You know that sinking feeling when a song you hold dear to your heart becomes popular on a social media app amongst stupid individuals? How does it feel to watch someone destroy the sandcastle that you’ve been building for hours? Do you know the sensation of a movie you deeply enjoy being spoken about as overrated, when in actuality they just didn’t understand the meaning of it? Have you ever been angered by witnessing people knowing but not understanding? That is how I feel about what people have done to the brain.
I have noticed a surge in interest in psychology and neuroscience since the Covid-19 pandemic. People all of a sudden are talking about how important therapy is and how ubiquitous mental illness truly is. Mental health doesn’t feel as stigmatized, and it seems like people are more passionate about figuring out how to help these people. I should be happy, I know.
But I can’t help but feel there is something amiss and wrong. I’m afraid that this isn’t a renaissance of resolution, but instead another misstep of mankind.
Does it matter if more people are interested if they are looking at the brain in the wrong way? Is that not more bad than good?
I propose that the reason people are talking more about mental illness now is not because more people have it than before due to the pandemic, but instead that everyone was always this way the entire time. What essentially happened is humans were separated from other humans, in a society where socialization is necessary. This caused internalization and dissociation due to people not being one hundred percent distracted all of the time. When we are by ourselves, we find something very, very wrong with ourselves.
What I am saying is, why is it that the one time the mind goes untouched, it goes haywire? Is life a constant cycle of distraction to keep us from realizing how messed up we really are? If we all have these struggles regarding mental health, why is research for it so unsatisfactory?
In my neuroscience class, we covered mental illness and consciousness, and the way they discussed it was almost comical. For mental illness, they stated that it’s somewhat caused by fluctuations in neurotransmitter concentrations. They always add in that it’s a theory and not for certain, but never elaborate more than that. For consciousness, all they talked about was how confusing and befuddling it is.
The funny thing is, I came to college to learn but the more I take neuroscience classes, the more I realize I’m being implanted with vocabulary and not learning about how the brain functions at all. We are taught extensively about synapses and neurons and anatomy, but nothing about the confusing parts. Neuroscience wants us to know the answers and forget about the questions.
Especially when communicating about mental illness or consciousness, my professors have no idea what to say. But there is only one thought in their minds when their students ask them a question they don’t know: pretend like you do know. That is because in the scientific world what’s worse than not figuring out the truth is seeming outright wrong.
When I tell my professors I am interested in researching consciousness and the cause of mental illness, they laugh at me and call me ambitious. But I don’t consider it ambitious at all; if anything it feels obvious.
There are many reasons why neuroscience fails to research mental illness and consciousness adequately. But there is an ultimate foundational issue that covers many of the problems of neuroscience.
Neuroscience and psychology are guilty of failing to replicate their studies. When replicating MRI studies, they found that their sample sizes were far too small to have reproducible results (1). This has been deemed the “replication crisis.” But not only is this terrifying in terms of neuroscience but in terms of science as a whole. If people are allowed to publish anything, even if it is filled with confirmation bias and fraud, and we as a society believe whatever we read, then when does truth become impossible?
The famous marshmallow experiment (2) is one that has been up for debate recently. The finding was that delayed gratification is beneficial and makes something feel nicer once you sit and wait for it. But, when replicated, these studies cannot hold up. This means that all the children that were told to “sit and wait” for food or for rewards so that it would be more joyful were tortured for no reason.
Where is the line drawn between science and pseudoscience?
For example, there is evidence of fabrication for studies promoting cognitive behavioral therapy (3). Shockingly, articles that are cited more tend to have more falsified statements (4). It is recently coming out that neurotransmitters have a correlational effect on mental illness, rather than causation (5), while there are thousands of studies claiming small percentages of correlation to mean more than they actually do.
