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In reply to your email, there are more concerns for a trader than just
dealing with "fear and greed". Rick's and Harley's correspondance clearly
point to the problems traders can have with obsessions and compulsions.
Trading difficulties can arise long before the obsessions and compulsions
become serious enough to be diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
(OCD).
Automatic obsessive thoughts and their accompaning feelings arise in the
orbitofrontal cortex whereas compulsive behaviours arise in the ventromedial
striatum. These are normally inhibited by voluntary conscious control or
"will power" arising from the dorsolateral frontal cortex.
A trader can have obsessions or compulsions or both obsessions and
compulsions.
When normal automatic thoughts become obsessive (i.e., a concern or
difficulty) and/or the normal automatic actions become compulsive then a
disorder results. The voluntary conscious control or "will power" has been
overcome.
SRI medication "re-balances" these CSTC circuits by reducing the activations
from the obsessive thought areas and/or by reducing the activations from the
compulsive behaviour areas.
Behaviour modification therapy rebalances the CSTC circuits from the other
direction by strengthening the voluntary control areas.
Enclosed is an email which explains this further.
Best regards
Walter
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Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common neuropsychiatric condition
characterized by bothersome intrusive thoughts and urges which frequently
lead to dysfunctional repetitive behaviors such as excessive hand washing or
ritualistic counting and checking. There is well-documented evidence
implicating faulty modulation of certain aspects of frontal cortex function
by the striatum in the pathophysiology of this condition.
Studies utilizing PET have demonstrated systematic alterations in cerebral
activity in OCD patients successfully treated with drug-free cognitive-
behavioral therapy.
Essential features of this treatment involve educating patients to regard
the intrusion of OCD symptoms into consciousness as the manifestation of a
"false brain message, " and training them to willfully select alternative
behavioral responses when experiencing these bothersome thoughts and urges.
This process of willful behavioral change is difficult to perform and
requires significant pain tolerance. However, it results in significant
symptom relief over a period of 10 weeks, accompanied by systematic changes
in metabolic activity in fronto-striatal circuits involving the orbital and
anterior cingulate cortices. These circuits have been implicated in OCD
symptoms by a substantial amount of data collected over the past decade.
...
What stands out as the key predictor of clinical success in
cognitive-behavioral treatment is a patient's ability to utilize cognitive
insight concerning the true nature of a pathological urge to perform a
compulsive behavior (e.g., "That feeling just the result of a false message
from my brain") in order to change the meaning and/or value they place upon
the internal experience of the symptom (e.g., "I'm not going to let that
bothersome urge make me do a compulsive behavior.")
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