Tim Quinn, MFT

08/27/2026

BRILLIANT and brief conversation about a man’s shame wound. What a find! 

08/27/2026

08/26/2026

“From the 1980s it became clearer that people’s decision making and behaviour could be influenced without their awareness.

Later, it was also clear with neuroscience experiments and brain scanners, as my team and I showed in two meta-analyses, that both unconscious memory and conscious memory play a role in brain processes. For example, neuroscientists can show study participants hidden flashes of “subliminal” happy or horrified faces and the person will have no conscious recollection of the faces. But their amygdala (the arousal region of the brain) will show increased activation, which can influence people’s decision making.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow built on some of Freud’s ideas of primary and secondary processes. He proposed we have two modes of thinking where system 1 is a fast process that is impulsive and largely unconscious, whereas system 2 is a slow process that takes effort. The secondary process is reserved for when you need to pay attention to something new, dangerous or uncertain.”

Today's cognitive neuroscientists are integrating decades of behavioral research to show that our conscious minds are heavily directed by underlying, unconscious neural activity designed to predict and navigate the world.

08/15/2026

I’ve always loved the advice in this handout.

08/09/2026

Brilliant article on what’s going on with modern psychotherapy.

“Predictive processing theory allows us to say that, so long as a given therapist and client have a genuine human relationship, emotional safety and a reliable method for generating — and resolving — flawed ways of modeling the world and self, they are probably on the right track.”

The good news is that the neuroscience of perception can pave the way out.