I would hate the brain too if I didn’t know so much about it; it makes us hypocrites, because simultaneously it makes us self-conscious and also incredibly selfish.
It is through self-exploration that one comes to the conclusion that they are the most misunderstood being on this planet. Due to the nature that nobody speaks honestly and we have not made communication a straightforward act of evolution, but instead a meandering multitude of layers, intricacies and lies to ourselves and others, we are under the illusion that we are each special. The western world has capitalized on this and bred a society that’s dependent on individuality and competition.
In order to be successful, you must be different. This is based on the university system and how one progresses as an adult. We are terrified of not being seen as distinguished enough by another person.
We base our happiness on the perceptions of others. We base our satisfaction on individuality, whereas we spend all of our time in the shallow end of the pool along with the majority of people. We play it safe, because we are more scared of strange looks than dying unhappy.
With how many people are starting to question this, neuroscience is as important as ever, but why don’t neuroscientists seem to think the same thing?
As a future scientist, I am befuddled with the collaboration of philosophy and science. Neuroscience despises philosophy, and in my courses, the only philosophical thing taught about the brain is the hard problem of consciousness.
The field of neuroscience is a microcosm. In the field of neuroscience, we have a “common enemy” that we are all fighting against and thus, is what progresses research. But, what if I told you that there was no enemy?
The belief that has propagated neuroscience for several decades, since the 1960s to be exact, is the serotonin deficiency hypothesis. It essentially states something very basic when looked at from afar – that the common cause of major depressive disorder is a deficiency in serotonin. And I have one thing I would like to say to that – damn, I wish it were that easy!
Part of me wants to cry, but another part of me wants to laugh at how many years we have wasted on this theory and how many people have unknowingly suffered because they placed all their trust in science.
I have a very horrible thing to tell you. And it is going to make you sad, and it should break your heart. Science doesn’t want to figure the unknowable out. The days of science, as we know of it today, that consisted of epiphanies, discoveries and mind-altering prepositions are long gone.
In other words, the creatures that are dependent on the brain have no real desire to figure it out. In other other words, to the people who first fell in love with it, the brain has turned into a tantrum-ridden toddler, that doesn’t seem to calm down when given things that are very much not the solution. The industry of neuroscience is, essentially, full of parents who shouldn’t have been parents. They were parents not for their children or themselves, but for others. I’ve noticed that people just mostly want something to brag about. Oh, and they want a lot of money.
Neuroscientists treat mentally ill people like uncontrollable infants, and that is the problem with the industry as a whole today. It seems we are always stuck between a rock and a hard place with mental illness – either people don’t take it seriously or they take it seriously to extreme lengths. We can never see mental illness for what it truly is — it always ends up being something else: a justification in a murder trial, a reason for someone’s irrationality or a cause for someone to start medication. In all instances, mentally ill people are deemed as diverting dangerously from the norm. They push the limits so far of what it means to be human that it’s better if they would just be quiet.
And that is evident in the medications that are prescribed to mentally ill people today. Antidepressants can definitely benefit some people’s lives, but most people recall negative side effects to their overall life when taking it – such as lack of pleasure in daily activities, lack of sex drive, lack of motivation, but also a lack of depressed mood. Essentially, they take away every aspect of human experience instead of focusing on the cause of the problem. In other words, it causes the numbing of mentally ill people who are unable to function and complain a bit too much for neurotypical people.
People ask me then, why do we keep doing this? I have an answer, but it’s not a fun one. I believe that mental health caretakers simply want mentally ill people to shut up and keep quiet. They deem them not as people, but instead pests. This is a genocide that doesn’t kill anyone off — it only aims to suppress them so much so that they are basically philosophical zombies. They’ll react when you pinprick them, but they have no conscious experience, because the medication has sucked it out of them.
And this is where I want to start when dismantling current day neuroscience – the serotonin deficiency hypothesis, because this has seeped into so much more of neuroscience and biology today.
Neuroscience today is based on the notion that there is a common cause of all mental illnesses, and that is the disorder itself. For example, all the symptoms of depression lead to the common cause being diagnosed as depression. This notion implies that the problem in the brain is the cause, since it is the thing that is causing all of the symptoms. They make the assumption that if you snip the cause of the disorder, you will cut off all of the symptoms.
From there, a decrease in serotonin was correlated with a cause of depression. I bet scientists were throwing a party when they found this out — they thought they had genuinely found the cause of depression. But, I argue, if this were true, why has our number of mentally ill people not gone down, but instead gone up? Why do so many psychiatrists misdiagnose bipolar people with depression, then prescribe them an antidepressant blindly to thus induce a manic episode? And why is nobody questioning this at all? How has nobody realized this is the laziest game of guess and check in existence?
