Philosophical Perspectives on Brain Data by Stephen Rainey

Author:Stephen Rainey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031271700
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

But this isn’t so easily done, and gaps in the approach prompt concerns like those crystallised in Insel’s position. Social and cultural values, personal and political histories and contexts are in play in the Jaspers-like approach. These factors are relevant to characterising mental illness in ways not seen in physical illness. Even in codifying specific symptom groups and terminology in DSM and ICD editions has limited application as editions change, making for clinical practices that are dynamic over time. But the brain is more stable in its form than these texts. It can be considered a consistent substrate, which the DSM and ICD editions could be seen as lacking. Psychiatric syndromes and definitions may change, and their boundaries change, but the brain and its functions persist as they are set in biological and physical terms. Its function can be studied, and over time a picture of how it ought to function can be developed. Rather than looking at overt performance of behaviour, we might look through this and peer into the brain so as to develop a picture of normal function. Where surface pathological performance is observed, it might be assumed that this reflects a deeper deviation from normal brain function. But the move toward a general picture of normal brain function requires the amalgamation of large amounts of information from a variety of contexts.

At least two interpretations of the task ‘understanding the brain’ are available. Firstly, one can seek an understanding of the brain as an object—a purely anatomical undertaking—exemplified perhaps in the drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Secondly, one can seek an understanding of the brain as somehow ‘correlating’ with cognitive faculties in general (Place, 1956; Smart, 1959; Gamez, 2014). This latter approach would be the means through which to achieve a model of the brain necessary for psychiatry as clinically applied neuroscience. If a neuroscientist of today wants to explore neural function, they might identify a phenomenon of interest, locate a brain region of interest, design an experiment to record changes in brain function while engaging that area of the brain in a phenomenon-relevant task, and assess the results they obtain. To make a model of the brain beyond each individual experiment carried out in each separate lab across the neuroscientific discipline, the data from everywhere would need to be amalgamated. Efforts to produce such a model can be seen to be underway already. The European Commission’s Flagship research endeavour, the Human Brain Project, for example, combines supercomputing, analysis of human brain imaging, patient data, and lab work on human and animal brains with the intention of combining insights from all of these areas to understand or ‘decode’ the processes and functions of the brain. Essentially, from the scale of the molecule to (potentially) the socialised organism, an account of the brain that bridges these scales (Amunts et al., 2016) will be developed. This would be hoped to bring benefits for areas like diagnosis of brain disease, and psychiatric disorder just as clinically applied neuroscience ought to.

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