Positive Difference Making Fundamentals in Focus - An Introduction to Meditation

Positive Difference Making Fundamentals

an Introduction to Meditation

As I've mentioned in the past, a neat aspect about authoring a book in online segments in blog form like this is that I can respond quickly to the feedback I get from readers. It helps me a great deal to get reader feedback as it is important to me to know how my material and approaches are being received and it helps as well for me to understand what needs further or better clarification and where readers might be having trouble with the concepts. 

As such, I had some questions and points raised following the previous post on "zombie programs", the autonomously running subconscious brain programs that run most of our conscious lives. 

Essentially, the questions and points came down to "are we really just zombies with no free will?" (There was a decidedly disheartened and not very enthused tone to this question)

These are excellent questions, and questions that are much, much on the minds of philosophers to neuroscientists the world over and have been for many, many years. 

Regular readers of my posts related to the brain, brain evolution, my post in my other blog on "Dopamine the Bus Driver",  how individual brains develop and how our brains create our individual perceptions of reality may have picked up that I don't have a lot of belief (if any) in the concept of "free will". And I don't. I used to defend to the death the notion that we had free will but the evidence just overwhelmed that position; both my personal evidence when my mind would go on radically wild out of my conscious control "voyages" (I have written about some of these extensively elsewhere) despite heroic efforts to master more control over it (and we may see that I am getting there anyway, but in time) plus all the evidence that neuroscience and neuroscientists have uncovered in recent years (it has been said that more has been discovered about the human brain in the last five years than all of prior history combined). 

I have been humbled repeatedly - literally brought to my knees - about where my mind would take me at times (these were very horrendous "inner voyages", I can assure you) and despite having some conscious awareness that I needed to somehow control or stop them, I was utterly powerless to do so. Sometimes I had no conscious awareness at all - my body was just taken over by something else. And each time after I came out the other side, I'd think "what the hell was that all about and where the hell did it come from?!!". Then I'd analyze it through the lens of neuroscience and go off in search of what may have been at the root of that particular experience. 

So on a personal experience level there's that. (1)

But then there's all the mountains of evidence of how the brain operates subconsciously to produce what you consciously experience (which I tried as briefly and as concisely and clearly as I could to outline in that previous post on "zombie programs"). In the beginning of my neuroscience adventure, I really, really looked for evidence of free will. I felt I desperately needed free will to gain control over this wild and wacky mind of mine. But I just could not find any evidence and instead found all evidence pointing to the conclusion that we have very little "say" in what goes on "under the hoods" of our brains and that in fact our brains pretty much "run our ships" with little input from "the captain" (AKA: you or me). 

I also study people a lot in the real world. I talk to a lot of people. And I have all these clever little lines of questions and conversation to sort of "plumb their depths" and subsequently observe their behaviour matching that to what they'd previously said or their stated beliefs and so on. I then match this to the enormous volumes I've read on human behaviour and cognitive psychology, etc. 

And I'm sorry to report that I saw no evidence anywhere that we are in "free will" control over our lives, IE; what we say, do and decide. 

But, I've found, when people are hit with this realization - and I've gotten some pretty intense and distressed feedback on this from readers (2) - it can create a real Existential Crisis. 

And the last thing I want to create in a blog designed to help people right their mental health ships is create more problems. But then again, I think I have come to the conclusion that at least a little existential questioning of our selves may be a Good Thing. Existential questions about one's life may actually be a root of What's Going On in one's life to create chronically distressed and depressed moods and states. It could well be the root of what's going on. So maybe it's not a Bad Thing to be faced with this question of one's own free will or lack of it. 

But so that you don't melt down into an existential crisis or - worse - veer off into all kinds of dark nihilistic "fuck it, I'm just a zombie, I don't fucking care anymore" directions, we'd better address this here and now.  

Now it's true that we humans - like all animal species with brains built along similar lines to us (and our brains are remarkably similar to all mammal brains - that's why they're used to such great effect in neuroscientific research) - all operate more or less completely autonomously. 

Now, there are two things I want you to understand about the human brain before we freak out about all this. One is that free will or not, the human brain is the most advanced "survival mechanism" in the known universe and in the four billion year history of evolution. Trust me on this one: it is - even yours - an extremely good survival machine. I could wax on forever over all the unfathomably impressive and powerful systems it has evolved to guide your fanny through life. Your brain is very well equipped to guide you through life (all occasional appearances to the contrary notwithstanding). 

Plus - PLUS - my friends, we humans have an ace up our evolutionary sleeves: we have this spiffy thing called consciousness. No other creature on earth enjoys - nor is tortured by, mind you - consciousness on the levels that we humans have. 

It is consciousness where we can make more "free" choices about where our lives may or may not lead. Or even how our very brains themselves operate. Or what we deeply believe and so on. 

If there is free will, it is to be found and exercised in our fancy evolutionary advanced consciousness. 

Now I'm going to leave a more complete description of what consciousness is and how it works and why for a separate future piece but for now I will tell you that it is in understanding consciousness (and how it works and why) that is where the rubber meets the road in gaining more mastery over your selves and over that 3 pound blob of tofu like substance between your ears that drives you so batty (for those so interested, we take a detailed look at consciousness here). 

In the previous post I likened our consciousness to the screen and speakers of your computer - those represent what you "see" (and hear) or are "aware of" at any one time out of all what your computer (along with its Internet connection) could present at any one time. And that is what our consciousness does - it is what we are being made aware of by our brains out of all the ginormous (and almost astronomical) amounts of incoming sensory data (that coming in through our five senses and the gut-mind axis) and that crazy amount of stuff our own brains store and may need to feed up to us for attention (you'll recall from the previous post the million or possibly millions of gigabytes of data that your brain holds). 

I also mentioned that the cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars (2) likened our consciousness to a "plate", a sort of working plate (that's actually a little "poetic licence" on my part, it's properly known and presented as Global Workspace Theory); what we can put there and work on at any one time. So if we think of our consciousness as a plate and our brain as the biggest restaurant buffet in the universe, our consciousness is the plate on which we can serve up from that vastly huge and varied buffet at any one time. 

I also mentioned that I posited that a lot of mental breakdowns are to do with a) those "zombie program" autonomous brain systems malfunctioning or not cooperating properly and they're flooding our conscious experience (or the computer screens or plates of our analogies) with some really wrong stuff (from dangerously dark thoughts and thoughts of harm or suicide to delusional thoughts to hallucinations and so on) or are overfilling it and we melt down from overwhelm (or quite possibly combinations thereof).

Hands up those of you who have experienced that? Yeah, okay, I don't think I'm going to be able to count all those hands. You can put them down now. 

So, to cut to the chase, how do we better control what our brains present to our conscious experience (or computer screen or "working plate")? 

This is not a new conundrum, my friends. Probably not long after humans began to evolve our advanced consciousness (and with it the ability to experience inner thoughts and dialogues), people began to notice that a lot of crazy shit could show up in their conscious minds. Not only that, they noticed - within themselves and others - that what popped up into their consciousness could make them (or others) do a whole lot of crazy shit - a lot of it probably going against the "norms" of whatever tribe or group or culture they belonged to. And thus began all kinds of methods being cooked up by group elders or seers or shamans or "high priests" and what have you to control what went on in our conscious experiences. And thus arose practically all religions because believing in, praying to and "following the directions" of a god and religious tenets and dogma actually can - for many people - deal with this issue of wayward and wacky human conscious experience. 