From multiple sources(1), it has been found that there is no such correlation with a decrease in serotonin and an increase in depressed mood. What this suggests is scientists have attempted to put a bandaid over a huge, huge wound fundamentally in neuroscience.
I don’t know how to explain this without crying — how am I supposed to be okay with the fact that all of the research on depression has been based around the serotonin deficiency hypothesis? How am I supposed to be okay with all of the people who have blindly gotten serotonin syndrome or lost all of their motivation due to antidepressants, and they are so trusting of scientists that they think it is their own fault? How am I supposed to be satisfied knowing that we are running longer and quicker in the wrong direction? Why are mentally ill people not allowed to ask their psychiatrists why they are on their medications without the worry that they are trying to “go off of them”? Why do we hate mentally ill people so much?
And why won’t anyone listen to me? Why am I being taught about the serotonin deficiency hypothesis in my classes, but nobody is doing anything about it? Does it not make everyone else full of rage?
I wonder, am I the only one who wants to figure out the brain, not simply figure out how I can profit from it?
Our subjective desire gets in the way of researching subjectivity. We collectively write the hard problem of consciousness off as philosophical jargon – something that is interesting at first, but will never actually be able to be figured out.
But, I argue, if we can’t, what is the purpose of all of this? What are we advancing for, if we don’t even know what is between our ears? How can we ever dream of understanding society or the universe when all of us have our brains at gunpoint right now?
Everyone is scared about AI — I’m not so much worried about that, as I am people trying to replace the brain with it. They have no idea what they are up against.
We need our brains to figure out inventions, but God, we haven’t even figured out the brain. We are screwed.
It’s because we don’t want to understand the brain truly and we never did. We just wanted to learn how to control it to thus control everyone. We saw the most beautiful painting in the world, and instead of preserving it in a museum, everyone plotted on how they could steal it for themselves so nobody else could have it. They don’t want to make it ubiquitously known — they want to keep it from us and use it against us. In other words, they want the brain to remain a secret, so they keep these hypotheses that amount to nothing except money, money and money and a lot of silence from mentally ill people. It’s just a version of asylums where they have freedom — they are still controlled and regulated so they aren’t as much of a disturbance, but it’s under the guise of being helpful and considerate this time. They prescribe medications, telling you they don’t want you to go off them for your own safety. But it’s mainly because they don’t know what will happen if you stop. It’s not that doctors are keeping from you what they know — they are keeping from you that they in fact don’t know anything.
What’s worse than not understanding is pretending to understand.
Whenever I am full of hatred for science, I try to remember how beautiful it is sometimes, and how science would be nothing with subjectivity – how so many amazing creations were found out all by complete accident. I think about how many lives penicillin has saved from a mold that grew over a two week period – let me put that into perspective for you: so many lives were saved due to a mistake of a human. I think about how microwaves were found out to work by the inventor realizing his chocolate bar had melted when he was trying to make energy sources for radar equipment (2) during World War II. Even gunpowder was figured out by Chinese alchemists trying to find the elixir for life.
What I am trying to say is, humanity is somewhat dependent on subjectivity. But, the opposites of something are not enemies, but are instead poles. We strive for objectivity, when subjectivity is the end result. The problem is we think subjectivity is an enemy – we see it as something to abolish. We think that is what seeps into science and poisons it — but no, it is when subjectivity is not used curiously but instead with evil intent.
This is where AI comes in. It takes away the subjective nature of humans, and in unprecedented circumstances, makes it even better. But, I have some questions as a very curious neuroscientist.
What breakthroughs will AI ever discover? What leads to breakthroughs is an innate feeling of insatiability. AI has a purpose – to fulfill their task. But humans have no purpose – that’s what makes our breakthroughs so worthwhile. We fight to keep living on a planet we don’t have to. We are struggling to make answers out of things that have none. We were born with a certain hunger that can’t be satisfied no matter how much we read or watch. AI has no subjective reason for doing things. Humans have to generate that reason for themselves, and when it’s so real like that, it’s impenetrable and no machine can come near it.
I fear if we replace scientists with AI we will lose all possibility of figuring out mental illness. And a part of me is hesitant – especially for therapy. I see the biggest problem of therapy is subjectivity as well – but that’s also the biggest argument in favor of it. There are lots of bad therapists, such as ones who haven’t been through horrible instances themselves so they have nothing to relate to their clients on, ones that push an agenda onto you or ones that otherwise abuse you. That is where subjectivity gets in the way — because we have this insatiability, it doesn’t just seep into inventions, but also things that have already been invented.
I see a lot of current therapists as Mary in her room. They study all they can about mental illness, but I’ve found that if you’ve never lived with it, you don’t truly understand it. I would argue even if you watched a loved one have a debilitating mental illness, although it’s sad, you still don’t understand. And that’s what breeds bad therapists – people who speak as if mental illness is a mindset, as if it’s something that can be cured with mindfulness or living in the present moment, as if it’s something that the only problem is that they don’t want to get better. I find that a lot of mental health technicians and counselors really hate mentally ill people.
