The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

by V.S. Ramachandran

from epilepsy starting in his late teens. He had periodic bouts of depression, but it was hard to know whether this was related to his seizures or to reading too much Sartre and Heidegger, as many intelligent teenagers do.

The brain finds free-floating (inexplicable) anxiety less tolerable than anxiety which can be clearly attributed to a source. If this is correct, one wonders if it might be possible to “cure” panic attacks by taking advantage of the fact that the patient often knows a few seconds ahead of time that an attack is about to occur. If you are the patient, then as soon as you sense the attack coming on, you could quickly start watching a horror movie on your iPhone, for example. This might abort the attack by allowing your brain to ascribe the physiological arousal to the external horror, rather than to some terrifying but intangible inner cause. The fact that you “know” that it’s only a movie at some higher intellectual level doesn’t necessarily rule out this treatment; after all, you do feel fear when watching a horror movie even while recognizing that it’s “only a movie.” Belief is not monolithic; it exists in many layers whose interactions one can manipulate clinically using the right trick.