But I'm not one of them. 

Another method, however, discovered and developed some 2,500 years ago and which has been compiling a very impressive track record ever since is - ta da!

Meditation. 

The word meditation can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To many it'll conjure up vague images of hippie like new agers in wild coloured tie-dyed shirts and so on. Or maybe it conjures up images of some Hindu guru sitting in the lotus position on some craggy mountaintop somewhere (the subject of no shortage of western comic images). Or perhaps of weird looking bald men and women in saffron coloured robes sitting around chanting. Or maybe the Dali Lama.

All of which may trigger a reaction along the lines of "That weirdo shit isn't for me. Screw that".

Which, you know, fair enough. That would have been me not all that long ago. 

But, as you know, I study a lot of neuroscience. And if you study neuroscience as broadly and as open minded enough as I do, you will be bound to come across the amount of research done on meditation and its power to change and transform the human brain. No, I did not say mind nor did I mean the mind, I said - and meant - the brain. And by change and transform the brain, I mean its very structure, its connections, the brain waves that help coordinate cognitive activity and actual core brain systems. Change the brain, thus change the mind.

Hey, like I have often said, I just go by the evidence and there is absolutely no shortage of evidence for the power of meditation on the brain. Not only that, but the power of meditation to put you more in the driver's seat of your consciousness experience. I actually originally intended to present a good deal of that evidence in this introductory post but I see that - in typical Bradonian style - that I have prattled on a good deal too long already. But I feel it's really important for readers to deeply understand why I recommend meditation so highly and why I think it's essential for you to accept the use of it to get your mind in better shape and to learn to take better control over your brain and thus who and what you are and thus your life. 

So I'm going to start off by putting the concept of meditation in a different light. Let's go back to our computer screen (and speakers) metaphor for consciousness. Now imagine you've lost control of what's on the screen - all kinds of pages are popping up, annoying pop up ads, all kinds of assaults of strange sounds through the speakers, you can't focus on anything, it's all running glacially slow, screen freezes, crashes, the whole works. And try as you might, you can't seem to control it. It's as if your keyboard and mouse have no control over the screen at all. If you can imagine how much that'd mess up how you use your computer and your online life, hey, welcome to my world. My real flesh and blood world, that is.

So I want you to think of meditation as a way of gaining control over what's on that screen, of how to get into the guts of your computer and reprogram and deal with what's going on that's messing up what you're experiencing on your computer screen and speakers - AKA: our conscious experience. Of how to gain control over your keyboard and mouse and how to use them again to control what's "on your screen" (and speakers). 

By this, I mean gain more conscious control over all those subconscious programs running amok and messing up your conscious experience (and driving you batty). 

Allow me to just very, very briefly touch on the neuroscience of meditation and why it's important. When we're talking about "control" in the brain, that is all frontal lobe stuff; particularly our fancy highly evolved human grade prefrontal cortex (popularly referred to as PFC). When we practice meditation, we are exercising very key behavioral regulating PFC areas of the brain and giving them the "neuronal muscle" they need to regulate or exercise better and more consistent control over emotions, impulses and various behaviours that originate in limbic region or brain stem areas. 

Even something as simple as the very basics of meditation that we're going to learn here today exercises control over very powerful and essential breathing mechanisms normally controlled by areas in the brain stem. This is learning "top down management" over very deep brain areas indeed. 

And it is this kind of "top down mind management" technique that we'll begin to be able to apply to all kinds of pernicious brain activity - negative thoughts, impulses, "lack of willpower", etc - that gives rise to the moods and behaviours that are part of whatever disorder we're dealing with. 

And what we do when we regularly practice meditation and build up those key PFC areas, is that we in essence create new "zombie programs" that autonomously or automatically exercise more control over the wayward brain regions that get us into trouble all the time. The more automated this becomes the easier it becomes, the less tiring it becomes and as time goes on our brain is better regulating itself all on its own - this is the big goal we're really shooting for!

Okay?

Now this is a process. It takes time. And regular practice. But if you bear with me through this series on meditation, neuroplasticity and my other Positive Difference Making Fundamentals, we will get you there. 

So to begin, I'm going to introduce you to some very very simple and easy ways to start off meditating. No weird poses involved. No weird "emptying your mind" stuff. No cosmic experiences or anything like that. 

I'm going to give you two little exercises to start off with. I don't want you to go any further than these to start, just these (for those already more "on board" with meditation, feel free to skip these. These are for those who really struggle with and are intimidated by the concept of meditation). 

One, I want you to take a timer and set it for twenty seconds. Done? Okay.

Now, I want you to close your eyes and breathe out. Good, now open your eyes again. Now, I want you to count to four very slowly. Now I need you to really focus on counting out each number - one - two - three - four. Nice and slow and really focusing in your mind on each number as you count them. Again; one - two - three - four. 

Good. 

Now I want you to close your eyes, exhale and then draw in a new breath. But as you draw your breath in, I want you to count - one - two - three - four, really focusing on each number and nothing else. 

Okay, excellent. 

Now draw in a breath, close your eyes and exhale but as you do so count again - one - two - three - four. 

Good work. 

Okay, so let's give it a whirl. Start your timer. Now close your eyes and breathe in and focus on counting - one - two - three - four, breathe out - one - two - three - four, breathe in - one - two - three - four, breathe out -one -two - three - four, breathe in - one - two - three - four. Ding-ding-ding-ding - time's up!

Good work! You freaking meditated!

So just go ahead and play around practicing with that. Don't worry about thoughts or blocking them out or anything like that. Just focus as much as you can on counting each number. Focus only on each number as you count on it. Do it for twenty seconds, then thirty and see how many seconds you can work your way up to. If you get past twenty seconds, that's awesome. If you don't, that's okay. We're just here to learn the basics and practice. 

Okay, I'm going to give you a slightly more advanced one if you want to move up a bit. 

For this one I want you to sit in a chair. Make yourself comfortable. Now pick a spot somewhere, any spot - a book on your shelf, a leaf on a houseplant (a personal favourite of mine) or anything you like, as long as it's just a single spot. Now I want you to put your hands on the arms of the chair or crossed on your lap. Okay?

Now I want you to set your timer for twenty seconds again. Now fix your gaze on the spot you picked and do the same as we practiced above - breathe in - one - two - three - four, breathe out - one - two - three - four. As you do this I want you to try keep your gaze focused on that one spot. If your eyes want to wander a bit - and it's quite natural for them to do so, that's what they're designed to do - that is quite okay, just bring them gently back to your fixed spot again and continue to focus on breathing in and out while counting one through four. Your hands will be tempted to wander as well, and if they do, just put them gently back where you had them.

Okay, now start your timer and while focusing on that spot and keeping your hands still as well as you can, do the breathing and counting exercise. 

Ding-ding-ding, time's up! Excellent! 

That's it! You freaking well meditated again! Okay, you're not ready to supplant the Dali Lama as a meditation expert any time soon but you did it! 

And to start with, that's all we're going to do - that simple focusing on counting and breathing and doing so while keeping your eyes fixed on a specific spot as well as you can. Again, you can play around with trying for longer periods of time. 