It’s not that they don’t want to understand – it’s that they can’t. But, all of the people who would be good therapists end up thinking they will amount to nothing and are dying at alarming rates. They don’t know how necessary they are in their field – this is because we preach stability in the course of university. But I argue we need to have lived through instability to teach someone who is unstable to live a stable life. What does a person who swept through school with daddy’s money hav e in common with a decade-long drug addict on Skid Row?
I think this serotonin deficiency hypothesis has plagued every aspect of the neuroscientific study of psychiatric disorders. It is just like the reason parents give their parents endless hours of iPad time instead of spending time with them – because it’s easier. This goes back to my analogy that neuroscientists are just parents who weren’t ready to be parents yet.
Raising a child consists of long, strenuous decisions to over time grow them into a better person. If you jump over the complicated steps of raising a child, they will grow up completely misguided, and that’s where neuroscience is right now – they were raised incorrectly, they were given kisses for every wound instead of gauze, they never learned right from wrong. How do you undo so many years of imprinting?
Neuroscience is a victim of itself – what do I mean by this? The thing we should be working to figure out is imprinting, but it’s the thing getting in the way. It's imprinting about imprinting. Damn, I’m starting to understand why nobody wants to study this. This is meta shit.
I don’t want to be a parent when I grow up, and maybe I see why now. I already have a child that nobody is taking care of properly. In fact, it’s being utterly neglected on all frontiers by people who claim to love it. We must have a very different definition of love, because I know I would never try to suppress the truth of something I loved.
What I think happened is a lot of people went into neuroscience when it isn’t neuroscience that they loved. They loved something else that neuroscience isn’t – they loved the money, the status, the bragging rights.
I ask, what could neuroscience be without being tainted by malice? What if neuroscience wasn’t used for any ulterior purpose – what if it was just genuinely wanted to be figured out? What would happen then? Would we find that the brain loves us back?
Would we find, maybe, that it’s not as elusive as we think it is? Maybe it wants to be figured out as much as we want to figure it out?
So many people see the brain as an enemy, something they are cursed with making sense of. I argue that we have fabricated the brain into being an enemy, so we have a common cause to eliminate. And AI is trying to eliminate the brain.
“We have scrubbed the world clean of magic,” Alan Watts stated. This is evident in trying to make machines replace the brain in a time where we haven’t even understood a fraction of the brain. It’s just like when a parent walks back into a child’s life after having been gone for a majority of it. It’s a contradiction in and of itself. We have spent no time trying to befriend the brain, only control it and that’s all we’ve known. We haven’t spent any time raising it but we expect it to be a fully fledged adult. We never spent any time fostering care, but we expect it to love and obey us.
Humans are so used to being at the top of the food chain that they forget what causes them to be at the top of the food chain – their developed brains.
It makes me want to cry seeing how many people take their brains for granted.
It makes me want to cry hearing so many people say they wish they could go into neuroscience. It makes me feel so alone. What that essentially means is, I know exactly what you are saying, but I’m not in love with the brain enough to dedicate my whole life to it. I see what’s wrong, but that’s for someone else to fix.
I ask, what if there is no one else? I look around, and I see nobody else even remotely angry. What if that someone else has to be you?
I’m officially over the idea of maintaining a legacy. I have no desire in being the person that covers the wound that is the human brain and getting praise for it. Simply, I want to understand, and then I want to perish.
After twenty one years, I have realized what my purpose is. I am supposed to have felt the weight of mental illness, the trauma of subjectivity and the separation from others. It does not make me special or unique. I know if we all realized that we are not special and are all smaller parts of a whole, then we would be able to figure it out, I know. I know that I can’t do this alone, deep down.
But nobody seems to be listening to me. Nobody seems to be hearing the cries from the brain, how much it wants to be understood. It doesn’t want to hurt us and fill us full of doubt. It’s just as confused as we are.
AI is only distracting us further from the problem – that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in neuroscience. And part of me wants to let go and stop complaining, because I look around and it seems I’m the only one flustered and upset.
But, I have faith. I have faith that there are other people like me who can’t sleep because they’re thinking about what could be wrong. And they aren’t just thinking about what’s wrong — they want to be the person who changes it too.
I have recently found something to keep me awake again. I found something that provides some semblance of answers that it is leading me into curiosity like never before. What I thought was dead in me has been invigorated.
