Fredric Schiffer

Harvard Medical School | HMS · Department of Psychiatry

Evaluating a novel treatment for opioid use disorder based on dual-brain psychology and photobiomodulation Opioid Use Disorder or opioid addiction is a devastating illness that leads to failed lives, overdoses and other medical catastrophes, family agony, crime, and social dysfunction. Although we have medications such as methadone, buprenorphine a...

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 (either left or right) when stimulated by simpl...

Purpose Conventional theories of hemispheric emotional valence (HEV) postulate fixed hemispheric differences in emotional processing. Schiffer’s dual brain psychology proposes that there are prominent individual differences with a substantial subset showing a reversed laterality pattern. He further proposed that hemispheric differences were more ak...

Background: The opioid epidemic is a global tragedy even with current treatments, and a novel, safe, and effective treatment would be welcomed. We report here our findings from our second randomized controlled trial to evaluate unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation as a treatment for opioid use disorder. Methods: We enrolled 39 participants wi...

In this paper I will address questions about will, agency, choice, consciousness, relevant brain regions, impacts of disorders, and their therapeutics, and I will do this by referring to my theory, Dual-brain Psychology, which posits that within most of us there exist two mental agencies with different experiences, wills, choices, and behaviors. Ea...

Introduction Opioid Use Disorders (OUD) cause great disfunction and pain to individuals, families, and societies. There are few good treatments. This paper presents a novel, easily applied, painless, therapy that can be applied as an adjunct to psychotherapies and medications. Methods The author presents a retrospective overview and 4 brief case r...

Background Opioid use disorders (OUDs) are an epidemic causing catastrophic consequences to individuals, families, and society despite treatments including psychotherapy, substitution therapy or receptor blockers, and psychoeducation. We have developed a novel treatment that combines unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation (t-PBM) to the hemisph...

Experience Quantum field Brain information The hard problem Subjectivity A B S T R A C T Penrose and Hameroff assert that brain computations, including quantum computations, involving hydrophobic areas of microtubules whose electron clouds go into orchestrated superpositions and reductions that lead to proto-conscious elements, or "bings" that beco...

Penrose and Hameroff assert that brain computations, including quantum computations, involving hydrophobic areas of microtubules whose electron clouds go into an orchestrated superpositions and reductions that leads to proto-conscious elements, or "bings" that become orchestrated into conscious experiences. Their assertion, however, like the findin...

Methods for treating psychiatric disorders using light energy are disclosed herein. A method for treating psychiatric disorders using light energy includes determining which hemisphere of the brain requires treatment using lateral visual field stimulation (LVFS) and applying light energy to the hemisphere of the brain to treat the psychiatric disor...

Many studies have reported beneficial effects from the application of near-infrared (NIR) light photobiomodulation (PBM) to the body, and one group has reported beneficial effects applying it to the brain in stroke patients. We have reported that the measurement of a patient's left and right hemispheric emotional valence (HEV) may clarify data and...

The authors sought to replicate an earlier finding that baseline lateral visual field stimulation, a procedure shown to activate the contralateral hemisphere and induce affective changes, predicted the clinical outcomes of a 10-day course of left-sided rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). For 23 patients there was a significant 1-tailed...

The authors sought to replicate an earlier finding that baseline lateral visual field stimulation, a procedure shown to activate the contralateral hemisphere and induce affective changes, predicted the clinical outcomes of a 10-day course of left-sided rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). For 23 patients there was a significant 1-tailed...

Much has been theorized about the emotional properties of the hemispheres. Our review of the dominant hypotheses put forth by Schore, Joseph, Davidson, and Harmon-Jones on hemispheric emotional valences (HEV) shows that none are supported by robust data. Instead, we propose that individual's hemispheres are organized to have differing HEVs that can...

We examined whether lateral visual field stimulation (LSTM) could activate contralateral extrastriate cortical areas as predicted by a large experimental literature. We asked seven unscreened, control subjects to wear glasses designed to allow vision out of either the left (LVF) or right lateral visual field (RVF) depending upon which side the subj...

We examined whether baseline-affective responses to lateral visual-field stimulation could predict clinical responses to left, prefrontal, transcranial, magnetic stimulation (TMS) in patients who are depressed. Schiffer et al have reported that left and right lateral visual-field stimulation can often evoke different (positive versus negative) psyc...

The author presents an evidence-based psychological theory which is derived from clinical observations, a review of the literature, especially the split-brain literature, and experimentation with lateral visual field stimulation which has been found to induce changes in patients' cognitive and emotional status thought to be associated with the rela...

Fifteen subjects evaluated while wearing, in random order, four pairs of glasses, two limiting vision to either the left or right lateral visual field (LVF) and two monocular glasses (MGs) limiting vision to either eye, manifested significant differences in laterality indices in the predicted direction for the theta electroencephalogram (EEG) (P <...

Questions of a psychological nature were presented to two split-brain patients from the California series encouraging each hemisphere to respond simultaneously and independently. The responses of both patients indicated that their hemispheres were responding independently. For the first patient, his right hemisphere appeared to be more disturbed th...

Questions of a psychological nature were presented 2 two split-brain patients from the California series encouraging each hemisphere to respond simultaneously and independently. The responses of both patients indicated that their hemispheres were responding independently. For the first patient his right hemisphere appeared to be more disturbed than...

Seventy psychotherapy patients were given two pairs of goggles each taped over to allow vision from only the left or the right lateral visual field (LVF and RVF). Sixty percent reported at least a one-point difference between visual fields on a five-point anxiety scale; 23% reported at least a two-point difference. Among 21 patients with major depr...

This paper reviews evidence from split-brain and other, more recent studies that have enriched and advanced our understanding of the cognitive and emotional abilities and characteristics of the right hemisphere. The more recent work includes research on intact subjects (employing Wada tests, unilateral videos, and functional imaging) and neurophysi...

Auditory probe evoked potential attenuation was measured as an index of hemispheric activity in 10 subjects with a history of childhood trauma and 10 matched subjects without such history while they recalled a neutral memory and then a traumatic memory. There were prominent group differences in degree of cerebral laterality between memory tasks (P...

The author reviews a series of nine cocaine abusers successfully treated with long-term, in-depth, dynamic psychotherapy begun on an inpatient drug abuse unit and continued after hospitalization. He finds his patients to have been victims of unrecognized psychological trauma in childhood. He argues that the cocaine abuse, in addition to functioning...

Twelve executives with typical angina pectoris, given a 12-minute quiz, designed to be psychologically stressful, responded with ST depressions of greater than or equal to 1.0 mm. Each of these patients was given an exercise tolerance test on an upright bicycle to induce an amount of ST depression equivalent to that observed during the quiz. A stat...

To evaluate possible cardiovascular effects of emotional stress, a specially designed 12 minute tape-recorded stress quiz was administered to 43 subjects while blood pressure and the electrocardiogram were monitored. For the entire group, the heart rate and blood pressure rose from respective control levels of 76 beats/min and 136/87 mm Hg to a mea...