune brain; the regions didn’t evolve in the way the model suggested; and the separation between emotions and “higher” functions doesn’t exist).
It was an interesting idea, but it was found to be wrong, and researchers in the in-crowd moved on to more grounded ideas by the end of the 20th century.
But the research lag — of more than a quarter century — has had far reaching consequences.
In part 2: The rise of the lizard brain.