Fredric Schiffer

Standard physicalism often renders subjective experience epiphenomenal, while interactionist accounts struggle to reconcile mental causation with energy conservation. We propose the force of experience: a real, physically efficacious force exerted by experience on neural architecture. To address the objection that a fundamental force should act universally, we introduce biological confinement, analogous to the confinement of the strong nuclear interaction. The force of experience acts exclusively on structured biological information—the coherent, meaning-bearing informational patterns sustained within the living brain. Within the brain’s open thermodynamic system, experience supplies the causal influence required to bias activation barriers of neural logic gates, releasing stored metabolic potential in a direction determined by the meaning of the experience and the organism’s prior experiential history. This framework reconceives subjective experience as a confined physical force essential for biological agency and clarifies how meaning-driven interactions can be both constructive and destructive. We situate this proposal within historical perspectives on mental causation, including agential realism, dispositional causation, and nonreductive materialist psychology, while offering a biophysical mechanism absent from prior accounts.

Dual-Brain Psychology is a theory and its clinical applications that come out of the author's clinical observations and from the Split-brain Studies. The theory posits, based on decades of rigorous, peer-reviewed experiments and clinical reports, that, in most patients, one brain's cerebral hemisphere when stimulated by simple lateral visual field stimulation, or unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation, reveals a dramatic change in personality such that stimulating one hemisphere evokes, as a trait, a personality that is more childlike and more presently affected by childhood maltreatments that are usually not presently appreciated but are the proximal cause of the patient's symptoms. The personality associated with the other hemisphere is much more mature, less affected by the traumas, and less symptomatic. The theory can be applied to in-depth psychotherapy in which the focus is on helping the troubled side to bear and process the traumas with the help of the therapist and the healthier personality. A person's symptoms can be evoked to aid the psychotherapy with hemispheric stimulation and the relationship between the dual personalities can be transformed from conflicted and sabotaging to cooperating toward overall health. Stimulating the positive hemisphere in most therapy patients rapidly relieves symptoms such as anxiety, depression, or substance cravings. Two randomized controlled trials used unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation to the positive hemisphere as a stand-alone treatment for opioid cravings and both revealed high effect sizes. The theory is supported by brain imaging and rTMS studies. It is the first psychological theory and application that comes out of and is supported by rigorous peer-reviewed experimentation.