Cognitive intervention teaches people to change how they monitor the environment.
Your brain getting better on cognitive therapy is not doing the same thing as your brain getting better on drugs. Drugs modulate monoamine neurotransmitters in the brainstem; they have a bottom-up effect. Cognitive therapy works top down on your thinking. It reorganizes the way you interact with your environment. You learn to monitor the environment, to increase attention, which is in the medial frontal areas.
Then, once you are aware of a [negative emotional] stimulus, you recognize its relationship to self—and you let it go by. You focus on your breathing. You don't kick it into working memory and sit and ruminate about it. You turn off your lateral frontal lobes. That's what we see in the pictures. For whatever reason you have mislearned how to respond to certain kinds of stimuli; you have to unlearn it.
