T.the human brain, Veronica O’Keane tells us, contains 68bn neurons. The truth is easy to say, but the effect is… well, soft-spoken. Neurons, or zero cells, record and process information from the physical world, and control the body’s activity with electronic messages. They bind together through dendrites, and the cell assemblages burn together as a unit. Since each neuron can have up to 15,000 dendrites, the binding abilities are, as O’Keane put it, “almost limitless”.
Burning and stringing cell assemblies create memories. “The key process in creating even short-term memory is what the cells need fire together for enough time to be string together. Burning together creates a stagnant memory and more permanent memory wiring. ” Quite simply.
No, of course not. The activity of the brain is the great wonder of the world, and until recently we could do little but estimate it with helpless wonder. Neuroscience has made rapid progress, however, largely due to advances in other fields, such as computer technology, and even particle physics.
O’Keane is a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin and a counseling psychologist. As a working scientist, rather than a theorist, she is interested in what the brain does when it works as a mind – although she would reject the distinction: “Brain and mind,” she says. , “They are one and the same” – and what happens, and why it happens, when the mind loses its way in the haunted forest of everyday experience.
She punctuates her statement with a brief but uncertain history of some of the patients she has treated in her work as a clinician. These corridors are vibrant and instantaneous, and more influential in the measured and neutral way in which they are laid out. If O’Keane is as good a doctor as she is in prose style, her patients are indeed lucky.
Her first “story” is that of Edith, whom she met while working at the Royal Bethlem Hospital in London in the early 2000s. Edith had no history of mental illness until she was born, but after that, the onset of her illness was rapid and devastating. “Like most women in postpartum depression, she seemed to be in a changed state, as if she had been taken out of the world. “The conviction, provoked by emotional voices in her head, was a sign of her psychosis that the baby she was born with had been abducted and replaced with a similar” changeling “- a common delusion -author returns to it at the very end of her book, neatly closing the structural chain.
In time Edith responded to antipsychotic medication, and was able to return to normal life with her child and family. In subsequent investigations, she admitted that she was ashamed that she rejected the child while believing the child had been abducted. O’Keane explained to her that the psychosis was the result of hormonal changes that occurred at birth, which led to “personal experiences that seemed to come from the outside”.
Here we come across the “first principle that we must establish”, which is that what are called symptoms are real sensory experiences. Hearing a sound, a human voice, is a personal experience, whether the voice comes from the outside world or is generated in the brain by pathological cloud firing. ”The voices Edith heard were imaginative, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a real experience to hear them. It may seem like an obvious point, but it is often downplayed by those who care for and treat people with mental health problems. Sometimes the more we know, the more we forget.
And with this we know a great deal about how the brain works, although our knowledge may not be as complete as O’Keane suggests. She is impatient with the interesting notion that “some human experiences are ‘psychological’ and others ‘organic’. ”For them, the conclusion is:“ In the real organic life of man, the work and matter of the brain is easily recognizable, because all knowledge is in the brain, whether it is normal or abnormal. it is, based on the case and how that business works. ”
But is the case so quick and dry? To say that “action and brain matter are recognizable” is to illuminate the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. This was celebrated in the mid-1990s by Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers, and has inspired a major movement among scientific and philosophical columns.
To put it simply – perhaps simply – the question Chalmers is asking is, how can consciousness arise from an unconscious matter, such as neurons and dendrites? In other words, how a lump of gray matter can be important think? Or to get closer to O’Keane’s main theme, how do our physical brains store onions as mobile and as late as memories? Several solutions have been put forward, but the hardest problem is as severe as ever. Why not? In other forms it was already old when the pre-Socratics became involved.
But this is to quibble. O’Keane has written an interesting, informative, wise and compassionate book, given the importance and value of hard to add. The author’s voice is measured and humane, the range of reference is wide, especially in literature – from Proust to John Berger, from William James to Samuel Beckett – and the clinical and philosophical ideas are as inspiring as they are inspiring.
In these pages there is a lot for the reader, or at least for this reader, to learn, but there is also a lot that is just enjoyable. For example, did you know that there is a hormone that affects the onset of childhood in girls called kisspeptin, or KiSS? For more of that, search inside.
• Rag and Bone: How We Make Memories and How Memories Make Us is published by Allen Lane (RRP £ 20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery costs may apply.