In the medical field, it may take an average of 17 years for research findings to get to clinicians.

Many popular trauma-healing modalities are built on a foundation of the triune brain.

There are ways to update our knowledge and step away from disconfirmed theories.

This post is Part 2 of a series.

In part 1 of this article, we explored some of the reasons for the research lag that exists between what researchers know and what clinicians and the general public may think is true.

This lag can be astonishingly lengthy (in the medical field, researchers found that it may take an average of 17 years for research findings to make their way to clinicians).

A similar lag exists in neurology and psychology, which means that much of what we think we know may have been disconfirmed decades ago.

We explored the famous—and mistaken—triune brain model that neuroscientist Paul MacLean began developing nearly 80 years ago. This model assumed that we had an unevolved lizard brain in charge of our impulses, and a slightly more evolved mammalian brain in charge of our emotions. This model also claimed that we could use our allegedly more evolved human brain to control our lizard-ish and mammalian tendencies.

This model separated humans from "mere" animals and impulses, and it helped us (incorrectly) see emotions as lower than and separate from logic. And sadly, it taught us to attempt to control, suppress, or extinguish our emotions (and glorify logic and rationality) instead of learning how and why emotions work.

It was an interesting idea, but it was found to be wrong, and most neuroscientists moved on to more grounded ideas way back in the 1990s.

However, due to the research lag, this disconfirming information was not available to clinicians or the general public for many decades.

How the lizard brain myth grew

Many college-level textbooks—and specifically, many Psychology 101 textbooks—referred to the triune brain as a real model until at least 2017.

That's a research lag of more than a quarter-century, and as a result, many........

© Psychology Today