The Brain: Basics re "Mental Health"

As a psychology major in undergrad, I often felt that there was a gap between the "harder" natural sciences (chem, bio, physics) and "softer" sciences such as psychology, anthropolgy etc..  Maybe it was only at my school, but I really felt like psychologists had an inferiority complex about it.  Or maybe it was just me...  

Anyway, I wonder why there needs to be a rift.  

Dr. Grobstein got me thinking about this in his first post where he alluded to entropy.  Here are some quotes from Dr. G's post:

"We have randomness (meaninglessness) as a driving force that causes new things to be created." 

"Perhaps those things, rather than being failings, are actually what drives the ongoing process of 'getting it less wrong'" 

and here are some quotes from the Wikipedia article on entropy:

"[Entropy] is a measure of the randomness of molecules in a system...  Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system" 

I see a lot of parallels.   

I guess my point is... It's not hard to imagine that mental and psychological phenomena may obey some of the laws of nature that "hard science" has discovered gotten less wrong.  Perhaps we would be well-served to use these principles as guides and/or foundations for new exploration into mental and psychological phenomena.

Another example...  I like the argument that Marty makes for a metaphysical aspect of reality.  He says that nothing comes from nothing... something is, something always was.  

That sounds like the first law of thermodynamics to me.  

Because as much as I took (and in some ways still take) issue with our attempt to do away with the idea of "mental illness", I am totally on board with both the reorganization of our ideas on the scientific method (though I agree with jrieders above that perhaps this is just semantics, that it is generally accepted that whatever we say today, and whatever we "prove," may of course be false, that we are always trying to understand things less incorrectly) and with the idea of the brain/mind as both a parser and creator of reality.

In today's (tomorrow's?) New York Times the Modern Love column is about how someone with a frontal lobe injury tries to reconcile his current reality with his past reality, not fully able to understand the world in the ways he used to, or others do ... And I think we all do this to varying degrees. Perhaps it is partially because I write fiction, but I think so much of our reality is based entirely on how we percieve it. Additionally, I always find memory studies fascinating -- how likely it is that we will misremember events, make up events, how easily we can be influenced to remember things differently. One of the studies I have always found particularly interesting is the one in which people created memories of interactions with Bugs Bunny at Disney World -- despite the fact that Bugs is not a Disney character.

I also think our perceptions of reality are very much culturally -- or subjectively -- based.  A friend often tells the story of taking some sort of iq test when she was younger, and being shown a picture of a three-legged table. 

"What is wrong with this picture?" she was asked, and later it was brought to her mother's attention that she hadn't mentioned the missing leg.

"Of course she didn't," her mother had responded ... In their house, they had a lot of modern furniture, including a three-legged coffee table. 

Perhaps slightly differing from Paul, but in the same vein, I think that regardless of whether or not shared perception is an example of objective reality, or simply a brain construct, there is something important about life as a social being as sharing with others a perception that reality is shared. There will always be variations in the things we are sure! happened, and yet both comfort and reassurance are derived from a sense of a shared reality.

I also read the Powers book last year, and in a lot of ways Capgras reminded me of my own grandmother's changing perception of reality with early alzheimers (not uncommon) ... A year or so before she was diagnosed, she became very agitated because she and my grandfather were living in a home that was an exact replica of their real home in every way, but that was not their home. Every aspect of it was the same, but she was positive it was the wrong home. My father would try to question her, first just to get her to see she was wrong, and then just to ask why, if everything about her "new" home was exactly the same, she cared if they had moved. Couldn't she live the same life in this replica of her home? But of course her agitation continued. Maybe she was right, in a sense, just as in "The Echo Maker", what does it mean to be the same person everyday? Aren't we each just our own constant reinterpretation of events? Maybe our houses *are* different everyday ... But if our brain isn't comforting itself with this thought, what use is it?

I think that in creating narratives, our minds often strive to jive with others -- to make connections in shared perceptions or communal cues. Often people who have traumatic brain injuries do explain the world differently (and perhaps in ways no less correct), but they also often feel frustrated, maybe vaguely aware that their perception is a bit off kilter, maybe just less able to make their narrative comforting. I am more than happy to decide that being mentally healthy means feeling able to construct a personal narrative that is bolstering and personally sensical. In a way, the goal of our brain is not necessarily to get reality "less wrong", but to make our lives easier. (Case in point -- often people with personality disorders/PTSD view the world more in terms of luck and less in terms of personal agency. In reality, many of these people may have experienced "unlucky" events over which they had little control. Is their perception less right? Perhaps not. But is it helpful to them? Well, perhaps not, too.)

I'm hoping to join you for class next Monday night, and in anticipation...

have been mulling over my own current project: bringing 5 years of intensive therapy to a conclusion, looking @ what didn't work (esp. my dissatisfaction w/ the lack of "reciprocity"), and trying to find a satisfactory way to "end"...

to bolster myself along the way, I have been looking @ a very 60s text, The Radical Therapist, which insists that therapy--which has been dominated by gradualist models that bolster the status quo--needs to remake itself as a political activity. The assumptions here are that the essence of all psychiatric conditions is alienation, and that alienation is the result of oppression, about which the oppressed has been mystified or deceived.

I was interested by the last stanza of Dickinson's poem on the brain that Prof. Grobstein references above:

Does she suggest that God is a creation of the brain--as the sky and you and me are in the first stanza--or that the brain is more like God itself, and more the creator and source of all reality, rather than the one being created by the other?

I'm interested in continuing this connection between God and the brain, and in connecting to the earlier comments on how religion enters our conversation about mental health.  Is religion a "disability" for the study of the brain? Or, perhaps, as we consider an individual or culture's particular vision of itself in relation to God, it will inform a definition of "mental health" as it relates to a particular story.   Dickinson couldn't separate God from the brain in her poem--and it seems to me that many people/patients will also have a hard time separating god/the creator from the brain, that which creates meaning. 

Yesterday we talked a lot about dichotomies, and whether or not we felt the need to draw lines.  Some people felt like these lines were necessary, that decisions had to be made to make terms and concepts credible.  My problem with this is, even if in the moment, we can make some kind of line, how useful will that be?  I think it's like observations being true up until this point- these lines may be true, up until this point, but tomorrow, they may be false.  Is it worth it to spend so much time searching for lines to be drawn that can just as easily, with just one exception, be proven false, or should would be looking for things we can rule out, things we can say are already false, so we can make progress through observations that, once proven false, will always have that falseness to it?

 Another thing I was thinking about, was with therapy, there is often such a stigma associated with going for help.  I started to wonder how necessary therapy actually is- maybe (and I'm sure it is) an idealistic approach to think that maybe, everybody, with all of our problems and issues, is like a puzzle- maybe, we can help ourselves by helping others, just talking and trying to understand the other person can maybe help us reflect on our own troubles, and knowing that they will do the same in return- maybe that's all that is really needed, at the base of this idealistic world. Maybe the need for therapy and drugs and whatever else is what happens because we can't create, or act out this kind of altruistic world.