I am not good at recalling names, and never have been. Is my brain not working as well as it did? Is it dementia? Or does everyone have weaknesses that get progressively worse as you age?
Autism is hereditary, but you don’t inherit autism
The probability of having autism is greater for an individual if it runs in their family. This suggests hereditary factors. But what do you actually inherit? What you inherit is a predisposition for a specific development of your brain. This, together with what you experience while growing up, can lead to the development of a mild to severe form of autism.
Letters and messages, neurons and thoughts
Is a thought simply the sum total of the activity of all the neurons in the brain? No, just as a message is not simply the placement of a sequence of letters which follow the rules of grammar. How do those letters stand in relation to that message? How does the activity of neurons stand in relation to a thought? Was Descartes right, or are we our brain?
Let the sunshine in
How would we manage, if we could not visualise three-dimensional objects from flat two-dimensional diagrams? An amazing feat our brain performs. What role does pre-determined programming play in this? That is related to how the sun shines on us.
Hallucinations: seeing what you expect
Someone who is hallucinating will see things, whole scenes and events which are not actually there, and experience them as real.How can this be? Because you see what you expect, unless it is corrected by your perceptions. Which is where things can go wrong.
The parable of the murderous brain
In a country with golden sand dunes by the sea, each year saw more murders committed than the year before. Neuroscientists had proven that the murderer’s brain made him commit the murder. The judges were stuck. How could they solve this problem?
The new crystal ball: predicting future disease
Disease can be seen as the antechamber of death.
Are there reliable tests for predicting disease? The short answer is: not for Alzheimer’s or other common diseases. Tests do exist for some specific diseases, most with known familial predispositions, such as Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne’s dystrophy and many more.
Driving and memory
When you drive a car, you have to execute several actions at the same time, and also pay attention to traffic. For this to take place, most of your actions are performed automatically. These are laid down in a separate memory in a specific part of the brain: the corpus striatum.
Where are the new medicines for psychiatry?
I do not foresee any new medicines for psychiatry coming any day soon.
Everybody wants fast acting psychotropics, but that is not possible for most psychiatric disorders.
But integration of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy can be extremely rewarding.
Who directs the brain?
Our brain controls everything we do and think and what happens in our body. Who directs these complicated brains? “I” do? No, there is no central power or police force, no editor, prime minister or CEO, no leader. The brain controls all without a director.
