Studying The Brain In Order To Truly Understand The Mind

Throughout psychology’s history, the most common question to be asked is if we must study the brain in order to truly understand our minds. Even before the time of relevant psychological thought, there were philosophers such as Rene Descartes who sought to find if the body and the mind were truly integrated as one. We have found through a number of new imaging techniques that various psychological processes are related to structures within the brain, including mental illnesses, various forms of expression and how we sense the world around us. These techniques have also shown us that damage or injury to the brain can affect our mood and behaviour in a number of ways. We may never be able to locate every explanation for who we are and what we think through scanning the brain, but it can be argued that the methods of studying the brain have brought us newfound insights into our psychological processes.

There are a number of those in psychology now advocating and supporting the use of studying the brain in order to understand our minds and psychological processes. Henson (2005) argues that data from brain scans could potentially become a new variable in psychology studies, along with the more usual behavioural data, as long as we use a constant relationship between the structure of the brain and the function that it is involved in. He also argues that we do not necessarily need to “localise” the structures of the brain in order to view the relationship between it and our minds, as the different structures are so often relational when it comes to various psychological phenomena. The relationship between the brain and the mind is now able to be studied with a number of different imaging techniques, which show us areas of the brain at different times and conditions.

One of the most popular is MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a technique which shows us the brain through its molecules reacting to a radioactive detection - while potentially dangerous due to its radioactivity, MRI has assisted in showing us different ways in which the body and mind interact. Olabi, Ellison-Wright, McIntosh, Wood, Bullmore and Lawrie (2011) found that through longitudinal studies of various MRI scans of 928 schizophrenia patients (and 867 mentally healthy control patients), those with schizophrenia generally had less brain tissue in their frontal, parietal and temporal lobes - these structures of the brain and their degradation may partly explain the conditions of schizophrenia. Similar damage would have been done to one of neuropsychology’s most famous patients, Phineas Gage, who had his head speared with a pointed tamping iron and was left physically and mentally well but for his personality, which had devolved into making the once mature and responsible man overly angry and unwilling to do his job. Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galburda and Damasio (1994) found that while no damage was done to Gage’s motor cortices, the tamping iron had hit several sections of his frontal cortex (most notably the ventromedial sector), explaining his poor behaviour and bad temper. Damasio et al theorise (using 12 patients with damage to the frontal lobe) that sections of this region are connected in part to both the hypothalamus, which have been found to participate in emotional processing, emotional control, social skills and the assessment of fear and danger.

While the temporal and parietal lobes are responsible for auditory input and integrating general sensory input (respectively), the frontal lobe of the brain is our general behavioural and emotional control panel - it controls our behavioural and emotional responses to stimuli, and how we act on these responses. This shows how the physical brain relates to the mind, as damage to certain lobes shows explanation for a number of schizophrenic symptoms. There are also methods such as CT (computerised tomography) scans, which take X-ray scans of lots of different angles of the brain, creating a full image of the brain that is able to be studied. CT scans have shown us how the brain relates to the mind when it comes to production and recognition of speech. Dronkers (1996) sought to find if brain injuries could affect apraxia of speech, a condition which leaves patients able to recognise speech, but not create recogniseable speech themselves - using 44 participants who had post-stroke damage in the left hemisphere of the brain (25 with apraxia of speech, 19 without), he used a CT scan to locate the areas that may have contributed to the damage - it was found that the 25 participants with apraxia of speech had damage to the precentral gyrus of the brain, an area responsible for our motor cortex. Dronkers used this study to challenge Broca’s area (in the left of our frontal lobe), which was originally theorised to affect production and recognition of speech - he found that there was no significant damage in this area in any of the participants with speech apraxia. Diffuse optical topography is another valuable way of scanning the brain and finding support for the relationship between the brain and the mind - this way of measuring changes and activity in the brain measures the amount of oxygenated haemoglobin in various structures. Using this method, Taga and Asakawa (2007) have found that even in young infants, structures of the brain react in relation to different outside stimuli. This type of scan was used on 15 infants 2 to 4 months old as they reacted to different spoken and visual stimuli that were displayed apart. The auditory cortex of the infants (which receives and processes auditory signals) displayed an oxygenated response, meaning that the infants’ brains could positively react to the stimuli.

A newer neuroimaging technique, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), can also give us insight into the connection between the brain and our mind. Instead of using magnetic fields like MRI, fMRI works by measuring oxygenated blood within the brain - researchers can use structures of the brain with the most oxygenated blood to tell which structures are used when certain tasks are played out. This means that fMRI is a non-invasive way of scanning the brain - Rorden and Karnath (2004) argue that fMRI is especially useful in group studies, as its non-invasive methods mean that scans from several participants can be used to overlay and find common occurrences in association with different theories and locations in the brain. Rorden and Karnath argue that fMRI has given more support towards functions being spread out amongst various structures, and that it is able to show us functions in action so there is definite support.

Despite the brain structures evident in the relationship between our brains and our minds, there are a number of external factors which can affect both our brains and our psychological processes. For instance, the behavioural and emotional effects of alcohol are obvious, and support the link between the mind and the brain. Alcohol affects the brain’s neurons the most - tiny cells that connect to one another in a number of ways in order to send signals and commands. This is done through a neurotransmitting system in synapses between the cells. Valenzuela (1997) states that alcohol affects the brain’s neurotransmitters by affecting the equal balance between the synapses - these excitatory neurotransmitters (often involved in speeding up or exciting brain processes), causing the poor speech and motor functions we usually associate with the extreme use of alcohol. Afterwards, the excitatory neurons overcompensate for their lack of action and tend to cause symptoms such as shakiness and anxiety, those which we associate with hangovers. It has also been found that just as the brain can shape experience, experience can also shape our brains. This is due to “neural plasticity”, where the brain’s areas and neural communications can change constantly depending on a number of factors. Examples of this include Elbert, Pantev, Weinbruch, Rockstroh and Taub (1995), who found through MRI that musicians who use their left hand to play instruments had a more enhanced somatosensory area in their right hemisphere than those who didn’t play an instrument - not only does this support the theory of cross-hemispheric communication, but shows that the brain’s cortexes can be changed by our unique experiences. There is also the example of what structures process visual stimuli - Tzeng, Hung, Cohen and Wang (1979) found that those who spoke Chinese as a first language had more activation in their visually processing right hemisphere than their language-processing left hemisphere, as the Chinese written language is more pictorial and requires more visual study.

In conclusion, we do need to study the brain in order to properly understand the mind. This has been shown in the studies mentioned, as the invaluable methods of MRI, CAT and fMRI (among many other different methods) have been able to show us how our different cortexes and brain structures affect how we think and carry out actions. Such methods can offer invaluable insight to patients with mental disorders (such as Olabi et al) and those with various sensual disorders.