Spanish neurologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Camilo Golgi. He became a pioneer in contemporary neurology via his work and microscopy investigations of the brain. When Cajal visited Barcelona in 1887, he discovered Golgi's technique, which entailed staining cells with potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to convert a few neurons to a dark black colour while keeping the surrounding cells clear. He took this method up and developed it further, which became his major area of work. This method allowed him to work on the central nervous system which earlier could not have been studied closely with the help of a microscope as the nerves were extremely bundled up. Eric Newman says that cayal went on to create many neurological illustrations which are even used to date. These illustrations made the understanding of the brain better as they provided a clear image and understanding of it. Cajal and Golgi however didn't work together as they both had different views, as Golgi believed that all neurons were connected to each other while Cajal argued that the brain consisted of autonomous cells.
Despite how rudimentary his working hypotheses were, Ramón y Cajal employed schematic sketches because he believed that making an attempt was better than making none. He thought that the existence of rigidly ordered neural circuits is a basic feature of all brains. Ramón y Cajal was the first to realise that the existence of neurons was the shared characteristic of all brains and that all brains are cellular societies with the same objective of orchestrating the behavioural interaction of the organism with its environment. Ramón y Cajal's discovery that the conduction of the 'nervous current' — the element that finally forges functional dynamics — has a direction: from the terminals of the presynaptic neuron through the dendritic tree, towards the somata, and out via the axons of the postsynaptic neurons.
Over the years there have been many neurologists and psychologists who have worked on understanding the brain, each one coming up with their own theories and Sigmund Freud is one name who everyone is aware of. His theories of psychoanalysis, Oedipus and Electra complex, denial and reaction formation and many more have formed the basis of the modern psychology we have today. The development of therapeutic methods like the utilisation of free association and the discovery of transference was made possible by Freud's psychoanalysis, establishing its key place in the analytical process. Ernest Jones asserts that Freud's development of the Oedipus complex as the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory resulted from his broadening of the idea of sexuality to include its infantile phases. For the clinical examination of symptom onset and the underlying mechanisms of suppression, he developed models using his understanding of dreams as wish fulfillments. On the basis of this, according to Octave Mannoni, Freud created his theory of the unconscious and a mental structure model that encompassed the id, ego, and super-ego. According to Freud, libido—sexualized energy invested in mental structures and processes that leads to romantic attachments existed—as well as a death drive, which is the root of obsessive behaviours including repetitive behaviour, hate, aggressiveness, and neurotic guilt. Freud gained a broad understanding of religion and society in his later writings, which he often critiqued.
Over the years a lot of development has happened in the field of brain studies, from ancient times to the present, however one needs to understand that there will never be a point where one can understand the brain completely. It will always manage to amaze us and scientists will have to continue their exploration for many generations to come.
Brain with its 80 billion neurons is understood more through our pervasive attempts to assay the extraordinary rather than the mundane. The greatest stride in memory research started with the work of Soviet neuro-psychologist A R Luria wrting about the mnemonist S.
Just like the brain map and the research around the presence of pain in limbs which did not exist opened the conversation to neural plasticity.
Let's talk about ghosts. Let's talk specifically about ghosts that are in the brain. Specifically, let's talk about a phantom limb. What is a phantom limb? A phantom limb is the sense of an amputated body part that still functions as if it were there. It can cause pain and other sensations. Also, sometimes the phantom limb can move by itself. For example, a person with a missing hand might experience their hand moving of their own accord without any input or command from their brain. The arm may twitch repeatedly and the person may experience pain in the missing hand or shoulder as well.
But is there any scientific basis for the existence of phantom limbs? In short, yes.
Scientists have long known that parts of the brain can be damaged by a stroke or other trauma to the body. They have also been aware that some of these damaged areas can still function even if they don't receive signals from the rest of the body.
While they can't communicate in the usual way with the rest of the body, they can still process information and send signals back to the brain. These signals can produce sensations in the body like pain and the feeling of movement in the missing limb. In other words, some areas of the brain can become "ghosts." They can continue to exist even though they are no longer receiving any input from the rest of the body. This is why some people with a missing limb can experience a sense of motion and pain in the missing part even if the brain never sent any commands telling them to move their limb. The brain just received signals from the part anyway and processed them as if they were coming from the body as a whole.
This, of course, doesn't mean that all the reports of phantom limbs are necessarily accurate. There are many examples of people experiencing sensations in a missing limb that are actually caused by something else. It can be so confusing for doctors sometimes!
Looking glass syndrome:
In the book "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran, Ph.D., M.D., the author describe the story of a woman who couldn't perceive her own left side. it turns out that the woman had a condition called Hemi neglect in which one-half of the body is ignored or ignored mentally even when it can still clearly be seen and touched. The woman neglected her left half and never paid attention to anything in it, including her own body parts.
The omission of an entire side of space from conscious awareness can have serious affects on brain function. People with hemineglect often can't recognize their own body parts and cannot perform tasks that require spatial awareness, such as driving or crossing a busy street. Unfortunately, this condition is difficult to treat because the person simply doesn't realize there is a problem in the first place. So the researchers came up with a clever solution to this problem.
To understand what was going on in this woman's brain, the authors performed an experiment in which they showed the woman a mirror where she could see her full reflection and asked her to grab a pen on her left side. It was astonishing to see what she actually did. Instead of grabbing the pen with her hand on the left, she kept banging on the mirror with her right hand in a strange attempt to grab something on her left side. The error was quite startling and shocking to see because the action was entirely inconsistent with what one would expect from a healthy person acting normally. Clearly, something very strange was going on inside her brain!
