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What we are learning about autism, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease, for example, can help us understand the neural circuits involved in social interactions, in thoughts, feelings, behavior, memory, and creativity just as surely as studies of those neural circuits can help us understand brain disorders.
The dividing line separating “normal” and “abnormal” has been drawn in different places by different societies throughout history.
the genetic makeup, or genome, of any two people is more than 99 percent identical.
it appears increasingly likely that there are actually no profound differences between neurological and psychiatric illnesses and that as we understand them better, more and more similarities will emerge.
Sensory or social deprivation early in life can impair the structure of the brain.
Oxytocin increases trust and the willingness to bear risks—essential features for friendship, love, and the organization of family.
Psychotherapy is an integral part of treatment for most people with psychiatric illnesses. Put simply, it is a verbal exchange between a patient and a therapist within a supportive relationship.
psychotherapy is a biological treatment; it produces detectable, lasting physical changes in our brain.
For the most part, our genes determine whether we are likely to develop a mood disorder.
Schizophrenia is not a rare disorder. It affects about 1 percent of people worldwide and roughly 3 million people in the United States. It strikes without regard to class, race, gender, or culture, and it varies greatly in severity.
One of the many things that psychotherapy can accomplish is to help patients realize that they have a disorder, a disease: they are not a bad person but a good person suffering from delusions or hallucinations.
Imaging has also confirmed that psychotherapy is a biological treatment—that it physically changes the brain, as drugs do. Imaging has even predicted, in some cases of depression, which patients are best treated with drugs, with psychotherapy, or with both.
we are again reminded of how much we owe to animal models of disease. Genetic studies of social behavior in animals have shown that some of the same genes that contribute to social behavior in animal models also contribute to our own social behavior; mutations in those genes may therefore be involved in autism spectrum disorders. Recent studies of schizophrenia, in particular, have relied heavily on mouse models for vital clues to the causes of this disorder of thought and volition.
performance on implicit tasks can actually be impaired when we consciously contemplate the action.
good news for people with a normally aging brain. They can maintain crucial mental functions into old age, provided they eat healthfully, exercise, and interact with others. Just as we have learned to extend the life of the body, we must also extend the life of the mind.
the left brain and right brain have different functions and that they inhibit each other.
By viewing psychotic states as totally foreign to normal behavior, we fail to recognize that such states are often dramatic representations of character types or temperaments found in the general population—and often found to a greater degree in the minds of creative thinkers, scientists, and artists.
The skeptical and frequently hostile reactions to prions from many precincts of the scientific community reflected resistance to a profound change in thinking. Prions were seen as an anomaly: they reproduce and infect but contain no genetic material—neither DNA nor RNA; thus they constitute a disruptive transition in our understanding of the biological world.
when we speak, we know the gist of what we’re going to say, even though we don’t know precisely what we’re going to say until we say it.
Conscious activity is restricted in what it can focus on: it selects only a single item at a time and broadcasts it widely across the brain.
while we are concentrating on our inner thoughts—as we often do—our brain keeps new sensory stimuli out.
you are best off when you allow yourself to gather as much information as possible about the decision and then let it percolate unconsciously.
William James set this sequence of events on its ear. James realized not only that the brain communicates with the body but, equally important, that the body communicates with the brain. He proposed that our conscious experience of emotion takes place after the body’s physiological response.
with some notable exceptions, psychoanalysts have not embraced the last fifty years’ worth of knowledge about the biology of the brain and its control of behavior.
neurology and psychiatry will merge into a common clinical discipline that focuses increasingly on the patient as an individual with particular genetic predispositions to health and disease.
