{"id":295,"date":"2016-04-12T03:26:19","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T03:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ferguskane.com\/blogs\/?p=295"},"modified":"2016-06-11T19:16:35","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T19:16:35","slug":"after-reading-this-your-brain-will-never-be-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ferguskane.com\/blogs\/en\/after-reading-this-your-brain-will-never-be-the-same\/","title":{"rendered":"After Reading This, Your Brain Will Never Be The Same"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brainnetwork-e1436746440606-1024x1024\"<\/a>
In the best tradition of such articles, this image has no real connection to the content.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After reading this, your brain will quite simply never be the same again. \u00a0My ideas, transformed\u00a0by\u00a0my brain into a series of muscle stimulating electro-chemical nerve impulses and transferred\u00a0by my fingers\u00a0into my computer’s systems, will have been launched across\u00a0\u00a0the internet’s intricate web, eventually spawning\u00a0a torrent of photons that\u00a0will have streamed\u00a0though your eyes and onto\u00a0your retinae, unleashing\u00a0another chain of bio-electro-chemical reactions of almost unimaginable complexity.<\/p>\n

Your brain\u00a0networks will have been activated and deactivated; hormones secreted and metabolised; neurotransmitters released, sucked up, converted and degraded; your genome read; proteins\u00a0synthesised, cut up and stuck back together, synapses formed and broken – and at the trendy\u00a0edge of science, your brain cells will have experienced epigenetic change. \u00a0None of this is fully reversible. \u00a0You’ll likely never be able to completely forget that you read this, no matter how hard you try. In fact, the harder you try to forget, the more these words will worm their way into your biology.<\/p>\n

Sorry about that.<\/p>\n

Of course, although this is all incredible, it’s also absolutely normal. \u00a0There is nothing very special about these words. \u00a0Your brain is being changed all the time, by everything and anything that stimulates any of your various\u00a0different senses. \u00a0And should you for any reason, find yourself in a sensory deprivation tank, well, your brain will self-stimulate to a quite worrying extent. \u00a0The cascades of psycho-bio-electro-chemical events will never stop.<\/p>\n

Well, only once.<\/p>\n

So next time you read an headline\u00a0like: \u00a0Doctors Explain How Hiking Actually Changes Our Brains <\/a>or\u00a0Science Proves Premarital Sex Rewires the Brain<\/a>, I suggest the best response is a yawn (well actually, my recommended\u00a0response to that second link is a bit more than a yawn; indeed I recommend you activate your ‘disgust at the hijacking of science to promote your own agenda’ network. \u00a0If you’ve not developed such a network\u00a0yet, please do.).<\/p>\n

None of this is to say that the science behind these headlines is not interesting or important. \u00a0It often is. \u00a0Almost as often as it’s misrepresented to get the most advertising revenue possible.<\/p>\n

(By the way, if you doubt that my words permanently altered your brain, ask yourself, if they did not, how it\u00a0is that you can still remember what I wrote, and how is it that you’ll most likely still\u00a0recognise those words in a year’s time?)<\/p>\n

Now this blog post has been at the back of my mind for a while. \u00a0I was finally inspired to actually write it today when I read\u00a0Vaughan Bell’s critique of <\/a>‘Critical mental health<\/a>‘. \u00a0Which brings me to the ever present question of ‘Biological’ Vs. ‘Psychological’.<\/p>\n

I’m often asked whether a problem is biological or psychological in origin, and quite often, when I first see a client, they tell me that their doctor\u00a0told them something along the lines of:<\/p>\n

“You have a chemical imbalance in your brain, which we can try and fix with this medication”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the kind of thing that upsets me*. \u00a0For me, it’s a problematic misuse of ‘biological’ theories of mental function, and I have a number of concerns\u00a0with this kind of explanation:<\/p>\n

Firstly, the doctor has absolutely no idea whether what they said\u00a0is true. Setting aside the wider debate about whether antidepressants and anxiolytics do what they claim to do, without running a test, one cannot know whether another person’s brain chemicals are ‘unbalanced’ (whatever that might mean); and frankly, we don’t even have any meaningful tests to tell us whether this might be true. \u00a0It occurs to me, that the doctor in this case is misusing science to convince their patient to take a medication.<\/p>\n

Secondly, and connecting\u00a0back to the beginning of today’s blog, it feeds into\u00a0a wider problem, which is the tendency to separate the biological and the psychological. \u00a0I don’t see this as the doctor’s fault, it’s simply a tendency we have in today’s society, and which is reflected in\u00a0every article expressing surprise that hiking, sex or meditating\u00a0changes the brain.<\/p>\n

There are significant\u00a0consequences of labelling a problem ‘psychological’ or ‘biological’ and these vary from problem to problem, culture to culture and person to person. \u00a0It’s hard to know how an individual may respond to the idea that their brain is unbalanced and needs medication to make it better (hopefully a doctor will also indicate that psychology might also help this person, but that’s certainly not a given). \u00a0For some, it may be useful to have a ‘biological’ explanation, but for others, it may take away any sense of agency, any sense that they can do something about their condition other than take a medication (a good topic for a post\u00a0to come).<\/p>\n

There are indeed meaningful ways in which we can say a mental health difficulty\u00a0may have a significant ‘biological’ cause\u00a0(as in psychosis and chromosome\u00a022q11.2 deletion syndrome<\/a>, which Vaughan references), or\u00a0may have a clear ‘environmental’ trigger, such as when a person develops Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)\u00a0following a trauma**.<\/p>\n

Yet when it comes to ‘psychological’ vs ‘biological’, there is no sensible way to separate the two. \u00a0As I hope I may persuaded\u00a0you\u00a0earlier, anything and everything that you experience changes your biology, both temporarily and permanently . \u00a0If this was not the case, you’d experience nothing, you’d have no memories of what happened to you, and psychological therapy would have no purpose.<\/p>\n

Thus I believe that we should stop trying to separate the biological from the psychological and learn to always recognise\u00a0the two as different levels of explanation for the same thing. \u00a0Perhaps if we can do that, we might finally stop being surprised that\u00a0exercise\u00a0could make a person not only fitter, but also mentally healthier, and that this would be reflected in changes in the brain. \u00a0And perhaps it would stop us giving trite explanations like ‘your brain chemistry is unbalanced’.<\/p>\n

(As usual, feedback of any polite kind very welcome. \u00a0That includes comments on writing style, grammar, spelling, as well as agreements and disagreements. \u00a0Be as pedantic as you like).<\/p>\n

\n

Footnotes<\/strong>:
\n*\u00a0Of course I never know exactly what the doctor has said, and of course, I’m sure they have done it with the best of intentions.<\/p>\n

**As always, in nature vs nurture, in both cases, the story is likely more complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After reading this, your brain will quite simply never be the same again. \u00a0My ideas, transformed\u00a0by\u00a0my brain into a series of muscle stimulating electro-chemical nerve impulses and transferred\u00a0by my fingers\u00a0into my computer’s systems, will have been launched across\u00a0\u00a0the internet’s intricate web, eventually spawning\u00a0a torrent of photons that\u00a0will have streamed\u00a0though your eyes and onto\u00a0your retinae, unleashing\u00a0another … Continue reading After Reading This, Your Brain Will Never Be The Same<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,7,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-mental-health-media","category-uncategorized-en"],"yoast_head":"\nAfter reading this, your brain will never be the same.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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