Similar experiments have been performed on patients who suffer from unilateral neglect, which is the loss of awareness on one side of space. People with this condition tend to bump into objects, walk in the wrong direction, or even try to comb their hair with their eyes closed because they can't see the part of their bodies that they are doing these things with. These strange behaviours were caused by a failure of the brain to integrate sensory information from the neglected side of the body with the rest of the brain. In other words, the brain was unable to create a unified representation of the body because it couldn't receive adequate input from the neglected side.
Beyond the everyday consequences of the neglect condition, it has profound implications for how the brain creates a spatial representation and organizes information about the world around us, how it deals with left and right, and how it handles visual information. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial to understanding how we function as human beings and how brains organize complex information.
Capgras Syndrome:
In another instance, the author describes a case of a son who started believing that his parents were imposters. Although they were the same people who raised him from birth, he regarded them as impostors and insisted they were not his parents.
The patient described in his book suffered from Capgras syndrome, a rare but well-known psychiatric disorder in which people lose all recognition of familiar faces as belonging to themselves or their loved ones. This loss of familiarity is thought to be a result of damage to a part of the brain called the temporal lobe which is essential for forming memories. People with this condition often feel as if their family members are strangers and that they are being used and manipulated by someone else. They also experience amnesia for recent events and are unable to recognize some familiar places.
In another recorded case, a patient was convinced that his stepfather was identified as a robot. He decapitated him and opened his skull to look for microchips. The patient's dissociation from emotions was so extreme that he believed his stepfather to be an android.
Coping, Perceptions, and Delusions:
In the above examples, the symptoms suggest the presence of some sort of deficit in the patient's perceptual apparatus. However, in other cases, the mechanisms that underlie these disorders remain unclear, making it difficult to develop effective treatment strategies.
Researchers, therefore, continue to look for clues that might provide some insight into how these disorders occur in the hope that this may eventually lead to the development of more effective treatments.
People diagnosed with such conditions provide scientists with a unique opportunity to study how their conscious and unconscious minds interact and the role of delusion in this process. It is generally believed that these brain abnormalities arise as a result of various injuries to parts of the brain associated with memory and face recognition, such as the hippocampus and the temporal lobe. These injuries are often caused by head injuries, strokes, tumours, and chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. However, the exact mechanisms underlying the formation of delusional beliefs are not yet fully understood. In addition, it is often difficult to diagnose these conditions because many people are not aware that they have unusual beliefs about their own identity or that of their family members.
Coping with delusions can be very difficult because patients are usually unable to change their beliefs unless the underlying cause of the disorder is identified and treated.
Delusions are false beliefs that are held by a person despite there being no objective evidence to support their existence. Freud suggests that defence mechanisms play a central role in the development of delusions, and these are best understood through the lens of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Defence mechanisms are unconscious processes that we use to cope with stressful situations by diverting our attention away from the source of the stress so that we can deal with it more effectively. But in the context of patients with capgras, where the subject has lost contact with their external environment, the effects of these defence mechanisms become exaggerated and they can result in delusional beliefs becoming fixed in the patient's mind and preventing him/her from recognising that they are no longer in contact with reality. The causes of these conditions are still poorly understood, but there are a number of proposed theories which have been proposed to explain their causes. These include the idea that they may result from a disturbance in the patient's memory or a disruption in their sense of reality as a result of brain damage. Although there has been a great deal of research into this condition there is still much that remains unknown about it and its treatment. Research in the field will help us better understand how the brain works, how memory is formed and how the connection between the mind and the body is maintained so that we may be better equipped to treat patients suffering from such conditions in future.
Brain Imaging and Neuropsychology research has had many successes in understanding how belief formation occurs in the cerebral cortex region of the brain during short-term memory formation tasks. However, researchers have struggled to model how the wealth of information in the cerebral cortex can be effectively transmitted and integrated with other regions of the cerebral cortex to maintain long-lasting memories in long-term memory. A number of cognitive scientists have investigated the way memory forms in order to try and understand this integration process. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques, researchers have been able to observe how different regions of the brain work together to generate meaningful memories. In particular, research has shown that regions of the cerebral cortex in the brain known as the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are involved in the formation of long-term memories.
These regions are believed to play a role in the memory formation and retrieval of long-term memories by forming a communication network between the different areas of the cerebral cortex and the regions of the brain responsible for sensory perception. Together, these regions are thought to play an important role in mediating the processing of information so that it is accurately encoded into long-term memory. The research suggests that this communication between different parts of the cerebral cortex takes place through a process known as synaptic plasticity. This means that synaptic connections between different areas of the brain are strengthened or weakened depending on a number of factors including experience and exposure to certain environmental stimuli. In this way, the integration of different areas of the brain is promoted so that there is greater connectivity between different cortical areas which allows information to be passed from memory to memory and over time makes the memories more stable and easier to retrieve.
Memory Research plays an important role in understanding many aspects of human cognition and behaviour. There are a number of different techniques that have been used to study the process of memory formation in humans including behavioural studies, brain imaging studies as well as neurochemical studies. In recent years, advances in neuroimaging technologies have made it possible to observe changes in the brain that take place during the process of memory formation and retention. Another important aspect to study is how meaning and beliefs are stored in the brain and how information that is learned is processed and stored as memories.
How these memories influence our day to day life through the decisions we make is an open question to be considered by neuro-economics, and applied psychology.
Thank you to 9,875 of our readers. This week The Behavioural Review was written by:
