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Quite apart from its other virtues, the imprinted brain theory establishes a new standard of humane insight into mental illness—and one, furthermore, which is not in the least based on sentiment, PC axe-grinding, or pious platitudes. On the contrary, in its counter-cultural insistence on the ultimate genetic determinism of mental illness, the theory offers a perspective based on the deepest and most secure foundation we are likely to find for any humane insight: our DNA.
First and foremost comes the realization that people with mental illness are effectively paying a personal price for our species’ collective cognitive adaptations. What they experience in lonely pain, anguish, and alienation, the rest of us enjoy as the fruits of civilization, the comforts of culture, and the consolations of society, friends, and family.
According to the imprinted brain theory, human culture and civilization rest on two parallel cognitive adaptations: mentalistic and mechanistic cognition. The former gives us our mental culture and the latter our material one. One adapts us to the universe of other people, their minds, emotions, and intentions. The other is the key to our mastery of the physical world and the foundation of our science, technology, and ingenious engineering of the material environment to suit our needs.
Normally, the two cognitive systems are roughly in balance, with only minor deviations one way or the other. However, in mental illnesses these deviations become extreme and the genes which underpin one or the other are no longer expressed in balance. Instead, they become dangerously skewed in the direction of autistic or of psychotic spectrum disorders. But although this represents a pathological outcome for the individual concerned, for the race as a whole it is entirely normal in the statistical sense of such deviations being inevitable in any standard, “bell-curve” distribution. In other words, what afflicts the individual as a painful deviation from the norm is from the point of view of the whole merely the inevitable outlying extreme of a normal distribution curve: the rim of the bell, if you like. In any event though, mental illness emerges as the personal price levied on some unfortunate individuals for the benefits enjoyed by the normal majority.
The second insight peculiar to the theory is that deviations in either direction—autistic or psychotic—do not just imply deficits, but sometimes also enhancements of normal mentality. Autistic savantism—invariably mechanistic in its cognitive style—is well known, and a growing number of authors have listed the increasingly long catalogue of scientists, technologists, mathematicians and others whose autism transformed their talent into genius, with incalculable benefit to the human race as a whole.
But as I note in my book and as psychiatrists have often pointed out, psychotics have their own kind of cognitive expertise: a mentalistic—or even hyper-mentalistic—one. Eugen Bleuler (1857 -1939), who coined the term schizophrenia, noted that schizophrenics who seem totally withdrawn and uninterested in their environment nevertheless pick up an astounding amount of information from snatches of conversation about the personal lives of their doctors and care personnel, and about the tensions among them. Randolph Nesse notes that “those who have worked with schizophrenics know the eerie feeling of being with someone whose intuitions are acutely tuned to the subtlest unintentional cues…”
And indeed, as I also argued in an earlier post and in an online interview, there might even be true psychotic savants, notable for their mentalistic skills, astonishing ability to read other people’s minds and not only to empathize with, but also to exploit, their emotions and aspirations. Although my example of Bruno Bettelheim illustrates the worst that can result from this, literary, dramatic, and artistic culture in general abounds with much more creditable examples—and particularly, as I point out, with poets.
This in itself ought to change the way people think about mental illness, because it shows that mentally disturbed people are not merely paying a personal price for our social sanity, but are sometimes gifted too in their own peculiar way—mentalistic or mechanistic as the case may be.
Last, but not least, the imprinted brain theory underlines the fact that no one is completely immune to mental abnormality, and that what passes for sanity is nothing other than a precariously poised compromise between the extremes of autism and psychosis. Trauma, insult, infection, brain injury and—if the hygiene/old friends hypothesis is to be believed—immune dysregulation, and many other causes can tip the balance for anyone, at any time. Consequently, we should see the mentally ill not as an alien species or the diseased detritus of our own, but as examples of ourselves as we all too easily could be if our luck runs out!