I taught this simple method to a Taming the Polar Bears student, a fifty year old woman, who'd sworn up and down that she was the most ADD person on earth, always had been and that no way on earth she could do this. But she did. She totally did. 

I'm going to draw this to a close for now, but these simple little steps here are going to take you on the way for learning how to gain some level of mastery over your consciousness. And this in turn is going to get you on the road to being a stronger, more in control "captain" of that ship of yours that's currently being run by all those amok "zombie programs". 

Until the next time. 

Zombie Programs - An Introduction

I mentioned at the beginning of the post Neuroscience 202 - Brains as Reality Creators that two of my favourite subjects about the brain are how they create reality and the other was "zombie programs". I've introduced the concept of how our brains create the realities we experience and now I'd like to introduce and talk about the "zombie programs" that create consciousness and our conscious experience.

This topic, I have found, is very difficult for most people to accept and it's not hard to understand why - nobody wants to accept the fact that they are not exactly the "agent" in control of their very self and actions but in reality whose life and whose very essence is produced and run by mechanisms in their brain over which they have little actual awareness, let alone control. It certainly didn't make me comfortable and I railed against it at first, but the evidence trumped my desired beliefs and I came to accept the facts. My own acceptance aside, I do understand the natural repulsion towards the idea but I'm going to ask that you put that aside in the spirit of learning how brains - and thus "us" - really work.

When we are looking at mental health problems a lot of what we are looking at is various what those in various fields would call behaviours, even in such serious disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder or addictions and addictive tendencies of all kinds. But what gives rise to the behaviours (IE: outwardly observable symptoms)? The majority of the psychiatric pharmaceutical model would tell us that these are caused by "chemical imbalances" for which their prescribed medications will "correct" or "put in balance". The basis of the chemical imbalance theory relies on drug company research going back to the 1960's. The field of independent neuroscience has since that time produced overwhelming amounts of research and findings that show human behaviour (or any mammal's for that matter) and "moods" are more  than just "chemical imbalances". Though neurochemicals do indeed play roles - we get an introduction to the roles and functions of a couple of major neurotransmitters in this post on dopamine and this one on serotonin - it is simply incorrect and terribly incomplete to subscribe all wayward human behaviour and the great number of symptoms of the various mental health problems to just the actions of neurochemicals alone.


But aside from outward behaviours, what we are looking at in mental health disorders are mental experiences - something that is not outwardly observable. All mental experiences lead to behavioural changes. The question is how obvious those changes are. In bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, the behavioural changes can be quite stark and dramatic. For many, however, it is much more subtle. Many, many people suffer behind a veil or facade they learn to present to the world to cover their inner suffering but this too will ultimately affect behaviour, decision making and interactions with others in negative ways. On the other hand, there are those whose very minds shield them from from what is not right about their mental experiences and behaviours and carry forth in their lives in a sort of blithe denial of inappropriate behaviours in ways that may be harmful or disruptive to themselves and those around them.


What gave me a burning desire to study neuroscience is that I deeply wanted to understand what was going on in the brain to create symptoms of both outwardly observable behaviours and our inner mental experiences. One important aspect I discovered early on is that our mental experiences are largely the "reality" that our brains create; how we perceive both the world around us and our own inner world. From that I realized that the torturous inner mental experiences we suffer from (that can cascade into behavioural changes of all kinds, actual physiological damage and an overall decline in health) are, I'll posit, the result of "distorted realities" that our brains are creating.

We can also think of our "realities" as at least part of what creates our "conscious experience" so let's have a look at what I mean by that.

Our "conscious experience" is - we'll say for our purposes here - what we "see" and "hear" in our minds when we wake up in the morning and that inner screen in our mind comes to life and our inner thought dialogues start to roll. We'll also include what we visually see and audibly hear as these will become all part of what we consciously experience at any one time. As an analogy for understanding conscious experience we'll use the monitor screen and speakers of your computer. Although your computer (along with an Internet connection) can produce enormous and widely varied amounts of information, calculations and much so on, you only experience a small fraction at a time on your computer screen and speakers at any one time. The same is true of the brain (and even more so - the human brain still dwarfs any computer and mainframe on earth for computing power) - your inner screen and dialogue - your conscious experience - only represents a tiny fraction of what's going on "beneath the surface" of your conscious awareness.

And like what you see on your computer screen, your brain has all kinds of impressive doo-dads and programming that create what you see on the screen and through the speakers (I outlined some of those "impressive doo-dads" in my very popular basic primer to brain anatomy - Neuroanatomy 101).


And also like what you see on your computer screen and hear on your speakers, we don't think much – if at all - about what creates what we see and hear and smell and feel (tactically and emotionally) and think and so on: our conscious experience. Which becomes very unfortunate when our conscious experience is going way off the rails and we're melting down with anxiety, depression, heart pounding inner pain, auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions, self-hatred and wildly negative thoughts and all that other fun stuff that completely messes our lives up.


There's a tremendous amount going on in the brain that creates all that but today we're going to look at "zombie programs".


"Zombie programs" is a term commonly used in the neuroscience biz to refer to the vast and enormous numbers of neuronal circuit programming that hums away below our conscious awareness controlling all of our physical movements, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, actions, decisions and so on (perhaps most popularized by and best explained by the neuroscientist David Eagleman in his book Incognito). When I talk about our "subconscious" running our lives (as I have repeatedly throughout this blog), this is for the most part what I am referring to, not in the Freudian subconscious sense (which is what will generally spring to most people's minds when they hear the term subconscious). What we are experiencing consciously is but a very small fraction of what's going on beneath the surface (or in the guts of the computer in our analogy).


For an easy example, take walking. All those foot placements, leg movements, balance, how your place in space is marked, and sense of direction and so on that we take for granted are taken care of by all kinds of autonomously running networks of highly complex brain regions. Walking is one of our "pre-loaded from the factory" “programs”; in other words, it's not something we have to be explicitly taught - there are programs that we are born with that even take care of the learning process of walking (the human species are rather slow at this, however. In herd animals, for example, newborns have to almost literally hit the ground running).


That moving picture show you experience as "sight" is another. This entails vast amounts of circuitry located mostly in our occipital lobe that takes the blizzard of light photons pounding the retinas of your eyes that are then relayed by electrical impulses through the optic nerve to the back of your brain where it assembles them into geometric shapes, colours, distance perception, 3D perception, movement and so on into what you experience as "sight". And as we saw in Brains as Reality Creators, we only "see" a fraction of what's going on within the light spectrum (this can be a bit of a philosophical quagmire so don't start getting worked up about what you're "not seeing". Your eyesight and inner picture show has evolved just fine to equip you with all you need to know to get through life). Everything we experience as sight and further, what is "remembered" (yes, even what you think you are consciously remembering), is taken care of by a completely autonomous set of "brainware" programs.


