The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

by Eric R. Kandel

One of the great steps forward in the modern era was the realization that Descartes had it backward: in actuality, “I am, therefore I think.”

Modern studies of consciousness and its disorders suggest that consciousness is not a single, uniform function of the brain; instead, it is different states of mind in different contexts.

Your senses do provide the information you need to act, but they don’t present your brain with an objective reality. Instead, they give your brain the information it needs to construct reality.

The more we learn about unusual minds, the more likely we are as individuals and as a society to understand and empathize with people who think differently and the less likely we are to stigmatize or reject them.

Imaging has also confirmed that psychotherapy is a biological treatment—that it physically changes the brain, as drugs do.

We also know that vigorous exercise builds bone mass. Thus it is likely that osteocalcin released by the bones ameliorates age-related memory loss in people as well as mice.

In other words, while they were improvising, their brain was damping down their inhibitions normally mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. They were able to create new music in part because they were uninhibited and not self-conscious about being creative.

We do not know what accounts for this creativity in autistic people, but a review by Francesca Happé and Uta Frith of numerous studies suggests that superior sensory acuity, focus on detail, visual memory, and detection of patterns may be involved, along with an obsessive need to practice.

These findings suggest that the biological basis for talent in, say, numerical or calendar calculations does not differ appreciably from the basis of talent in art or music—a conclusion that may extend to neurotypical people as well.31

As Rudolf Arnheim points out, “Present psychiatric opinion holds that psychosis does not generate artistic genius but at best liberates powers of the imagination that under normal conditions might remain locked up by the inhibitions of social and educational convention.”

In a large study published recently in Nature Neuroscience, Robert Power, a scientist affiliated with deCODE Genetics in Iceland, and his colleagues found that genetic factors which raise the risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are more prevalent in people who are in creative professions.44 Painters, musicians, writers, and dancers were, on average, 25 percent more likely to carry these gene variants than people who work in professions judged to be less creative: farmers, manual laborers, and salespeople.

The later discovery of the insular cortex provided biological confirmation of James’s idea that our bodily response to fear precedes our awareness of fear.

(Scientists don’t know why men who experience traumatic stress are so much less likely to develop PTSD.)

People who have suffered trauma as children are much more likely to develop PTSD as adults because trauma affects the developing brain differently than it does the adult brain.

Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from animal models is that the heritability of addiction is moderately high: roughly 50 percent. This means that the genetic risk of addiction is greater than that of type II diabetes or high blood pressure.

Many of us, when faced with an important choice, take out the proverbial piece of paper and make a list of plusses and minuses to help us decide what to do. But experiments have shown that this may not be the best way to make a decision. If you are overly conscious, you may talk yourself into thinking you prefer something that you really don’t like. Instead, you are best off when you allow yourself to gather as much information as possible about the decision and then let it percolate unconsciously.