A spiderless arachnophobia therapy: comparison between placebo and treatment groups and six-month follow-up study.

We describe a new arachnophobia therapy that is specially suited for those individuals with severe arachnophobia who are reluctant to undergo direct or even virtual exposure treatments. In this therapy, patients attend a computer presentation of images that, while not being spiders, have a subset of the characteristics of spiders. The Atomium of Brussels is an example of such an image. The treatment group (n = 13) exhibited a significant improvement (time x group interaction: P = .0026) when compared to the placebo group (n = 12) in a repeated measures multivariate ANOVA. A k-means clustering algorithm revealed that, after 4 weeks of treatment, 42% of the patients moved from the arachnophobic to the nonarachnophobic cluster. Six months after concluding the treatment, a follow-up study showed a substantial consolidation of the recovery process where 92% of the arachnophobic patients moved to the nonarachnophobic cluster.

Plato's theory of ideas revisited.

According to Plato's theory, every pattern perceived by the mind is a composition of raw concepts (ideals). In this paper it is argued that the thalamus can decompose input patterns into these ideals and, during development, generate them from incoming patterns. As the neuronal counterpart of a certain ideal is proposed to be the activation of a reticular neuron inside a competitive layer in the thalamus, these ideals are not coincident over time. In order to recruit the ideals of a certain pattern, ideals are delayed in the long dendrites of pyramidal neurons. When several parts of a pattern are to be related, these are bound through the association of their equal constituent ideals. Coincidences of the same ideals are stored through synaptic reinforcement in nearby spines of pyramidal neurons. After binding, if a partial pattern is input, it will be reconstructed by the recall of its ideals over the reinforced synapses.