Accidental Blogger

From an earlier discussion on memory, a chance wrong link sent me on the search for information on neuroscientist Ian H. Robertson. While I couldn’t dig up the much quoted research article regarding the inability of younger people to remember phone numbers as well as the older generation(primarily on blogs, which ought to have thrown up a relevant hyperlink or two), I did come across a  bevy of  articles penned by Dr.Robertson as a columnist for the British Medical Journal, which whetted my appetite for more.

Samples below:

The point? Oh yes, the point. Well, the point of this book is that pleasure and quality of life are about buying things which change how you feel. Like tobacco, like alcohol, like chocolate, like fatty foods, and like coffee. You see, these are the really important things which put the quality in life. The trouble is that fascist health promoters keep making us stressed and sick by telling us to stop or do less of them. The editors of this book have a noble vision of a new science of pleasure. There are even three pages describing the pleasure circuits in the brain to prove it.

                                                    –From  a pithy 1996 review of a psychology book

The gut reaction that is prejudice is just that: an automatic convulsion of body and mind against the object of prejudice. It takes less than half a second for this convulsion to spread through the brain when the object of prejudice is encountered. This is too fast for conscious reflection–and hence for conscious control. It is a reaction that is learnt largely from parents and family, and the stark truth is that it is so ingrained in the mental apparatus that it is almost impossible to change.

                                                                       — From Gut reactionaries

One of the worst things about getting older is becoming stupider. It’s not, I’m afraid, just a matter of losing the edge off your   memory. The gruesome fact is that, on standard tests of raw intelligence which do not rely on stored up knowlege or well rehearsed mental skills, from the mid-20s onwards your mental abilities steadily decline. Now 90% of jobs are 90% routine, and age may confer advantage to the routine via long experience and hugely practised skills, but non-routine problem solving is better done by the young. Hence most mathematicians have to make their names and find their chairs in their 20s and 30s, and state-of-the-art computer programmers have to get out or get into management while they are still young. Only in politics does age related mental decline seem to be linked with career advantage.

                                                                        –From Use it or lose it

Dr. Robertson makes some interesting observations regarding the propensities and capacity of the human brain in this interview, as well, in context of a discussion of his book ‘Mind Sculpture:Unlocking your brain’s untapped potential’.

Griffin: The book’s title, Mind Sculpture,
is itself, of course, a metaphor. It makes the hugely important point
that we have the capacity to sculpt our own brains, and you describe
the brain in a wonderful phrase: "this trembling web". Could you talk
about what you mean by brain sculpting?

       

Robertson:
The notion is that one can now see marvellous things happening in the
two-way interchange between the trembling web of neurones in the brain,
and our thoughts, feelings, emotions and memories. Debates about
whether such and such is psychologically caused or organically caused
are entirely sterile. It should surprise no psychologist that an
antidepressant can change mood and it should surprise no psychiatrist
that a particular psychotherapeutic intervention can change the
biochemistry of the neurotransmitter system and alter the physical
structure of the brain, if a mood is prolonged. But it does
surprise both of these camps! A lot of people still don’t appreciate
that every thought has its physiological substrate and vice versa.

In his book Mind Sculpture, he goes on to elaborate in great detail the ways in which the brain is molded throughout the life of the average human. A special chapter on Phantom Limbs deals with the perception of pain, itches and other sensations in phantom limbs that persist in the mental mapping of the body to the brain- even how some treatments had a remapping of the missing limb to parts of the face so that a woman who sensed an annoying itch in her amputated limb, could relieve it by gently rubbing a part of her cheek, for instance. I wonder if there would have been a similar neuropsychology based treatment available to those who had the weird condition highlighted by Ruchira in an earlier post on Real Afflictions – Common and Uncommon.From a link about Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID)in her post:

"Neurologists at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of
California, San Diego, who have studied phantom limb syndrome (in which
accidental amputees still feel pain in their lost limb), stroke
victims, and GID have recently turned their attention to BIID. They’ve
only been able to conduct three brain scans on those with BIID, so far,
but in those, they have found some variation in the right parietal
lobe, the area of the brain responsible for creating a "map" or the
image of where one’s body exists in space. "What’s suggested from this
is that because of this dysfunction in the right parietal lobe, this
sense of unified body image isn’t formed," says McGeoch. "The senses
don’t coalesce. So, for a leg, for example, they can feel that it’s
there but it doesn’t feel like it should be there. It feels surplus.
Something’s gone wrong."

The brain is a strange and marvellous creature, unique in its susceptibility to influence and change throughout the life of the organism, and Dr.Robertson’s book highlights this in easily understood examples and anecdotes for the lay reader.