The same is of course also true with sound and a subset of sound called speech recognition. Again, all kinds of very complicated circuitry is required to take the disturbances in the air (sound waves) caused by a person speaking to you through vibrations of their vocal cords and translate all those air waves into what we experience as sound, then into individual sounds, then words, then groups of words and then assembled bits of meaning which you experience as a person verbalizing some sort of (presumably important but maybe not) information to you. Yet other groups of neuronal regions and circuitry will, if yet another program detects possibly important meaning, churn all that verbalization around looking for deeper or wider meaning or any possible connections to other stored bits of information (of which only a small percentage may or may not make it into your conscious experience). Yet other completely autonomous programs will be assembling your own words and groups of words and sets of meaning to verbalize in response (while yet other regions filter possible responses and decide that no response at all is perhaps better).


Yes, we may believe we are "thinking" of all those clever things we are saying (or perhaps wisely keeping to ourselves), but in actuality, that's all subconscious "zombie" programs doing all of that for us. Even if you consciously try to think deeper of what to say, all that's happening is different programs are (hopefully) being called on to produce something (hopefully) more clever.


The vast, vast majority of our thoughts - our non-verbalized inner self-dialogue - is created subconsciously by far flung networks of brain regions and speech regions. The words I am typing on this page translating my thoughts and knowledge into words? I am experiencing them as a conscious process (and it sort of is) but it's really all subconscious autonomous programs whirring away furiously inside my brain that is creating all of this - though most people, unaware of this process, would gladly take conscious credit for it all! Ditto with much of song writing and music composition - that's all subconscious programs stitching together fragments of this and that the artist's mind either consciously stored away (a small fraction) and subconsciously stored away (the vast majority) and presenting it to the artist's conscious mind at the moment of creation (what they experience as "inspiration") or are the result of countless hours and many years of musical training (which itself creates "brain programs" related to music).


And on and on and on we could go for all of our actions, reactions, emotional responses, things we say, hear, do, think, believe, create and so on and so on. What makes it to our "conscious mind" is but an infinitesimally small fraction of what your brain is really up to.


Our subconscious programs may well be running all kinds of programs our conscious selves may not even approve of! Take certain prejudices and biases. The public persona we present and what we consciously want to believe may say one thing, but tricky psychological tests may reveal quite something else beneath the surface! (for those so interested - and are brave enough - this piece on The Illusion of Moral Superiority delves into this in some detail and depth)


Most of what we experience as "choices" and "decisions" in fact are almost invariably the product of a dizzying amount of background calculating being worked out by far flung region of your brain (and often at odds with each other!) which quite likely had been going on for hours, days or weeks or longer prior humming away well, well below the surface of your mind before the "choice" or "decision" or "inspiration" sprung up to your conscious mind.


Understanding this basic brain function concept is critical for understanding a great deal of how we "work" (or not).


Everything we experience as memory (including storage, retrieval and importance attached to each memory) are all taken care of by autonomous brain functions that run largely way below our conscious experience and control (including all manner of memory training techniques).


Everything we think of as "habits" or habitual actions would be autonomously running programs.


Not only all that, but we get very little choice into what programs all of our programming! This too was largely a subconscious process from a lifetime of various cultural, societal and family influences, AKA "nurture" of nature vs nurture fame (or maybe infamy would be a better term given how filled with acerbic controversy that topic is),


Now, having established that (and this is all beyond a shadow of doubt among any credible neuroscientist current with the latest findings), this begs a few questions.


One, why - if we humans are blessed with higher states of consciousness than our animal brethren and fore-bearers (as we indeed are) - does so much stuff run below conscious awareness?


This is a very good question, indeed. And the answers aren't all that difficult and will completely make sense.



One, is that our consciousness - as nifty as the human version is (and it is human consciousness and the cognitive flexibility it provides that sets humans apart) -it is limited. The cognitive scientist Bernard Baars in his landmark (and very widely cited) paper on Cognitive Theory of Consciousness explains part of consciousness as a "global workspace", a sort of "workbench" where we can put things while we work on them and like a workbench, there is only so much we can put on it at any one time (to put this breathtakingly briefly and simply). We can also think of this as what we can run on our "working memory" at any one time. This too is limited.

So if you consider the astronomical amounts of tasks your brain needs to do at any one time to guide your fanny through life - movements, short term and long term planning and decision making, thinking, creating (if that's your bag), blah-blah-blah ad nauseam and try to imagine going over every single solitary detail of all of that - your brain would melt down and run out your ears. And I only mean this partially facetiously - when we examine what's going on in mental breakdowns, this is almost what is literally going on; your mind - your conscious experience - literally does break down in overwhelm as your mind, or consciousness, is flooded with too many things your conscious self can't handle (as mine did spectacularly on several occasions requiring emergency 911 calls and hospitalizations in psych wards).


Back to our computer screen and speakers analogy, it is much the same way - you can put only so much on the screen at one time and if we look at the brain's working memory and think of it as our computer's RAM, this too is limited. Put too much on there, and your computer will crash and so it is with your brain and mind (or consciousness).


So this is one reason why so much of our lives, behaviours, decision making and so on is largely handled below your conscious awareness - your conscious mind and working memory can only handle a tiny, tiny fraction of what needs to be done by your brain. If we look at this through the lens of evolutionary benefits, having your brain melt down from conscious overload is unquestionably a Bad Thing and would have, in the past, meant that you became tiger dinner and your genes - or that of your offspring - would not get passed on. Yes, yes, speaking in evolutionary terms, this is a Very Bad Thing. So the brain evolved Not To Let That Happen thus it just takes care of the vast majority of stuff required to guide your fanny through life autonomously below the surface on its own, thank you very much.


Two, is for the simple reason of energy economy. The brain - that three pound blob of soft tofu like substance between your ears, approximately between 1 and 2 percent of your total body weight - burns up a whopping 20% of the energy you consume through calories and about the same amount of the oxygen your lungs draw in. Consciously churning through things, it turns out, radically ups the draw on those (limited) energy reserves. So again, if we look at it through evolutionary terms, even though human consciousness has been a great thing, the rest of your brain is too smart (or well programmed) to let you burn up too much energy that way. Again, to have you be a tiger's dinner and not pass on your genes because you didn't have the energy to deal with the tiger or you burned up too much "RAM" pondering over what to do would be - in evolutionary terms - A Bad Thing. So it evolved to run the great majority of things on "auto-pilot" because that is the most energy efficient way - not to mention fastest - of crunching incoming data and generating responses (movements, thoughts, etc, all of the above we looked at).

The second question, if we don't consciously decide what programs our brains (and it is mostly an illusion that you believe you do program much in there, as clever and bright and as "in control" as you think you are), what does program your brain?

I'm actually not too sure you want to know too much about this but here we go anyway. It's in fact kind of impossible to know in any precise terms (though at times we can recall specific experiences or lessons), but in truth it's possible that every single thing your five senses ever brought in for your entire life may have played a role. If you want to put that in some perspective, if you are an average adult your brain will hold something like 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes) of "data". To put that in perspective, if your brain worked like your TV recorder, that would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for three hundred years to play all that back. And by some estimates, that's conservative. Oh - and it turns out that everything you've ever put in your gut may play a big role, too. Yikes.

This data is a rough summation of everything you've read, heard, experienced, seen, smelled, touched, and felt along with all the myriad of cultural and environmental experiences and influences you've had throughout life and through school, not to mention almost endless amounts of thoughts and feelings your own brain has produced (and what you shoveled down your throat all your life - urp) - and all of that has at least some potential to have become “inputted” into the zombie programs that in turn run "you".


