Experience-dependent brain plasticity: A key concept for studying nonconscious decisions

The development of normal or abnormal psychosocial behavior is discussed in the framework of a brain model centered around findings on experience-dependent plasticity. Plasticity is the brain's basic mechanism that leads to the creation of autobiographical memory with which the memory-driven conscious and nonconscious (automatic) information processing operations organize the individual's cognition, emotion and action. Psychological problems treatable with Freud's talking cure are understood as products of automatized, maladaptive memory contents (skills and cognitive-emotional coping strategies) that represent conflictive (uncooperative) interactions between developing individual and social realities.