The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Dementia of Parkinson's Similar to Alzheimer's (ABC News HealthDay 12/14/2004) (link retired)
TUESDAY, Dec. 14 (HealthDayNews) - People with Parkinson's disease and dementia experience a similar average annual decline in cognitive function as people with Alzheimer's disease do, says a Norwegian study in the December issue of the Archives of Neurology.
The article noted that dementia is common among people with Parkinson's disease, but few studies have examined the rate of cognitive decline in Parkinson's patients. Dementia in Parkinson's patients is associated with a rapid decrease in motor and functional ability, higher death rates, and greater caregiver stress.
I've written many times that the same thing causes all these disorders: they are caused by a collection of stress (a mathematical degradation of decision-making). This stress communicates to other parts of the brain to a greater degree if there is a greater amount of connectivity with those other regions. The regions of the brain that deal with motor function have many connections with the switchboard part of the brain that gives us emotion and executive function and is the region where many subsets of information come together (which creates an illusion that these same regions record long-term memory as well). The disorders caused by a severe collection of stress in the entire brain will collect the most stress in these regions where the most diverse subject matter of processing intersect (large amounts of stress can collect primarily in these regions or large amounts of stress can collect globally in the brain and will, by default and design, end up having the most impact on these regions of the brain with the most intersection of information).
For some years among some researchers there has been a hunch that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disorders were the same thing. I go further than that because I believe they are pretty much the same thing as autism and schizophrenia as well, but with different manifestations caused by this stress appearing at different locations or at different stages of development. This recently announced study takes us another step closer to proving my case.
And they should stop labeling these problems as “diseases.” They are disorders. The same method of communication and same aspects of how the brain lays down tracks of stress (inhibition) is behind how we develop all of our learning and all of our character traits. Every character trait taken to an extreme is then a disorder. We all collect stress in our systems until we die. Stress can collect at a fast rate or a slow rate but it is still the same stress.
Another point to repeat here: stress is something that communicates because of mathematical changes in sensitivities to excitement or inhibition in the structure of cells and the connectivity of a network of cells. This stress knows no boundaries concerning what particular neurotransmitter is involved with that part of the cell firing across the synapse and no boundaries concerning what particular neurotransmitter chemical is statistically dominant in a subset of the brain. The differentiation between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disorders in the medical community is partly due to the different responses these patients have (and only statistically) to different medications. This lesson is hard to teach the current system: different responses to medications do not define different disorders.
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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.