Try go back and put all that on your "conscious plate" and deal with it. I think you can imagine now how impossible that would be.


And what filters through all that data (and blocks out astronomically more data) itself is determined by subconscious autonomous programs that hum along way well, well below the surface. These themselves are part of what I was getting to in the posts on "ego defenses" as well as in Genetic Factors and Environmental Factors in Brain Development.


This is why it's important to be more aware of what we're "consuming" every day in the way of "input data". You may recall in my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals that I made big changes to my "data input" and this is what I'm talking about. If we give our brains better material to run on, they will create better programs and they - and thus us - will run better, at least to some degree.

So that is a very brief introduction to the programs that whir and twirl and whiz away in your brain well, well below your conscious awareness.


What, you are probably thinking, does this have to do with mental health and conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and depression and so on?


A couple of things.


One is that it is my very firm position that a lot of what goes wrong in mental health disorders is that these subconscious programs are in various ways running amok and are messing with your "conscious experience" (producing auditory or visual hallucinations, as just one example). Or, as we'll see, it may be that some of our most important programs have been poorly programmed (by "bad data" that we've absorbed throughout our lives or at key times or in key ways) and these are in some way running our lives and mind very poorly (the negative/self flagellating thoughts programs would likely top this list in many of us).

It is my idea - and approach - that any given mental health disorder is in fact a "distorted" conscious experience - our programs have encountered problems or were never programmed right in the first place and are messing with what's on the "computer screens and speakers" of our conscious minds that we are experiencing and as a result, our mental states, behaviours and actions are being messed up (to put it very mildly). We'll also see that it could well be some very important programs are actually "offline" - such as key behavioural regulating regions and programs and this may be greatly involved in what's going on in acute or long term mental disorders.

Two - and more important - is the very exciting news that very many of these programs can be reprogrammed. The brain - even late in life - will respond to retraining "commands". It takes a lot of specific dedicated work, but it can be done. When we look at neuroplasticity, we are going to learn some very encouraging things about how we can "reprogram" or retrain our brains. And this goes for even the most severe neuropsychiatric condition (though it is true that the longer the condition has been present, the harder the work it is to reprogram it. I will get to some very interesting cases studies on this to show how possible it is).


Three - it is again my belief and theory that a good number of our mental health disorders and mental meltdowns are the result of warring zombie programs. And this can indeed happen as we'll see in Part Two of this series. We'll look at how all these programs running our brains and minds don't always "get along" and these inner wars, these "regional battles", can produce - in our conscious experience - a lot of our difficulties. Thus, examine what's going on in these "inner wars", understand what's going on and why they're at war, straiten them out - or retrain some of them, as we'll learn - and it's entirely possible that a good deal of what's messing with your conscious experience and causing you grief and depression and anxiety or what have you will greatly settle down. As a bipolar person with borderline personality disorder and at times social anxiety disorder, I have lots and lots and lots of "war stories" to relate.

Four - in further understanding how our brain uses and regulates energy, we will see that having most of our functions and reactions handled by autonomously running subconscious programs is the most efficient in terms of best utilizing available energy and that having so many of these programs out of tune or at war with each other plays a large role in what leaves us drained of energy.

And perhaps most importantly, understanding these programs and in turn what triggers them is going to be huge in understanding perhaps the most important zombie program of them all when it comes to mental health disorders and suffering - the stress response system.

That's it for today. I needed to introduce the concepts of subconscious autonomous programs - AKA: zombie programs - and how they run our worlds and create our conscious experience before I moved on to explain other things we'll look at and learn in understanding and dealing with mental health disorders.

In Praise of Quick Fixes for Depression (And Possibly Other Psychiatric/Mood Disorders)

Yes, yes, I know. I just wrote a post deconstructing "quick fixes" for psychiatric and mood disorders. 

So why am I now posting an article praising quick fixes?

For a couple of reasons. One, I am a fair guy (all occasional appearances aside). Two, I'm bipolar. We bipolar peeps kind of roll this way. We'll feel and see things completely one way and then - days, hours, weeks, or at some point - see the exact same topic or idea or view in a completely different and opposite way. We'll go from wildly optimistic about something to being horrendously pessimistic about the same thing (I wrote about the neuronal basis for optimism and pessimism in my neuroscience blog a while back). Our minds just sort of tend to work that way - see things in alternating completely opposite ways. Actually, a lot of people will work this way (I'm sure some of you have observed this in someone close to you and were left scratching your head wondering "what the hell just happened there?"), it's just that bipolar minds work more regularly this way and more radically this way and for more prolonged periods (among other weird and wacky ways). 

This can be rather crazy making (trust me on this one) but it's not too bad if you sort of go with it and allow your mind to explore each side of whatever bee happens to be in the bonnet (like the topic of "quick fixes" for psychiatric and mood disorders for me lately) and can avoid the radical extremes of run away grandiosity and delusional belief positiveness on one end and dark pessimistic pits of despair negativity on the other (this ranks quite high on the Easier Said Than Done list for bipolar peeps, I must truthfully confess, however). 

My brain also just naturally has this habit of seeking all kinds of truths and poking at them to see which apply here and which apply there. I also try not to fall into confirmation bias traps and single view perspective traps. [people who are bored and/or have too much time on their hands and have read through my other blogs will know that, despite being a true blue atheist (or non-theist, if you will), I also wrote about the possible positive efficacy of prayer] 

Anyway, almost no sooner than I finished writing the previous post pouring cold water all over "quick fixes" than my mind started throwing up all kinds of reasons in favour of quick fixes. From past experience (lots of past experiences (many of them the aforementioned crazy making experiences)), I knew that these opposing thoughts would haunt me unless I worked them through and wrote them out for all to see (or at least those readers who trudge through all of this stuff of mine). 

Now everything I outlined in that previous post is absolutely true (or at least not absolutely false) but it's also true that there are other perspectives on the whole notion and approach of "quick (or easy) fixes". 

So in the interest of presenting alternate perspectives and truths (and easing my nagging conscience), here we go. This is rather neatly illustrated by this great image:

For the fun of it we'll say that the previous post was the warm orange square perspective (or is that a rectangle?) and this post will look at the soft blue circle perspective (and no, I'm not trying to mess with you psychologically by choosing them that way). 

Now I firmly, firmly believe in the science of my approaches to better mental health and a more stable mind (AKA: my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals which truly are very well backed by and grounded in solid science of numerous and varied approaches; I would genuinely not have used them nor advocated them if they weren't). But the truth is that they are all a) quite time consuming to properly practice and b) quite difficult to practice properly and effectively on one's own without a lot of support. Real brain changes are like that - hard work and lots of time with lots of support (from therapists or family or friends making sure you stay on track with them). 

And something that's haunted me (that word again) from the very beginning about all my approaches is the realization that not everyone is going to have the time and mental space to devote to working on their brain, mind and habits like I do, let alone the important understanding support of family and friends. For another truth is that, due to my condition being as chronic and as serious as it is, I became disabled, qualified for a pension and am now unemployed (and unemployable) for a great number of reasons associated with having and dealing with all the conditions I have. I make getting better and improving how my brain works a full time job. 

