There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative stress connecting to the more serious mental illnesses.
It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head.
Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomfort as mental health problems.
I'm a clinical psychologist and I don't think I've had a patient in therapy who had
1. Sleep 2. Exercise 3. Stress 4. Food
Figured out.
What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly.
Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.
I think that is an important construct. It allows us to abstract the notion of an individual and make it something well above a bag of bones and meat. By "above" I mean something superior, trancendant, more important.
A lot of religions have the concept of a soul, and due to Abrahahim religions, the West that concept persisted. Even if people don't believe in a soul there is still a concept of a mind as separate from the body.
In computer terms (because it is hacker news), there is a tempting analogy of software and hardware. The mind / self / personality / soul is the software. The body is the hardware. Of course, we know that software is stored by altering some parts of the hardware (electric charges, etc)). So there is a connection obviously, but we still talk about it as separate things.
But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account.
It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods.
Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers.
It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.
You can't measure the measurer, so there's a gap in our perception. There's a RI talk on this, where the color purple is discussed. There's really no color purple, for example. It's your eye picking up the absence of green when seeing blue and red light together.
In other words, perhaps purple is a program in your head.
Perhaps our ability to understand the nature of a measurement is an absence of something we yet to integrate into our knowledge base? My vote is for a momentary access to the global consciousness. Like an API with a "search" timer on it. It serves efficient queries faster. It does this in a fixed timeframe using a hierarchical form of evaluation. It knows everything it knows so far.
In other words, perhaps causality in this reality is based on some type of immutable programmable storage. Perhaps that' why it's hard to change things here too.
Heck, swap mind with soul and you may trace it as far back as we have "documented" history.
We have this strong resistance against seeing our thoughts, feelings and such as signal activity between a massive bundle of cells.
[1] for a variety of reasons people with severe mental illness die about 20 years earlier than the general population.
Change in balance of some neurotransmitters can cause symptoms of mental illness - but can purely psychological events (i.e. what you observe and contemplate) cause permanent alterations to that chemical balance, cellular dysfunction, structural damage in the brain, etc?
All psychological facts have physical correlates (in philosophy of mind, this is called "supervenience"). The only limit is our ability to measure things. As our ability to measure our own brains and bodies increases, we should expect to uncover more and more physical correlates of psychological conditions.
Psychological facts having physical correlates isn't the answer - to use a wrong-but-useful analogy; it's clear that hardware can inappropriately alter/damage software in many different ways, but in what ways software can/cannot damage or alter the normal functioning of the hardware? The other answers give some examples where this can happen - are there more direct ways?
Maybe not any that we are currently able to measure, but something's got to be changing. As an analogy, consider your computer: you could open it up, look inside, and feel that temperatures of different parts change over time, but you can't tell what it's doing or how well it is working just by looking at it. Even with fancy electrical equipment you'd have a hard time determining what's going on, beyond detecting that there's a lot of signal activity flowing around. To really see what's happening you need access through the software, and we just don't have that kind of access to the human mind.
It's not a question of being able to measure - I believe that we can measure e.g. synapses being strengthened and weakened as a result of learning skills; but that these changes don't change the physical functioning; it's just part of their normal functioning and it functioned exactly as well before and after - the behavior is different but physically equivalent.
For what I mean as a "meaningful change to the physical functioning", consider your computer - deleting all the software and installing a different operating system would not be a meaningful change to the physical functioning; the temperatures, electric charge and magnetic properties of the involved parts would be very different, but that doesn't matter as all the physical parts would still function in the same normal way although the screen would be displaying very different signals.
On the other hand, a software program that manages to physically disable or re-enable parts of some chip in a way that's not normally possible through software, blow a fuse in a hard drive or trigger a processor bug that "bricks" the processor - those would be the kind of changes to the general physical functioning I'm talking about. In what cases do we have such changes to the physical functioning of (parts of) the brain? Changes that are substantially different from any changes that the brain "does to itself" in the course of normal operation?
> Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common disorder associated with emotional dysregulation and other symptoms that have been hypothesized to be related to dysfunction of limbic brain areas including hippocampus and amygdala. The purpose ofthis study was to measure hippocampal and amygdala volumes in BPD. Hippocampal and amygdala volumes were measured with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 10 patients with BPD and 23 control subjects. Patients with BPD had a 21.9% smaller mean amygdala volume and a 13.1% smaller hippocampal volume, compared to controls. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that alterations in the hippocampus and amygdala are associated with BPD.
Here they see changes in the structure of the brain.
The question at hand is whether you can have thought patterns that cause structural/functional changes to happen.
They see changes in the structure of the brain and they see changes in behavior (BPD), but they're clearly not saying that BPD caused these structural changes - they list both causal directions as some of possible hypothesis (altered amygdala/hippocampus causing BPD and/or BPD-related experiences causing these alterations in amygdala/hippocampus), in addition to other possible scenarios e.g. the fact that all of their BPD-group was on psychotropic drugs could also have been a cause for the observed changes, etc. They also aren't making any conclusions about a possible link between childhood abuse and BPD (or link between abuse and these brain changes) beyond the fact that they chose a set of 10 subjects that all had both BPD and suffered abuse; they're not even discussing a correlation as their data isn't sufficient to say anything about that.
All the observations in this paper certainly are compatible with a hypothetical scenario where these brain changes cause BPD (or indeed, are BPD) but it was some factor other than emotional trauma that caused the observed changes in their brains. I don't know if it is that way, but this particular paper also doesn't give any evidence to support or deny it.
[edit] It even seems that they don't even state that there was a change in their brains - instead, they observe a difference between BPD patients and the control group; but it would also be consistent with a hypothesis that these patients had smaller hippocampus/amygdala e.g. since birth, and simply having that property (instead of a change) was a risk factor predisposing them to suffering BPD symptoms later in life; and the authors acknowledge this as a possible option in their conclusions.
On that note, memory's footprint is all over the brain. Learning judo is more than just filling up a psudo HDD with relevant information.
I see where you're coming from, but in the case of biological brains and their physiology, the hardware IS the software, no?
Granted this link fades over time (and likely therapy helps), but the body is not always good at handling major stresses and the damage can become permanent.
I think they took a different group of people and predicted differences in the amygdala based on psychologic symptoms, and then checked that in MRI scans, and found the differences they predicted. (Although I'm having trouble find the links at the moment.)
I think so. Amblyopia is an example of structural changes in the brain based on what you observe. It generally happens early in life when the brain is more plastic but it proves it is possible. There is also evidence that amblyopia may be able to be treated in adulthood.
The experience was incredibly shocking for him. The idea that his feelings could actually cause him direct physical harm really freaked him out. Furthermore, the event caused his tantrum to end very suddenly. The tantrum came to a screeching halt, so to speak. Without any training, he was able to use this experience as a form of biofeedback. He had felt something in his brain when it stopped and that allowed him to find some means to interrupt the runaway process at subsequent events.
He didn't like being mad, so being mad made him mad about the fact that he was mad and it created a positive feedback look that caused his anger to just go off the rails. He stopped having tantrums following this incident.
I think, yes, psychological things can literally have direct physical impact. We know it can do things like raise your blood pressure. This is an ordinary thing. With extreme enough experiences, I see no reason why it wouldn't impact the brain in a meaningful way with long term consequences
Why would experienced trauma be any different from any other extremely powerful (and repeated) (yet traumatic) learning experience, thus causing permanent change in the brain to "capture" and "remember" the incident like any other powerful learning experience?
I mean, not the physical changes that amount to "now your motor neurons have changed so that they swing a golf club more accurately" but physical changes that are like "now your motor system or learning system or the regulation of something seemingly unrelated is structurally different because you've been seeing/hearing/thinking these things" ?
I'm not talking about a memory "subsystem" being changed so that it now contains and remembers the incident; that's the usual function of it; I'm talking about the memory (or other) subsystem being changed so that it is now somehow fundamentally altered, processes things differently from its normal function, or fails to process something that it could before.
That is just one example, but there are quite a lot of other long-term structural changes in the brain after chronic stress.
[1] http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322... [2] http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/0006-3223...
The article presents this as an issue of physical vs. psychological, but even stripped of that misconception it's still an interesting article.