No - the heading wasn't my idea but Mark McGuinness's. And he was practicing some more of his free-ranging creativity on me that he offers over at his own blog.
It all started with another one of those daft 'scientific' reports on the BBC site that claim to have discovered the biological cause for some problem or other. This time 'a Yale University team' were trumpeting that - wait for it - paedophile brains were showing decreased activity in the Hypothalamus when they were shown erotic 'adult' material (as opposed to the non-adult material they prefer). This was followed by a claim that anti-schizophrenic drugs could 'cure' paedophilia by taking out the Hypothalamus.
Taking a wild guess at what goes on in Mark's brain I would say that he got that brain research is becoming a bit like a long-running musical - every one wants to get in on the act, even when they don't have a clue what these discoveries are really telling us about the way human beings actually work.
Regular readers of this blog will know that, in Reverse Therapy, we see the Hypothalamus as one of the core brain mechanisms involved in symptom-production in Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Anxiety, Depression and a host of other conditions. That wasn't our discovery but Ernest Rossi's if you want to know more.
But that doesn't mean that the Hypothalamus is the ultimate cause of stress-related illness, any more than it is the cause of paedophilia. That would be a bit like an engineer claiming that a rapid consumption of petrol during the moments before impact was the cause of your car crash.
The reason the Hypothalamus shows a change in activity is that it is changing the signals it sends to the nervous system. One set of signals will damp down arousal, others will rev it up. But the Hypothalamus, in turn, is responding to signals from the rest of the emotional apparatus in the limbic system. And those emotional triggers are based on learning. Human beings weren't born peadophiles any more than they were born ill. They learned to be that way.
If you want to change human behavior you are going to have to start further back than the brain mechanisms that reproduce it. A good place to start would be the stressful experiences that led to the formation of cellular memories, which, in turn, dictated the way the brain - and its human owner - would respond to experiences of that same kind in the future. That raises the awareness necessary for the next step - which is to increase the opportunities for new learning experiences in the present, so that the brain can start to lay down different neural responses.
The Hypothalamus is a bit like the conductor of the orchestra. It regulates the musical offerings of the nerves, the hormones, the cells, the cytokines, the neurotransmitters and the endorphins. You can't blame the Hypothalamus if you give it a score from Schoenberg to play instead of one from Mozart.
I'm glad someone is prepared to take a guess at what goes on in my brain. I'd love to hear the results if anyone works it out.
Posted by: Mark McGuinness | October 09, 2007 at 08:12 AM