So what about the person who doesn't have that kind of time? What about the person who doesn't have that kind of dedication and devotion? The mega stressed university student balancing a job and school workload? What about the person who balances work, kids, family obligations and the like who's already stretched to the limit? (To name just two of dozens and dozens of possible examples)

They may simply not have time for all my stuff (as effective as it may well be in the long run). They may not be able to - for wide host of reasons - be able to make the critical lifestyle changes that I have been able to make. They have all this shit going on - maybe a dozen spinning plates up in the air - and they just need some damned thing to work and work fast. 

They need "magic bullets" and something they can just quickly take or do that will help straighten things out and let them cope with their lives in whatever way possible. 

And the truth is that these "quick fixes" (generally some sort of pharmaceutical drug) will work, at least for the short term. There is a good deal of literature showing the short term efficacy of pharmaceutical treatments (along with considerable anecdotal evidence). The truth is that all kinds of things may work. 

For here are a few more truths about severe episodes of depression, bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia - throughout history many of these cases just passed naturally. Things would be horribly horrible for a period of time and then somehow the ship would be righted, they'd return to normal (such as that may be) and that would be the end of it. Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Robert Whitaker explores all this and gives some interesting statistics and case studies in his fascinating and eye opening book Anatomy of an Epidemic, in which he very thoroughly explores the history of psychiatric illnesses and the pharmaceutical/psychiatric approach to their treatments. 

What this means is that it's entirely possible that whatever treatment one takes has no real bearing or effect at all and the condition just passes naturally as they often used to. But what happens is that the treatment - whatever it may be - helps a person cope with the short term crisis (of a few months to possibly a few years) until their brains sort everything out, right the ship, the crisis passes and on their lives go.

Another thing to consider is that if studies show that a given treatment is only equally as effective as a placebo or dummy treatment (and the ratio often seems to be in the fifty/fifty range), what about those that showed positive effects? If people report feeling better, what's going on there? 

We actually don't know what's going on when people report feeling better. Was it placebo? Was the drug treatment actually "fixing" something? (highly unlikely not, but I'll outline that another time). We actually don't know why a lot of treatments seem to work, only that there is an observable and reportable improvement of conditions. 

And does it really matter how it "works"? 

Here's one of the great truths about people - they don't actually give a shit how it works. They don't give a shit if it really works. People by and large don't give a shit about the science behind it or science at all. People just want one thing - to feel better and cope with or get on with their lives. People could not care less if it's an illusion, a trick of the light, a sham or whatever. They care about feeling better and carrying on with their lives in some sort of improved fashion and that's it. 

For here's another truth - and perhaps the biggest Grand Poobah truth - about the human brain: it is very, very possible that whatever it deeply believes in may well "work". 

There are actually some very interesting studies and data about this; whatever treatment you believe in has the greatest chance of working. 

What this means (apparently) is that if you believe in drug therapy, that may well work best for you. 

If you believe in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, that may well work best for you. 

If you believe in herbal remedies (and St John's Wort was very popular for some time), that may well work best for you. 

I know practitioners of hypnosis who report excellent results (however problematic self-reporting on such outcomes may be) and the truth is that many people do believe in hypnosis and for them maybe that is the best way to go. 

There are people who believe in astrology and tea leaf readings and all kinds of other similar ways for "understanding" their lives and minds. For them, perhaps those things may work and help them straighten out their mind and lives. 

In truth, you could go around the world and find that all kinds of strange and wacky "treatments" may "work" or - and perhaps just as importantly - appear to work. 

I have many Filipino friends and one evening they told me all kinds of stories about what they colloquially referred to as "Dr Quack-Quack" (yes, they were serious). These are local "doctors" that amount to something like shamans. If western medical doctors couldn't fix something, they'd bring in a Dr Quack-Quack. Incantations and perhaps some herbal concoctions would be applied and boom, the condition would disappear. Weird psychotic behaviour, physical ailments, all kinds of things, you name it; it worked for them and they couldn't care less if we westerners laugh and scoff at it. They believed it, they experienced a relief of or disappearance of their symptoms and that was all they cared about. And you could go find similar traditional medicine people in different cultures around the world whose methods may work for those who were raised and conditioned to believe in them.

People have turned to religion (or discovered it) and had severe episodes of psychiatric disorders turn around and just fade from memory. Some people just got into different environments, got better more satisfying jobs and things all turned around and the disorder faded into the past (again, Whitaker details some fascinating case studies on this). 

For perhaps one of the biggest truths about the brain is the incredibly powerful effects belief will have on it one way or the other (placebo for positive, nocebo for negative - the neuroscientist Mario Beuregard's book Brain Wars is an excellent place to start in understanding these mind phenomenon). Belief can change our biology and neurology and physiology. This has been tremendously well studied and documented for many, many years (though no one in the psychiatric or psychology professions who deal with mood, emotional or psychiatric disorders wants to talk about this). So if whatever "fix" you believe in works, if that's what you deeply believe in (for whatever reason), that could well have the best chance of working for you. Belief can turn all kinds of things around in the brain.

So back to "quick fixes", many - if not most - people could give two figs how or why they work. They just want to feel that they work. If they are lucky enough not to be affected by the side effects (quite possible with most anti-depressants, something unlikely to be escaped with anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers), then who cares? Who am I - or anyone - to throw cold water on that? If it works for them, then all the power to them. They have busy chaotic lives and if a pill or pills helps them manage and get through life, that's all that basically counts. There are no bonus points for how we get through life, only that we do get through life. 

So yes, for a certain percentage of people (and what that percentage is is rather fuzzy but it is not inconsiderable, it seems) "quick fixes" could appear to work. And for how the human brain works, appearing to work may be all that matters, may be all that makes the critical difference. How and why they appear to work really and truly doesn't matter. People are busy, frazzled and experience periods of great distress or depression or anxiety or perhaps psychosis and if pills or a ECT or some other kind of quick fix treatment seems to work for them, it doesn't matter what competing sciences (nor I) say about that. 

For my part, I (sort of) don't care either. If someone I care about feels better taking medications, I'm going to support that. My positions on medications and the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries become irrelevant; what matters is that they feel better and can cope. 

If this all seems rather odd and confusing, it is. But welcome to the world of the brain and of all the weird and wacky things that can go wrong in there, why it can go wrong and what may or may not get it back on track. 

I maintain that we have to work on certain core issues and work to attain and maintain better brain and body health to truly have a chance at and enjoy optimal mental health and sense of well being (relative to each individual's circumstances). But it is undeniable that what may appear to be "quick fixes" can indeed help a good percentage of people. 

I am more than extremely familiar with going through a life crisis and having everything fall apart around me while my mind was simultaneously falling apart and experiencing the ensuing horrendous mental madness. I am, therefore, extremely empathetic to what people go through during life and mental health crises. I deeply understand that people just need to get help in whatever form and get through that crisis and survive (IE: not lose their lives to suicide or descend into a life of homelessness and substance abuse). I deeply understand that people need to do whatever they can to get on with their lives and cope. 

And the ultimate truth (regarding mental health and life) is that that is the bottom line. 

Deconstructing "Quick Fixes" for Psychiatric and Mood Disorders

I don't mean to be a wet blanket. I don't like to be a wet blanket. But I have to be. 

