POPULATING THE QUALITY WORLD: A NEUROBIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION.

In his explanation of the brain as a control system, Glasser (1999) described the Quality World (QW) as a photo album that contained pictures of those things which we have or want and which fulfill our Basic Needs. The QW is differentiated from the Everything I Know World (EIKW) in that pictures in the QW are need fulfilling and relatively permanent, while pictures in the EWKW are transient and not Need fulfilling. While this analogy is useful in understanding the concepts of Choice Theory Psychology, it doesn't explain the biological workings that support the ideas. One of the criticisms of Choice Theory is that it lacks a research base to explain the physiological underpinnings of the theory. This paper addresses that concern and suggests a neurobiological explanation of how the QW is populated through dopamine/glutamate interactions. While the neurobiological explanation works for how any construct is fixed in the brain, chemical dependency (i.e., addiction) will be used as the primary example to illustrate the mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]