The network theory of mental illness is a response to the common-cause theory of mental illness. Instead of the disorder being the cause and the symptoms merely side effects of the disorder, the network theory considers it differently. It posits what if the symptoms were the cause of the disorder? What if it becomes a “disorder” when enough of these interconnected, node-like symptoms are active together? And what if mental illness can be prevented by attacking the symptoms head on? (3)
This provides hope. This instills the notion that the thing that is wrong with you is not something fundamentally embedded in your core that cannot be scraped off no matter how hard you try, but instead something noticeable, plausible and fightable. It’s not a chemical imbalance. It’s not permanent. We have just been trying to solve the wrong thing this entire time.
This explains how those with borderline personality disorder, the only curable mental illness known as of right now, can be cured when they go through DBT therapy because they don’t identify with the nine bullet points of diagnosis anymore. What DBT does is break down each of the symptoms of the disorder and teach them how to cope with them. It’s not because they are broken — they just don’t have the tools to help them just yet. This suggests a disorder is dependent on the symptoms, not the other way around.
But oh, what does this mean for pharmaceutical companies? I, frankly, have no care. I hope they all burn to the ground. I hope this is implemented more, and I hope we stop taking advantage of mentally ill people. Just because they don’t understand their brain, doesn’t give you any reason to take their money and exploit their confusion.
I want neuroscience to be a marathon, instead of just merely running in place. I want neuroscience news to be as prevalent as astronomical news. I want more people to realize how much they love the brain too. And I want it to stop being seen as some enemy that needs to be silenced and handicapped.
We don’t need to lock the brain in a cage until we find some way to exploit it – we don’t have to ruin the brain like we as humans ruin everything. We don’t need any ulterior motive for the brain. We just need to love it, and find that it has loved us back this whole time; it just didn’t know how to show the love properly. Aren’t we all like that? Can we not sympathize with the brain a little bit?
After all, the brain is human too, isn’t it? Isn’t it not what makes us human? Can’t we forgive it for everything it’s put us through, and realize that it is simply an extension of ourselves?
And can’t we have the grace to ask, why? Can’t we be curious and selfless enough to ask the brain why it does the harmful things it does?
We hate too much on the brain for producing evil. But I argue it’s humans who have let it fester as long as it has — evil is created by a cycle of trauma. It is the brain not being able to rewrite its own code. The brain is a victim. The brain is a sick patient. The human brain doesn’t hate mentally ill people — humans do.
I’ve been comparing the brain to a child this whole article, and maybe I’m right. Maybe the brain is a kid that is in and out of penitentiaries, that can never learn its lesson, but those places don’t aim to teach. They aim to punish for not knowing.
We are punishing the brain for not being obvious. But that’s what I love about it — how it isn’t so obvious. I love the brain for what it truly is.
And I hope this article made some people realize how much they love the brain. Your trauma, your pain, it can go into this field. This field welcomes all imperfections: in fact the more the better! The more isolated you felt, the more together you will feel now.
If you’re still alive and you’ve battled mental illness, you beat the brain. The only thing you can do for it in return is share everything you learned for those who suffer younger than you.
No, I’m not going to end this article saying I’m the future, because I’m not. I’ve noticed in my life when you don’t wish for something, it happens. Just like penicillin. But what I plan to do to figure it out is talking to as many mentally ill people as possible from as many cultures as possible and implementing Alan Watts’ notion that we are all organisms in accordance with our environment. I plan to live with Nature, and watch the answers fall into my lap.
I will not be somebody to celebrate, and I will tear down any statue they make of me. The brain doesn’t want to be profited for. They’ve taken everything else. The brain is the only thing I have left and it’s the only thing you have left. Be more scared.
Everyone seems to be worried about conservation of other things, but I seem to be the only one worried about conservation of the mind. I want to preserve it like a national park. I want to speak to it in its alien language: I don’t want to translate. I want to kiss it.
I know what real love is, and it is what I feel for the brain. And I think neuroscientists should only go into the field if they feel the way I do. Then, and only then, will we be able to crack the code.
We need to operate as one, but we are operating separately. Imagine if each wave roared in its own way, like pieces of hair made of water… now that wouldn’t make much sense. We are all going in separate misguided directions. We are just like the brain, as we are all children with parents who didn’t raise us right. We think we can’t take back our childhood, but I argue we can.
We are taught to be separate so I don’t blame you. We are taught to compete. But science isn’t about competition, and only when it is does it get ruined.
I can’t stand to see the brain get soiled. I can’t stand to see Neuralink monkeys get killed due to a high ego about the brain.
Just because you are good at technology does not mean you will be good at the brain. All in human history, nobody has been “good at the brain.”
The only area I aim to be different in, is I want to be good at the brain. I want to understand it the way it wants to be understood. It hears this sincerity. It thanks me continuously.
I hope you know what it feels like to not see your brain as your biggest enemy. I hope it is easily understandable one day of all days. I hope your brain is something you’re grateful you have, rather than feeling cursed by it. In fact. I will make it my mission to.
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