I've suffered from "mood disorders" all my life. In my case, bipolar disorder and bipolar depression with some good ol' unipolar major depressive episodes thrown in for good measure (along with Borderline Personality Disorder, at times major anxiety disorder (according to DSM clinical criteria, which isn't the best source for diagnosing anything but for whatever it's worth I did meet all diagnostic criteria), schizophrenic like psychosis and some other fun stuff). And I can tell you unequivocally that depression "sucks". No, I don't mean the popular slang use of the term "it/that sucks", I mean it literally sucks the very life out of you. It sucks all the light out of you. It sucks all the hope out of you. It sucks any sense of pleasure out of you. It sucks happiness out of you. It sucks your very soul out of you (readers and fans of the Harry Potter series will recognize the results and symptoms of a Dementor's Kiss, a fate in that series considered worse than death). 

But what I found even worse than all that in all my years of dealing with all my various "mood disorders" (a useless and understated euphemism if I ever saw one) was getting built up and run around by false hopes; the false hopes of promises of "cures" and "treatments". 

After a number of years of getting jerked around by psychiatrists and merry-go-round, roulette wheel, blind shots in the dark, yo-yo pharmaceutical "treatments", a couple of years ago I got really pissed off (a massive understatement but we don't need to go there) and I thought "fuck this, I'll learn what's going on myself and figure it all out from there". And so I took up neuroscience and in a massive manic rush (which I briefly touched on in The Mother of All Manic Depressive Cycles) I dug into every treatment there was and everything to do with the brain, what goes on in there and what may be involved in psychiatric (bipolar, schizophrenia) and mood disorders (depressions of various kinds, anxiety disorders, etc). 

And to sum it all up extremely briefly, I just realized that a) there are an enormous amount of factors flung all over the brain involved in any disorder, b) almost invariably there will be numerous complicated chronic or acute external factors such as socioeconomic conditions, family, work or social circle dynamics, etc and c) there is absolutely no way any "quick fix"  treatment could possibly or realistically untangle all that, be it drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (a "lite" version of the barbaric old electro shock therapy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest fame, but essentially the same thing) and the relatively new kids on the block, transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy and deep brain stimulation therapy. There's just no way, I could easily see, that these relatively simplistic "treatments" are going to untangle everything that's going on in any given patient's brain and body and external life factors that are giving rise to the condition they are suffering from. 

So it came as no surprise to me today see the headline Much-touted Deep-Brain-Stimulation Treatment for Depression Fails Another Trial in Scientific American's online edition. As has been the case with all so called "treatments", it failed to outperform a placebo in double blind studies. 

A team led by Darin Dougherty of Massachusetts General Hospital tested 30 subjects with treatment-resistant depression. Half of the patients received DBS, and half received a “sham” treatment. Last December, the team reported in Biological Psychiatry finding “no significant difference in response rates” between the treated and untreated subjects.

“The bottom line is that we can’t separate out active treatment from placebo,” Dougherty, the trial leader, told Neurology Today. “Whether that is a dulled active or an overactive placebo, or a combination, it’s bad news.” He added: “Given the investments in these pivotal trials, the manufacturers would have to have some awfully compelling reason” to continue sponsoring research.

Which may appear rather depressing (yes, just sorting through all the so-called treatments for depression and the seeming hopelessness of it all can itself be depressing) but I don't think so. We can't find what will work, my thinking goes, if we don't eliminate what doesn't work. Plus, there's nothing worse, in my opinion, than being jerked around and our hopes falsely built up by "treatments" that don't actually treat anything. 

But let's dig a little deeper to understand why treatments such as these and pharmaceutical drugs don't work either long term nor can outperform placebos (I really must get to soon a post dedicated to understanding the extremely powerful placebo and nocebo phenomenon in the brain). 

My whole education in neuroscience came as a result of simply asking the question "why?". I asked and searched for the answers to that one word question literally hundreds of times (and I've yet to stop. I'll never stop until I find satisfactory answers ... should keep me busy for a while). And I mean I ruthlessly searched. And I mean I ruthlessly culled out bullshit claims and science. I didn't just look at studies, I wanted to know who conducted them, who wrote them and why they wrote them. I wanted to know where their funding came from and why. I wanted to know how and why they selected their test subjects (massive errors, bad science and outright corruption takes place in this one aspect of clinical trials alone). I cross checked and referenced everything I found (yes, this was a staggering amount of work, but hey, I was enormously motivated and very manic (at one point I went a mind blowing 864 hours straight with no sleep other than occasional cat naps - I kid you not)). 

So let's take just one disorder - depression - and have a brief look at what's going on there. All or some of the following will be involved in any one case. Today this is just off the top of my head (sorry, I'm not in my monster mood of writing a huge scholarly piece but I will get to all of this in more detail with proper citations, etc at some point soon. I did have some of this in a post, but I took that post down in a fit of fury last winter and now I can't find it). 

As follows, we have (not necessarily in this order):

The Limbic Region

This is the main (though not only) emotional processing center of the brain. Here we'll find the amygdala and the hippocampus duo (one of each in each hemisphere). The amygdala is responsible for both "tasting" incoming sensory information (via all five senses) for emotional content and assigning emotional content (fear, for example if the sensory data happens to be visual input of a tiger about to jump on you and eat you). The hippocampus is a sort of a "filing lady" that files stuff away in your short and long term memory areas (flung all over the brain). Many, many studies will show that just these two nodules alone will determine to a great degree how you experience your environment and react to it. 

There are massive communication trunks tying these two regions to other parts of the limbic region (thalamus, hippothalamus, etc) and how these communication trunks are formed are going to affect how one experiences and processes sensory data and reacts to it. There are massive (in relative size to the brain) communication trunks tying these nodules to other important areas of the brain, such as our vaunted human frontal lobes. How these are formed, how thick they are and so on are going to affect how one experiences and processes sensory data (the world around us, in short) and their reactions. 

And if you are experiencing chronic depression, anxiety, overwhelm and so on, I would bet the farm that key parts of this major brain region are formed in important ways differently than that of people who don't so suffer, not to mention the aforementioned communication trunks. There is now tremendous amounts of evidence for this. 

There is a good amount of evidence (which I'll get to presenting when I get to all of this in more detail) that the Anterior Cingulate Gyrus may be heavily involved. This is a brain region that is between the limbic region and our neocortex (and in evolutionary terms it would have evolved somewhere in between those two as well). Numerous thought processes are believed to arise here, including those associated with self-rumination, and new research is showing a heavy role in mediating attention and focus that could be disrupted during depressive phases or episodes. This includes evidence that both glia cell density and neuronal size may be reduced in major depressive disorder.

Speaking of self-rumination, all kinds of distorted thoughts are going to be involved with any case of depression, many of them negative, self-ruminating, highly irrational, self-critical thoughts (AKA: "beating ourselves to a pulp" thoughts) and these are going to arise in, be consolidated by and routed to our consciousness (that weird, undefinable feature of the human brain where we experience what our brain produces) via all kinds of brain regions and wiring spread all over the brain and in turn our very thoughts are going to have incredible brain changing effects (hunting all this down and learning it all was quite exciting and fun, I can tell you, all serious implications of it all aside). I'll be getting to the effects our own thoughts have on our very neurobiology and brain anatomy at some future point (I swear, I really will).

