Information Is Not Knowledge

One of my colleagues, a brilliant neuroscientist has a great deal of information about the brain but not knowledge of it; that is, no deep understanding of what it all means.  Schools make this mistake a lot;  confusing learning and thinking with information.    They fill us with loads of memory facts about wars and their dates but never any real knowledge.  Like the cause of war, how to avoid them, etc.   Now in neurology, yes, it helps to know about the brain but how does that knowledge help human beings?   That question is not often asked in brain research: how can this knowledge help us understand ourselves and how can we devise therapies that will advance the treatment of mental illness.

  My case in point is that there are psychiatrists out there who have an intimate knowledge of the brain but promote therapies that do not emanate from that knowledge; as though the knowledge is compartmentalized and does not inform understanding.  Like the intellectual information stands apart from treatment.  So it is like two worlds apart, the intellectual and the emotional where the right and left brains never get together.  It is the exact mirror of neurosis. The two are barely held together so that information from the left side never makes it over to the right. In other words the right side preferences for therapy can exist as if there were no left side knowledge.  Thus one of the most brilliant professionals can teach psychoanalysis that has not a shred of proof and has long been outdated because it is concocted separate from neurologic understanding.    Yet another professional offers booga booga mindfulness therapy without once explaining how this merges with or evolves out of neurologic science.  The reason?     It doesn’t.

   In the same way that psychologists can construct elaborate theories about a therapy contradicting a good deal of brain science.   As though our psychology does not come out of the brain.  Not identical but close brothers who need each other, the brain and its psychology.

  I have met some of these brain scientists and I marvel how they manage to elude everything they know about the brain to tout certain schools of therapy.  But I shouldn’t be surprised since the therapies they adhere to come out of the feeling side which is twisted and turned by neurosis.  No they are not misinformed; they are compartmentalized.   So we have a feeling side that drives them to unreality while their left side knows better.  But if I know I shouldn’t smoke and still do what does that mean?  That one side cannot communicate and control the other.

  These doctors are largely repressed and live in their heads; emotions take a back seat.  So these theoretical constructions derive out of a repressed brain or a neglected one.   Feelings being neglected lead to theories sans feelings and without sense.  And each time they spout non-verifiable ideas that contradict what they know. Just as I know I should not drink (I don’t) but still do because my needs take precedence.  And because the two brains have not properly met.  They meet in our primal world and once they do we could not think of concocting a theory that leaves out half the brain.  A theory not based on facts.    Each professional has an opinion that may not be informed by knowledge, but rather by their history and emotional life, or lack of it.  Don’t forget why so many of us went into the psych dodge in the first place; to stay in our heads.  Don’t let the brain get in the way; just build hypotheses out of one’s neurosis.  It is safe and keeps the person in his comfort zone.  No intellectual is going to posit a feeling therapy when they do not feel; even though they think they do.  Yes they “think” they do  but that is a long trip from the right brain where they would know for sure.

  So we have a dilemma;  psychologists who do not have enough knowledge of the brain to be guided or informed by it, while neurologists who are not acquainted with the right brain to be informed and guided by it.