Neuroimaging Findings

Psychotherapy Changes Your Brain

There are literally dozens of studies that have been conducted in the last decade to illustrate how psychotherapy changes the brain. I wanted to give you a small sampling of the kind that's out there. Please note that this page will be added to and more refined in the coming months.

These are some articles we found useful online: (you will go off site)

"Neuroimaging and the functional neuroanatomy of psychotherapy"

Joshua, L., R., Carl, D. M., Glick D. M., Dougherty, D.D., and Rauch, S. L.

Brain Blood Flow Changes in Depressed Patients Treated With Interpersonal Psychotherapy or Venlafaxine Hydrochloride

Stephen D. Martin, MBBS,MRCPsych; Elizabeth Martin, RMN,BSc; Santoch S. Rai, MBChB,MRCPsych; Mark A. Richardson, BSc; Robert Royall, BSc,C.Eng,IEE,MIPEM
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2001;58:641-648.

Like Drugs, Talk Therapy Can Change Brain Chemistry
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
August 27, 2002.

More articles on Psychotherapy Changes your Brain

The following four citations are taken from:

Schore, Allan (2003). Affect Regulation and Repair of the Self. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Andreasen, N.C. (2001) Brave new brain. New York: Oxford University Press.

Furmark, T., Tillfors, M., Marteindottir, I., Fischer, H., Pissiota, A., Langstrom, B., & Fredrikson, M. (2002). Common change in cerebral blood flow in patients with social phobia treated with citalopram or cognitive behavioral therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 425-433. (Allan gave a citation for this paper as the year 2000 but I think he mistakenly gave the wrong year as it is listed in his bibliography as 2002, so I'm going to guess it's for 2002).

Massana, G., Gasto, C., Junque, C., Mercader J-M., Gomez, B., Massana J., Torres, X., & Salamero, M. (202). Reduced levels of creatine in the right medial temporal lobe region of panic disorder patients detected with 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Neuro Image, 16, 836-842.

Schwartz, J. M., Stoessel, P. W., Baxter, L. R., Jr., Martin, K. M., & Phelps, M. E. (1996). Systematic cerebral glucose metabolic rate changes after successful behavior modification treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 53, 109-113.

Notes

pg. 265…"Furmark and his colleagues (2000) reported that social phobic patients who underwent psychotherapy showed significantly reduced blood flow in amygdala-limbic circuits…These data support Andreasen's assertion, "we are steadily recognizing that the effectiveness of psychotherapy is a consequence of the ability to affect 'mind functions' such as emotion and memory by affecting 'brain functions' such as the connections and communications between nerve cells (2001, p. 31)."

There's a small section in Ledoux's book (a favourite book of mine) called, 'Psychotherapy: Just Another Way to Rewire the Brain' (pg. 263-265) that outlines what he thinks is happening in the brain with psychotherapy.

Ledoux, J. The Emotional Brain. (1996) New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

My favourite quote from this section:

" …it is well known that the connections from the cortical areas to the amygdala are far weaker than the connections from the amygdala to the cortex." (Amaral, 1992) pg. 265.

Dr. Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner for Neuroscience in Year 2000, explained that we have substantial research to suggest that psychotherapy changes the brain. More on his research.

External Resources

The Basics in Brain Imaging. This is a good place to start with easy to read explanations of the different forms of imaging: PET, MRI etc. 

Neuroscience Tutorial - examines different structures in the brain. Good illustrations. 

Brain Mapping - shows how they map the brain using fMRI. 

PET Demo - very cool images of how the brain looks using PET.

Don't lose track! Add to your FAV bookmarks:

Help