How all this is formed and works is, as I explained in Genetic and Environmental Factors in Brain Development, vastly complex and takes place over years from our very conception through to early adulthood. A tremendous amount of "who we are" is going to be determined during our "formative years" (yes, Virginia, the term "formative years" is not just an out of date expression, it actually does work a great deal that way). 

The Stress Response System:

For reasons that are entirely unclear to me, psychiatry, psychology and medical clinicians all almost completely overlook the stress response system and all its wild and wacky machinations and "downstream" effects on the mind and body biology in their "attempts" to treat psychiatric and mood disorders (and I do not use the word "attempt" at all flatteringly). The SRS will alter vast amounts of our neuorobiology, it will switch genes on and off, the stress hormone glucocorticoid will almost literally melt your brain down (it will cause neuronal death in the hippocampus as just one example) in chronic doses and all kinds of other fun stuff (top fifteen neuroscientist in the world Robert Sapolsky is my go-to source on most of the SRS and long term implications of its chronic over-activation). 

If you are suffering any mood or psychiatric disorder, I would bet the house that you are in some way (and there are numerous, numerous possible ways) living under or with all kinds of identifiable and unidentifiable stressors that are keeping your SRS locked on or in a constant state of "high alert". 

Phew, what else?

The Brain-Gut Axis

Only recently have researchers begun to start to unravel (and even discover in the first place) the importance of this axis and the role our intestinal tract has on our brains and brain functions. It turns out that the trillions of microbes that are in residence there and how they're balanced - or out of balance - can have enormous effects on our brain functions, cognitive abilities and - tra-la! - moods. 

And yes, Virginia, it really does matter what you eat (and not eat). For it also turns out that all the shit we shovel indiscriminately down our throats has a) a huge effect on our gut microbial ecosystem (yes, it is an ecosystem down there) and - AND - that this in turn can - pardon my French - fuck with our heads (I know, I know, I really am a wet blanket).  

Environmental Factors One:

This is very simple and straight forward and I'm not going to get into much detail because there is so much detail to get into. In our modern environment we are almost completely surrounded by toxic materials. A list of these and their ubiquitous presence all over most of our daily living environments alone would fill a large book. It wasn't long after I started looking into environmental toxins and their effects on the brain (and thus human behaviours, mental states, abilities and so on) that I had to stop because a) it was too overwhelming and b) it was too depressing. I simply concluded that to give myself the best shot at living/feeling better, I had to minimize environmental toxins as best I could (for one, see above about the shit we shovel down our throats indiscriminately). 

And that's all I could suggest for anyone.  

Environmental Factors Two:

By this environmental factor, I mean anyone and everyone you have to be in contact with and deal with on a regular basis in the real face to face world along with everything you take in via any and all media (hello, Facebook, TV, et al). 

Humans are highly social animals and social connections - or lack of them or quality of them - are going to have enormous and vast implications into how your particular brain works. 

And if you suffer from mood disorders, I can virtually one hundred percent guarantee you that you are a "highly sensitive" person. I do not in the least use the word "sensitive" to in any way implicate "weak" or "wimpy" or anything like that. What it means is that you not only taken in more sensory data from the world around you than the average person, but you process it much more intensely (see limbic region and stress response system above). 

What this means is that you have a high "emotional quotient" (not a term I'm particularly fond of, but for lack of a better one for now) and that people that aren't as "sensitive" have the EQ of a fence post (though I at times envy these emotional fence posts). It means that you see and experience far, far more of the world around you than the average person, plus you tend to feel the pain of all the world's injustices, PLUS you feel compelled to do something about all the pain and injustice and unfairness all around us PLUS you feel incredibly disempowered and/or inadequate to fight it all. This is also called our empathetic system, something which I briefly introduce and touch on in the post Bipolar in Focus - Empathy and Bipolar (which is actually more than just empathy in bipolar people). Talking about how our stress response system stays chronically activated, this is going to be a major factor as well.

I'd also bet dimes to donuts that you are experiencing intense feelings of isolation and that this factor alone could be deeply effecting your brain and how you experience the world (a vast topic I will cover in enormous detail at some point).  

In a future post I'll tie this into how our stress response system works and you'll easily see why many of us are in near constant states of overwhelm and meltdown. 

Also under this category are past environmental factors and by this I'm going to specifically mention childhood trauma. Evidence is pouring in from around the world for the enormous and vast effects on a person's brain (and thus mental functioning, emotional functioning and cognitive functioning and moral/reasoning abilities) child or early adulthood trauma will have. 

Lessee, what else? 

Oh yeah, as I outlined in a piece two years ago, how our memory functions and forms our inner world and perceptions of the world is going to have profound impacts on how we experience and react to the world, our mental models, our positive/negative perceptions and so on. How that works goes back to how our brains developed in the first place (see above link about Genetic and Environmental Factors in Brain Development). 

Phew, there's more but that's just roughly off the top of my head for now. 

Now all of this can change but that is through a process called neuroplasticity which is how the brain repairs itself when severely damaged (following a stroke, for example) or rearranges itself for more optimal and efficient functioning in response to a major change in our body or body structure (the loss of a limb, for example) or the loss of a sensory function (sight, for example). 

It changes synaptic connections, it changes brain regions, it can change enormous amounts and areas of how our brains (and thus us) work. 

But it is a very, very complex (and still somewhat mysterious) process. What is known is that be taught or learn a new habit or mental process and the brain will change itself in response to that. Give the brain a certain stimulation (musical training or intense music listening, for example) and it'll respond and rearrange itself in response to that. Give the brain a new task (a new dance step, for example) and it'll respond and rearrange itself to that. 

But whatever the new task, it has to be repeated regularly (like any training, like building a muscle). 


And when you understand all that is involved in any given mood or psychiatric disorder (and what I've mentioned here is breathtakingly brief), you cannot help but wonder (excuse my French again) how in the fuck simplistic quick fix "treatments" are a) going to target everything in the brain and body that may be going on and b) reverse what's going on. 

If this all sounds rather depressing and hope deflating, please, don't let it be. For I see all kinds of promising approaches to dealing with all of our messed up brain circuitry. 

I know I keep pimping my Positive Difference Making Fundamentals, but they really are solid and well founded fundamentals for changing how our brains (and thus us) work. And they're not "mine" at all, they are merely what I discovered when I went looking for answers as to what to do about our wacky brains and minds and mental states and moods. But there's more, much more, in terms of therapies and therapeutic approaches which I hope to start compiling and getting to at some point soon. 

In the meanwhile, I only ask you to approach with some healthy skepticism any "treatment" that promises a quick and easy fix to your depression. The world is full, I'm afraid, of charlatans trying to cash in on your misery (and mine). The professional ranks are, quite frankly, full of them. I suffered at their hands for years and so have many, many others (and yes, I am aware that there are those who believe professional psychiatry and pharmaceutical treatments have helped them or have helped hold them together). 

But since learning all I have about the brain, behaviours and what goes wrong and why in various disorders, I can vouch, with almost one hundred percent certainty, that if one doesn't on some level work on life issues, emotional issues, environmental issues and so on, no psychiatric or mood disorder is ever going to leave us alone. I'm not implying that we can make them completely go away either, but we can certainly learn to optimize our lives regardless (and I have, aside from myself, seen countless case stories of this happening, something else I hope to get to soon).