This is due to people not wanting to be out of jobs. While medication and CBT help some people, it certainly doesn’t help everybody, and shouldn’t be as shoved down our throats as it is now. There should be countless opportunities for therapy available, instead of focusing on CBT and medication as the end all be all. Therapists need something to fix to earn a living. Their business relies on the imprinting they do to make us feel like we need it. Additionally, Big Pharma doesn’t want to lose any money by people finding out that their medications are mostly correlational. There is a reason why most people on the DSM-5 board have invested in specific Big Pharma psychiatric medications, up to 70 percent (6).
The funniest part is science claims to be an unbiased, objective viewpoint of looking at the world, but it is filled with subjectivity. At first glance, it seemed incomprehensible that scientists would put status above the scientific method, but with closer examination, you realize it’s a microcosm of society today.
No publisher wants to publish a study that has no memorable data and no researcher wants to go unpublished. Thus, scientists undergo augmentations to their data to make it publish-worthy, including augmentations that make their data have positive results where they normally weren’t.
This blends the line between truth and fiction. Where does it stop? I’m worried that proving something to ourselves or others has become more important than figuring out the brain.
I look at my fellow neuroscientists, and I hope that we are here for the same things. But the harder I look, the more I see that a lot of them are there for the money and nothing else. More publications mean more money. This is the part where I cry because, in the end, the problem is always money.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s interesting how so many people are studying basic neuronal patterns, but not many people are studying consciousness when that’s what everything virtually goes back to. It’s interesting how so much money goes into neurotransmitter research for mental illness in order to back Big Pharma’s claims when that’s been stated to only be a theory. It’s interesting how confident we are about our research about the brain whereas we are open about our disillusionment towards the universe. It’s interesting how people see drugs as life-ruining substances and not as something phenomenal because they have the ability to alter our consciousness.
Everything points to the same thing: something or someone is trying to shut down consciousness research.
As of now, self-experimental research is not valid in the scientific world. But this is a huge problem because subjectivity is the largest question we as humans face today. In fact, it is called the “hard problem of consciousness.” What it questions is how qualia (subjective experience) can be measured and why it occurs. This is something that neuroscience completely skips and where philosophy takes over. Due to the fact that self-experimental research is invalid, this invalidates all qualia-related research.
Alan Watts said, “To name is to interpret experience by the past, to translate it into terms of memory, to bind the unknown into the system of the known.” Neuroscience is based on the assumption that consciousness can be explained in terms that are already known to us, so we study the topics we already know and hope experiments about those things produce a byproduct that could answer consciousness. We hyper-label parts of the brain hoping that that connects some puzzle pieces itself, instead of researching the brain as a whole. As humans, we have attributed knowledge to language, but what happens when the brain is unexplainable in human-understood words?
We are speaking a language to the brain in terms of previous neuroscience research, a human made language, whereas the brain is speaking an entirely different one, one we haven’t even conceived of yet.
This is knowing the brain, but not understanding the brain. Conscious experience is different than anything we have ever known, and it is going to be described in terms that are not known as of right now. Neuroscience as a whole is digging deeper and deeper into the wrong hole. “Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names,” Watts says. “To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations.”
Many people have faith in scientists, and I used to too, until I realized that so many of them value money over truth. I fear that we are so prideful of not being wrong that we are terrified of going back on our claims thus far.
I want humans to know it’s okay being wrong. I believe we will have another revolution — we will realize that a good portion of what we’ve learned in neuroscience has been fabricated or falsified. We will have to redo a lot of it. We will have wasted so much time. And it will be heartbreaking.
Subjectivity is the biggest problem in the world and in the scientific field — subjectivity is beautiful but it taints whatever it touches. It breeds competition and complication. It’s the one thing we need to research the most, but its prevalence is what keeps it from being researched. Our subjective desires for greed outweigh our objective desires for understanding subjectivity. Science is one big walking paradox and we should be very wary of what we listen to by people who are supposed to be on the human race’s side.
One day I hope we can love the brain the way it loves us.
1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04492-9
3) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00256/full
4) https://neurosciencenews.com/replication-science-data-18468/
5) https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-serotonin-fixation-much-ado-about-nothing-new
6) https://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/dsm-fire-financial-conflicts/story?id=15909673
