A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry | Hacker News Reader

A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry

nature.com

41 pointsfremden10 comments

> we have had little insight into exactly how disturbances in the brain cause psychiatric disorders

I recently heard a well-regarded neuropsychiatrist disavow any pretense of connecting his evaluation to the actual organic function of the brain or body. This was surprising for a—as far as I know— organic-focused subspecialty of a branch of medicine that routinely prescribes pharmaceuticals to achieve organic changes in the brain and body.

I mean I sort of get it. When you aren't taking objective data (I don't know what that would even be, brain scans or testing for levels of neurotransmitters, if those levels even mean anything..?) then what can you do besides acknowledge that it's a black box? Guessing what is going on in someone's skull would be disingenuous, no?

I'm sure they would like to know what was going on in the brain but I think often people just don't. Probably the more scientifically sophisticated the person is, the more likely they are to admit that.

A lot of prescribing of psychiatric drugs seems to be trial and error as much as anything.

I have completed an interview with a neurosurgeon recently. I'm writing an article for a big magazine about AI and Brains, and I was given a chance to get some comments from a neurosurgeon about AI, thinkingness and how he things things work.

I can't disclose the contents of the interview, this is under NDA till published. But, gosh, was that bad.

I thought neurosurgeon would know something about thinking process, and stuff like that. The guy in a state of a total despair. When I was bashing him with questions about the purpose of a brain and all that stuff, he was almost crying.

He ended up telling me that he hopes that someone will find quantum entanglement in the brain, and everything will be fine after that. After he sent me to this from PBS Science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k

Thinking is slippery as a concept, but feelings are what they’re usually after, and these can be remarkably deterministic by other than mental processes. The study of Israeli judges was debunked, but I think we all have experienced this at some level.

The NPR show This American Life had a segment years ago on the mind, “Life is a Coin with One Side.”[1] Producer David Kestenbaum provided his take, including that quantum effects can inject randomness but do not provide a complete explanation for thinking process or free will. He recounted the story of a friend who engaged in repetitive behaviors after a concussion, as an illustration that the mind is a machine, which like AI has wonderful emergent capabilities.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/where-there-is-a-will/a...

Ha. I think it's unlikely to involve entanglement myself and probably the closest model we have at the moment is LLMs but obviously those are different. I think a lot of what neurosurgeons do is things like removing tumors and dealing with burst or clogged blood vessels which don't require understanding how the actual thinking works.

Keep in mind that we also have no clue how general anesthesia works! It's not just psychiatry, many medications targeting the nervous system (e.g. muscle relaxants) have unknown mechanisms of action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Drugs_with_unknown_me...

I think you're being extremely reductive about what neuropsychiatry actually entails.

It would be interesting to explore further why this topic is still so sensitive for a lot of people, and why the metaphorical talk is still so appealing. I feel like the reasons given in this article couldn't alone explain its enormous staying power (even to this day).

I heard an interesting talk recently by a Stanford neuroscientist.

He was studying standing waves of brain activity among circularly linked groups of neurons. Neurons can provide both excitatory inputs and inhibitory inputs to other neurons.

For a computer programmer, it is easy to imagine excitatory and inhibitory localized phenomena giving rise to all sorts of interesting and complex self-sustaining standing waves.

Think of the study of cellular automata by Stephen Wolfram and others, in which various simple localized rules give rise to all sorts of interesting computational phenomena, up to and including Turing Completeness.

In animal models such as pigs, these standing waves can be observed to persist for months if not longer.

His particular area of interest is to subject the brain to gentle sub-lethal doses of radiation treatment in order to change selected standing waves.

My thought is that there may be a qualitative difference between the underlying "neural hardware" and the thought processes that "execute" on this hardware.

It is the bread and butter of computer scientists to reason in a world in which the complexity of software greatly exceeds the simple computational artifacts on which it runs.

One might say that chess has information content that is qualitatively dissimilar to the wood-working needed to make a pretty chess board.

The information content in DNA is composed of chemically interchangeable A, G, T, and C molecules. So, one might say that the underlying physics is "walled off" from the information content of the DNA. Evolution has, as it were, a free hand to encode advantageous alleles, with no bias introduced by the underlying physics or chemistry.

All this is to say "Hear hear!" to this excellent article.

The "metaphorical brain talk" the author describes may indeed be a conceptual limitation if applied too broadly to the mind.

I'm not really up on neuroscientific research but I'd think a way of progressing might be to make computer simulations of neurons and then see if you can get those to exhibit similar phenomena as those waves and other experimental observations.

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