THE MIND-BRAIN CONNECTION
'I think, therefore I have a brain."
Okay, so it's not as catchy as Rene Descartes's original maxim, "I
think, therefore I am." But if the philosopher were alive today, he'd
agree that his famous phrase--which assumed that mind and brain are
completely separate things--needs some updating.
Studies of stroke victims, as well as brain imaging research,
support the idea that the mind essentially is the brain. Or, at least,
it's what the brain does. But if you want further evidence, consider a
recent study demonstrating that psychotherapy can alter brain
function.
Researchers at UCLA treated patients with obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD) to about 10 weeks of cognitive and behavioral therapy. The
scientist also took "before" and "after" pictures of patients' brains
using PET scans, which visualize brain activity
The PET scans revealed that In OCD patients, several parts of the
brain--notably the caudate nucleus, orbital cortex, and thalamus--were
running in overdrive. "What therapy does is break up this reverberating
loops, this worry circuit," reports Louis Baxter, M.D., a psychiatrist
and pharmacologist at both UCLA and the University of Alabama.
Indeed, in patients who responded to treatment, these brain regions
no longer lit up in unison on PET scans. Meaning, of course, that purely
psychological therapy had some very biological effects on the
brain.
All of which might give pause to anybody who still divides mental
disorders into diseases of the brain and diseases of the mind. "I think
that to separate the brain from the mind at a deep level doesn't make
much sense," says Baxter. "Descartes was a good mathematician but a bad
philosopher."
ILLUSTRATION
Tags:
behavior,
behavioral therapy,
biological effects,
brain,
brain activity,
brain connection,
brain function,
brain imaging research,
brain regions,
caudate nucleus,
cognition,
diseases of the brain,
mathematician,
mental disorders,
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,
ocd,
ocd patients,
parts of the brain,
pet scans,
pharmacologist,
psychological therapy,
rene descartes,
stroke victims,
therapy
