ABSTRACT
American Psychological Association (www.apa.org), founded 1892 American Psychiatric Association (www.psych.org), founded 1844 American Psychoanalytic Association (www.apsa.org), founded 1911 American Academy of Psychotherapists (www.aapweb.com), founded
1955 American Counseling Association (www.counseling.org), founded 1952
American Psychologist Behavioral and Brain Sciences Current Directions in Psychological Science Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Personality and Social Psychology Review
What is a person, and what or where is an individual’s “personality”? According to Joseph LeDoux, a psychologist and member of the Center for Neural Science at New York University, the personality or self, “the essence of who you are, reflects patterns of interconnectivity between neurons in your brain” (2002: 2). In fact, his book is titled Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. The brain is more than the storage place of memory and learning; it is a product of memory and learning, due to the remarkable “plasticity” of the brain or “the ability of neurons to be altered by experience” (137). Brains literally change-grow and rewire-as a result of experience, which bridges the gap in the old natureand-nurture debate: inheritance and experience “are simply two different ways of making deposits in the brain’s synaptic ledger” (5). All of our
psychological capacities are, in one way or another, embrained-with profound consequences for knowledge and action. Memory, for instance, is “a reconstruction of facts and experiences on the basis of the way they were stored, not as they actually occurred. And it’s a reconstruction by a brain that is different from the one that formed the memory” (97). Motivation or what drives us to act is “neural activity that guides us toward goals, outcomes that we desire and for which we will exert effort, or ones that we dread and will exert effort to prevent, escape from, or avoid” (236). But because the brain is a physical organ, and experience comes through our bodily senses (and interaction with other people), the resultant self or personality is “the totality” of a person, “physically, biologically, psycho - logically, socially, and culturally. . . . It includes things that we know and things that we do not know, things that others know about us that we do not realize” (31).
