ABSTRACT
Précis: This chapter reviews some research on the CB and then weaves it into our conceptualization of what the CB might be doing psycho-dynamically. What is difficult in this is how best to tie together the many details of CB activity that we have been touching upon throughout this book, and how to help the reader best understand the reasoning behind our theorizing. We hope that we have already established a sufficient basis, however, in our earlier writings, and in the earlier chapters of this book, to make our case that the CB plays a number of critical roles in mental life. We are fully aware, however, that only future experimentation can determine how 146correct we are regarding to the role of the CB in mind/brain. Interdisciplinary insights aim to improve our neuroscientific explanations of Freud’s psychodynamic ideas about consciousness, our core self, and our deep unconscious motivations. It seems that under particular circumstances of modeling other brain systems, the CB essentially connects the explicit and the implicit memory systems. This connectedness of the two great memory systems (explicit and implicit), would thus be a product of the CB, to some significant degree. Of course, there may well be other connections between the explicit and implicit systems. In the earlier model of Ito dealing with the controller-regulator function of the brain, Ito assumed four regulators: (1) the CB, (2) basal ganglia, (3) limbic system, and (4) sleep centers. These regulatory centers are seen as accounting for the four different aspects of the ucs mind, as follows: (1) the CB provides internal models for other controllers; (2) basal ganglia provide selection and stabilization; (3) the limbic system provides the emotional input, and the SEEKING system ands to our drive states; and (4) sleep centers provide for the switching on and off of wakefulness and the different forms of sleep, which we have covered in the first two chapters in this book, and of course, during sleep, other centers produce dreaming. We are asserting that the CB helps all five controllers (for reflexes, compound movements, innate behavior, sensori-motor functions, and association-cortical functioning). Innate behavior is an expression of psychobiological emotional systems, and in this sense, the CB is related to the behavioral expression of emotion. However, (and this is an important caveat) although we suspect that the CB provides an important internal model for emotion, since we do not yet possess complete knowledge of all the systems that pertain to emotion, therefore, we believe it makes sense to be careful in assessing how exactly to weigh this particular CB contribution to the emotion and cognitive systems.
