Abstract

Subjects may be aware in each moment of the content of a given scene and/or internal state. However, the vivid reality of the scene is a by-product of the complex processing of external and internal information in the brain. This point is more evident in the hallucinatory phase of psychosis or during dreaming. There is complex internal processing for the recreation of certain contents which are unconscious for the subject, whilst the content is experienced, the process to arrive at the contents is not perceived at all. Therefore, an important question that naturally arises is if process and content are served by different neural mechanisms. The possibility that postsynaptic potentials arranged in an open-field configuration would be more related to the content, experienced (or not) by the subject, and transmission-transformation of information along neural networks would be related to processing would be proposed. The proposal has some important implications for clinical applications, given that depression, psychosis, anxiety, and others are experienced as defined contents or states, while more possibly the underpinnings are related to abnormal information processing. Therefore, any clinical application should be primarily directed to psychological, pharmacological, or neural stimulation modification of information processing. However, if the content is related to activation of defined neural nets, possibly defined as engrams in a broad sense, the activation of those engrams (content) would only be able to modify processing through action on the processes. A handful of psychological therapies, more or less, explicitly tacitly successfully focus on processes (i.e., cognitive therapy in psychosis) rather than on contents, while others also focus on contents (flooding therapy in anxiety). These ideas are being implicitly running from the beginning of Psychology and made explicit in the field of motivation in organizational psychology. It is important to clarify the different Physiological underpinnings of content and process, and how each intervention is more or less focused on one or the other to justify their odds for success. From an educational point of view, this topic refers to educational strategies more biased to memory (content) vs. educational strategies where the solving tasks approach (processes) is primed.