The Man Who Couldn't Stop by David Adam

Author:David Adam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710514
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TEN

The runaway brain

A popular way to visualize the brain is to clench your fist and stick your thumb out and point it at the ground, as if you are a Roman emperor passing judgement on a defeated gladiator.* Your thumb is now the brain stem and the thumbnail the end of the spinal cord. Your fingers and hand represent the cortex, with the little finger the pre-frontal cortex. Now, do the same, but first squeeze a grape in the grip of your index finger. The grape contains the seat of our obsessions.

The relationship between the mind and the brain is one of the most mysterious in modern science. At their most basic, the thoughts that cause such mayhem in OCD are just electrical and chemical signals. But to say those physical elements alone define and confine the mind would be to say that the Mona Lisa is just some paint. There is a point at which this material pragmatism seems to give way to something greater, a frontier beyond which the sum is greater than the parts. In the brain, that is the moment at which the chemistry and electricity, the nuts and bolts, combine to form the mind, to give humans the sensation of consciousness.

Take the separation of brain and mind too far, and you hit the scientifically awkward idea of a soul – that the mind can and perhaps does exist in isolation of its physical basis. But, refuse to accept the notion of a mind−brain duality at all, and we struggle to explain the human experience. It’s a problem as much of philosophy and metaphysics as one of biology.

Biology has one clear advantage over philosophy and metaphysics: it can be measured. But it’s natural for scientists to measure either the mind or the brain. Even as modern science scoffs at the false premise of dualism, it inadvertently reinforces it. Neurologists work with brain tissue. Psychologists grapple with functions of the mind. Psychiatrists have a foot in both camps; they diagnose problems of the mind and treat them as problems of the brain, which is perhaps why psychiatry is sometimes regarded with suspicion by both sides.

Since the days of Esquirol and Freud, OCD has been viewed as a problem of the mind. Except, of course, OCD wasn’t viewed, not in the literal sense, it was conceived, modelled, reimagined. Modern technology, however, now allows the brain to be viewed in the literal sense. And that literal view, some neuroscientists believe, can show us the physical basis of OCD.

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Only a fool or a liar will tell you how the brain works. Even well into the twentieth century, while scientists in other fields could harness technology to split the atom and unravel the molecular structure of DNA, neuroscientists were largely restricted to two types of experiment. They could remove and look at a dead brain, or they could watch for the effects of brutal accidents and dreadful disease on a live brain. The nineteenth-century scientist Paul Broca famously unravelled how the brain processes language with the help of stroke victims who lost the ability to speak.

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