You Mean the Brain is an Orphan?

 There is a picture in a new science magazine of a doctor holding a human brain declaring that she was going delve deep in the brain to find answers to so many maladies.   (This is the year of the brain, after all). Wait a minute:  what if the answers lie not in the brain but in the parents' brains who affected and infected that brain?   Don’t we want to know what environment that brain grew up in?   Was it an orphan?  Then almost for sure there will be brain impairment later in life.   And looking the brain cells will tell us nothing of this.  If that brain had no loving and warmth in the first weeks and months of life the brain will suffer but it won’t declare it.  All I am saying is that life in any form lives in an environment and is shaped by it, so how could we leave it out of the equation?

Could we ever understand ADD by looking at the brain in isolation?  Leaving out the events that were at the origin of the cause.  Could a kidney specialist know that his sick patient drank for thirty years?   Just by examining the kidneys?  Sometimes.  But not always.  That is precisely what is wrong with the Behaviorists; taking behavior as the sine qua non.  And worse, trying to change behavior without reference to what those behaviors were, and how they shaped us..   So we confine our field of inquiry to a vary narrow space that lets no new related information in.  They take an isolated brain without parents and try to figure out why patients have those compulsions or obsessions, and then try to change behavior into some “wholesome” idea of how it should be.  They force a behavior detour even against the biology of the patient.  His whole system moves to the left when it should move to the right.   It militates to the thinking cortex instead of the feeling one.  And he tries to obey; thinking before he feels so he is not impulsive.  Looking at full ashtrays to get over the urge to smoke and many other ploys that never look at causes. Above all, not understanding the imprinted memories lodged in the lower reaches of the brain that are deeply embedded, which force and drive behaviors.  There are roots to attitudes and behaviors. We are not decorticates rummaging around the world. But some therapies act as though we were; extracting the lonely brain for study without regard to its history.  Psychotherapy cannot be a-historic unless we are doing brief YMCA Counseling:  “You know you need to exercise more.”

Would we treat heart disease without knowing how tense the patient is or how he never exercises? We would be roaming in the dark.  When we say we are social animals it means we are affected by social events; we do not live in a vacuum.  We must study the total interplay of our physical self with outside events.  How can anyone get over his depression without knowing the originating events?   Yet that is exactly what we do.  Give pills for depression and if that does not work we give more powerful pills and then surgery for the brain and maybe electroshock, all without digging deep enough to observe those forces “alive.”  Going on blindly without seeing the brain at work deep down. Yes we can do that.  We see the brain live, meaning alive and living.  We see the pain memory and what it does and how strong it is; finally we see how it drives behavior.  Did I say “behavior”?  Yes I did. We see origins; no more guesswork.  Aah.