The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
MRIs find signs in bipolar brains (Reuters 11/30/2004) (link retired)
CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Bipolar disorder, a sometimes misdiagnosed mental illness characterized by wide emotional swings, may be identifiable by chemical abnormalities visible in victims' brains, researchers said Tuesday.
Detailed brain scans performed on 42 adults, half of whom had been previously diagnosed as bipolar, showed consistently different levels of five chemicals in areas of the brain that control behavior, movement, vision, reading and sensory information, they said.
This press release is a setup for the intent to market drugs based on this information (if they get lucky with some symptoms). And a test for bipolar disorder of this kind is intended to promote quicker decisions to use the drugs currently in use for these people and to take away some of the need for the doctor to worry about lawsuits for misdiagnosis when these drugs so often damage the health of the patients (because then they would just show the test results and how that indicates a prescription for that kind of drug). A benefit in the patient health of a population as a result from this kind of testing does not have to occur for such testing be considered important in medicine (if it serves some purpose of the doctors).
Different chemical markers (used as inhibitory or excitatory signals in the synapses) have different levels of dominance in different regions of the brain, so change in all functions will show a statistical change in the accumulated products of the vast number of firings in a brain. But the vast number of decisions in the brain are not regulated by a chemical volume control but are caused by the connectivity to whatever cells are connected and the activities of those cells.
To announce that five chemicals are measured with statistical changes in people with some disorder is to announce that attempts will be made to adjust those chemical levels using medication to find some drug that can be marketed.
But the brain is a one-way street as far as these observations go. Yes, changes in the nature of the brain activity in some region of thinking will cause some changes in the collective amounts of the chemicals that are involved in a large number of those cells handling that subset of brain processing. But, no, a drug from the outside to change those levels is not going to solve the problem (even if it creates some change in some symptom) although a drug might reduce function with a side-benefit of some faulty function stopping so that some relief of a symptom occurs. A lot of different decisions are being made at any moment - many cells firing and many cells stopping or resting - among the cells that use some particular neurotransmitter in common. The relative change in the number of cells firing relative to the cells inhibiting in that collective is the cause of the statistical measurement (often from measure a level of a drug in cerebral fluid). Putting that drug back into the system with a drug that raises the level of the drug to enormous levels throughout the brain, thereby causing a change in every decision at the cellular level in cells using that drug, and changing each decision in the same direction (more inhibited or both more excited and more inhibited) is not the reverse of the same kinds of factors.
Drugging an entire system does not reverse the difference in a system that is measured by a statistical summation of the many different decisions occurring in cells. Drugging is in a different realm of scale than is the decision of a cell to fire or not following the structure of its connectivity and the firings from other cells that have an effect on that cell.
The announcement of these chemical differences in brain scans is propaganda about how “brain chemistry” regulates the brain, which is a mistaken notion, and a notion that helps to promote the sales of drugs that are said to regulate “brain chemistry.”
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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.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
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.
