The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Early Eating Problems Linked to Later Eating Disorders (Scripps Howard News Svc 11/30/04)
One problem that I'll keep repeating in these essays is that of finding too narrow a focus in the observations that come out in these medical studies. Statistics, interpreted from the wrong level of scale, will not be interpreted properly.
Anxiety disorders in childhood may be a prelude to eating disorders that often strike young women in their teens and 20s, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that two thirds of people with eating disorders had experienced some sort of clinical anxiety, such as social phobia, panic attacks or obsessive compulsive disorder, at some point in their lives.
They have gotten so caught up in the groupings of differences in the diagnosis of these “various” disorders that they become blinded to the similarities and how those similarities have impact on the interpretation of these studies.
First: to eat compulsively is an act of anxiety.
Second: compulsive problems having to do with eating are forms of obsessive-compulsive behavior. The trigger (arising from appropriate or inappropriate associations to food from some other situation, but usually from stress in some form or another) leads to eating behaviors that are outside the norm and not healthful to the individual.
This seems like so much common sense as anyone who has worked with a group of food compulsive patients is going to expect anxiety to be a theme among these individuals.
The patterns that are in alignment with other disorders go beyond the obvious here. All severe disorders have an element of obsessive behavior, from the irrational obsessions of thought and obsessions of movement (rocking and such) in the schizophrenic to the obsessive eating patterns and obsessive habits of the autistic.
You'd think with all of the studies going on every day trying to show linkages between disorders and the almost constant success in finding some linkage to a greater or lesser degree that it is really too easy to think of a study to use for your doctorate. Just run data on a combination of disorders and see what you get. The requirement for all of these doctorates is that they keep their focus on a small picture and it is this requirement that keeps them from reorganizing their theories behind this data and seeing a much more important big picture.
Particularly striking was that 23 percent of the patients reported having had obsessive compulsive disorder in childhood _ normally the condition begins in the 20s, with only 2 percent to 3 percent of cases occurring in children. Kaye said the condition could be a particularly important signal that those children need to be watched for eating disorders down the road.
This is not true that obsessive compulsive behaviors rarely occur in children. It is true in the way that they are categorizing these people, but the rules for diagnosis are hiding a more important truth: autism (mild or severe) is a disorder that pretty much always starts in childhood, usually early childhood, and autism is rife with obsessive and compulsive behaviors and food disorders (they obsessively eat the same restricted diet of preferred foods following their own inner-directed schedule for eating as well, and they are known to misuse food quite often). If these behaviors start later in life, they are much the same but with irrational thinking instead of hyper-logical (and unemotional) thinking and the disorder is then called psychotic. The food disorder is then a subset of these disorders.
Look at these people with food disorders more carefully and you will find many subtle autistic traits, especially in those who show the signs of such a disorder earlier in life.
All disorders are caused by stresses that accumulate in the brain (caused by genetics, trauma, stress, illness, agingÉ all of the above) and the mathematics of the brain causes these stresses to communicate to other parts of the brain relative to the connectivity. When you map the relative connectivity of different realms of thinking and processing in the brain, you get a map of the concordance of different groupings of symptoms (that are currently considered to be different disorders). All of the disorders are connected relative to the mapping of the brain.
Some symptoms, such as obsessive behaviors, are not a product of mapping but of the severity the stress that is in that nervous system. The kinds of obsessions will change depending on where the stress is most prominent, but the existence of obsessions is indication of the degree of stress more than the location of the stress. (Read my essay: Mud Swamp Essay)
The same collaborative group is currently conducting a study on the genetic contribution to anorexia, seeking a study group made up of families that have at least two relatives with the condition.
I can tell you, in advance, that they will find very little commonality in the specific food disorders when studying separated identical twins, but they will find that the food disorder in an individual will predict a higher rate of most other disorders from ADD to schizophrenia and autism in a percentage of those who share genetics, but it will not predict which particular disorder will develop.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
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This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
