Is it to accurate say that a brain area is the 'seat of' any particular experience?
And, if it is, how can the knowledge help us?
“…the subcallosal cingulate region), which mediates our unconscious and motor responses to emotional stress; the other is the right anterior insula, a region where self-awareness and interpersonal experience come together.
These two regions connect to the hypothalamus, which plays a role in basic functions like sleep, appetite and libido, and to three other important regions of the brain: the amygdala, which evaluates emotional salience; the hippocampus, which is concerned with memory; and the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of executive function and self-esteem.”
The above is extracted from Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s piece in the New York Times: The New Science of Mind. It is about the attempts to quantify what is — to some — unquantifiable: a measure (a biomarker) for mental disorders, in which, it seems, we have made progress.
The exciting vista, perhaps, is the applicability of these biomarkers/methods to the wider public. Mental disorders are, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex class, notches at the far end of a continuum; where ‘stressed’, ‘shy’, ‘emotional’, ‘aggressive’ and even ‘OK’ all lie on the same continuum (by the way, I am painfully aware that these are labels born of 20th century Western psychology, but they make the point). That means that there may be the possibility of biomarkers with more general applicability — and that means we have the opportunity, at some point in the near future, to use them in much the same way as we use scales to measure weight and body-mass-index. If it can be measured, so the saying goes, it can be managed. And who wouldn’t want to be less stressed?
As an example of what I mean, the work of Sara Lazar has interested me for a while, I heard her first on the secular buddhist podcast (I’m not a buddhist but I am interested meditation as a brain exercise technology — and therefore its scientific underpinnings) and watched her Ted Talk. Her work uses fMRI scans to assess the results of meditation on the brain. You can read her paper yourself, but, in the interpretation of the researchers, the results show an ‘increase in grey matter’ in certain areas of the brain, for example,in the hippocampus, which, the study’s extract states, is “known to be important for learning and memory”, and a ‘decrease in grey matter’ in other areas of the brain, specifically the amygdala, which, the extract states, “is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress”.
Let me ask a quick question, given the three sources I have put into the previous paragraph, how likely now are you to consider using meditation versus how likely you were before reading it? And, how likely now would you engage in an 8 week course if — at the end of it — you could see thickened grey matter in your hippocampus?
Powerful, no?
The Big But
But the story doesn’t end there. For the interested observer, there has been a lot of controversy over the use of fMRI, and specifically when it comes to making claims over the ‘location’ of mental processes. The overselling of neuroscience has made Neuroskeptic, Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic essential reading: whenever a high profile neuro-story makes waves — it is to these blogs (and other similar) I go to get the sane view. In fact, the neuro-hyperbole has required a redressing book.
Erik Kandel, in the New York Times piece even starts with a warning:
These days it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging — for example, that a single fMRI scan can reveal our innermost feelings — and with inflated claims about our understanding of the biological basis of our higher mental processes.
What’s perhaps worse, is not the blogosphere’s criticism of enthusiastic media interpretations, but inherent and, seemingly endemic, flaws in fMRI methodologies and statistical methods spanning the decades that has had the neuroscientists themselves questioning their relevance.
And none of that even addresses the deeper human sciences point about how we can even say anything about mental processes given metaphors created by those processes to provide a dynamic ‘selfing system’ a coherent (if illusory) conscious narrative. But, I’m taking a pragmatic view — if it works, it works — even if just within a certain frame of reference.
So, where does that leave us? On the one hand we have the promise of brain imaging, biomarkers and encouraging studies and TED talks like that of Sara Lazar’s, on the other we have the barrage of anti-fMRI sentiment. I found it difficult to work out what we did and what we didn’t know. Happy to concede there isn’t a brain area just for dreams that would flag up my desire to buy a new pair of jeans, but equally I’d rather not lose the romance of the amygdala response, or the significance of a bigger hippocampus in a London cabbie.
What, then, was an armchair popsci to do?
The answer
Me, I went to Quora. And I asked this question:
And, within 24 hours got an excellent answer from Yohan John a PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University (and who blogs at Neurologism.com). It’s a long and well thought out answer (with 40-plus (at time of writing) up-votes it’s well worth reading) and the upshot was that brain imaging is not the only game in town, in fact, brain function has been studied using a variety of methods, from lesion studies to neuroanatomy, and that (in particular) certain areas are better studied than others — and therefore have a greater evidential provenance. Yohan says,
So to sum it up, sweeping statements about brain function should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the size of the pinch should be proportional to the newness of the claim. Some ideas about the hypothalamus, for example, have been corroborated by many of the techniques I have mentioned.
Which was good enough for me. Because, I think it left the Lazar study as viable (subject, I suppose, to its methodological rigour). And therefore, offers a real,scientific, evidential underpinning to a stress-reducing technique that can only benefit us all.
