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Brain Research - Neuroscience or Brainwashing?
contents
- Neo-liberal propaganda?
- Brain research: findings in the shade
- The personal brain
- How do brain researchers work??
- Brain and Heart - An old story
- Pictures of the living brain
- A social organ
- What did brain research find out??
- Brain research and psychotherapy
- literature
This interdisciplinary research combines medicine, chemistry, biology and psychology, computer science and engineering and systematically links fragmented results in these individual disciplines.
Brain research under the microscope. Picture: sudok1 - fotolia Neo-liberal propaganda?
Neuroscientists have a reputation among critical sociologists for propaganda for the neo-liberal ideology, thus making the victory of the most ruthless in competition and the destruction of the welfare state as a biological law unassailable.
Torsten Heinemann came to the conclusion that the popularity of brain research is explained by the systematic economization of academic science, in which knowledge is exclusively considered a commodity, and in which individual experiences are just as devalued as critical science.
In the face of the danger of nuclear war, environmental degradation, and social injustice, critical scientists questioned the idea of a "neutral science" that was marginalized by society until the 1980s and showed how science and technology could be used for misanthropic policies.
The neo-liberal model of a knowledge-based society that translates new insights directly into profit would be diametrically opposed. The neurosciences, especially brain research, would have used this paradigm shift and, from the "non-existent free will" on the genetic investment of "fighting males" as the cause of capitalist competition organized a permanent presence in the media and congested lavish research funds.
Thomas Heinrich writes in his review of Heinemann's book "Popular Science": "The media publicity values of neuroscience in the field of economics, pedagogy, philosophy and theology serve to give their users the impression they are using the findings of neuroscience for the needs of neoliberal capitalism itself. "
The popularity of brain research would have nothing to do with its importance to science. Brain research is therefore brainwashed for the antisocial propaganda of neo-liberalism against a solidary society?
Brain research: findings in the shade
It's not that easy. If some neuroscientists misuse their research to make ideological statements on issues of philosophy, economics and ethics that can not be deduced from this research, that does not call into question the importance of brain research.
We know much better today how our brain works than we did 20 years ago, and many findings in brain research are diametrically opposed to the neoliberal construction of the "capitalist natural system.".
It is now clear that the brain not only changes, but grows as a social organ. What learning opportunities a person receives, the social environment in which he grows up, the stress he is exposed to, how his social relationships promote him directly influence the development of his brain.
While most media uncritically continue to spread news from the neurosciences, there is a lack of a differentiated debate about what neuroscience and brain research are all about, their historical genesis, their methods and insights. Even critics of neuroscience know the subject usually not enough.
In the last few years, brain researchers have discovered a great deal about how sensory impressions arise, how memory works, how messenger substances produce feelings, and how the brain works. These essential findings come in the media sensationalism according to the motto "is there a free will" but hardly before.
However, brain research itself is not an ideology. She tries to understand how the brain works, how the work of the brain connects with perception, feelings and thoughts.
The personal brain
The brain carries our personality. We could not live without our brains, but that also applies to the heart or lungs. Without our human brain in general, and our individual brain in particular, we would not be the human being we are: we would not have a grown biography, no culture, no collective and personal memory, no interests, no hobbies, no sympathies or enmities based on experience, no prejudices and no skills.
The human brain is an almost unimaginably complex organ. About 100 billion nerve cells are interconnected by about 100 trillion (100 x 1000 billion) synapses and transmit information to the other cells.
The core is the cerebrum; Here are the centers for language, vision and thought. The diencephalon controls the autonomic system: it ensures that the organs function. The cerebellum coordinates the body. The brain stem controls the reflexes like breathing and the heartbeat.
The cerebellum is divided into two areas and is connected via the bridge with the cerebrum, which in turn gives the impulses for the controlled movements. The cerebellum is also connected to the equilibrium organ in the inner ear and thus controls the orientation in space.
The thalamus focuses the sensory perception down to the smell, the hypothalamus controls the autonomic nervous systems and these coordinate energy balance, water balance or heat regulation.
The pituitary gland releases neuro and growth hormones, it controls the protein synthesis, lipid metabolism, hormone production in the testes and ovaries, the thyroid gland, the adrenal cortex, the mammary glands, the uterus and the water balance in the Niernetubuli.
The cranial nerve pairs, such as optic nerve, olfactory nerve, facial nerve, hearing and balance nerve, Trigeminus nerve with its three branches, with eye nerve, eye movement and rolling nerve, tongue and gullet nerve, tongue muscle nerve and intestinal nerve.
The cerebrum is divided into different areas: the limbic system with the amygdala controls emotional behavior and ratings such as sexual behavior. In the hippocampus sits our ability to smell.
Awareness, intelligence, learning abilities, in short our personality is located in the cerebrum.
The anterior lobe controls mechanical movements The occipital lobe regulates visual perception, and memory is formed in the temporal lobes. The parietal lobe captures the information that comes to the brain through smell, hearing and feeling.
The structure of the brain reflects the history of evolution. The stem and cerebellum are also biologists' reptilian brain because they are the oldest parts of the brain.
The human brain spans two percent of body weight, but consumes 20 percent of the body's energy and 20 percent of oxygen.
Information stores the brain in different duration and in different parts: The procedural memory secures the cerebellum, and this includes acquired skills such as habits. Memories of events and semantic information such as words are stored in declarative memory. Sensory information stores the sensory memory only up to two seconds. Then most are deleted, which are considered important hiking for half a minute in the working memory. A few then make it into the long-term memory.
Neuronal brain structures. Image: Dr_Kateryna - fotolia The brain fluid protects the brain against damage from the outside. The ventricles are cavities in the brain; also filled with liquid, they absorb waste. Three layers of protective skins surround the brain and spinal cord.
How do brain researchers work??
Brain researchers investigate which areas of the brain work when. To do this, they measure the electrical activity of nerve cells in brain areas using imaging techniques such as magnetoencephalography or PET-CT and recognize them in images.
The better the scientists know which brain areas control which functions, the better these can be influenced. In some nervous diseases, areas in the brain are damaged and, if the cause is known, can possibly be cured.
Even everyday actions can be simplified. Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum used a magnetic coil to stimulate the sensory center of the brain with a magnetic field from outside. The sense of touch of the subjects improved significantly. Such external stimulation, deep brain stimulation, is now being used successfully in multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, depression and schizophrenia.
Brain and Heart - An old story
The brain has probably been occupying humans since our beginnings. So we know operations on the skull already from prehistoric times.
The ancient Egyptians knew millennia before our era much about the anatomy of the brain. They knew the spinal cord, the meninges, and the bones surrounding the brain. Nerves and blood vessels, however, they summarized as "channels" together.
The Egyptians knew that people with brain injuries lose their ability to speak - but as the seat of the human soul, their hearts were theirs. In order for the dead man to continue his spiritual life unscathed in the other world, the heart, lungs, liver and stomach remained untouched while mummifying, but the brain removed the Egyptians.
This notion persists in the pictorial language to this day: Cupid's arrow hits the heart and not the amygdala, we send "warm greetings" and no "limbic"; a cold heart is heartless, a fool mindless. Loving people are considered warmhearted, egoists are cold-hearted. But what acts "warmhearted" or "heartless" is not the heart but the brain. Those who "have their hearts in the right place" are actually using their brains in a positive way.
Greek doctors already suspected the brain as the seat of intelligence, but saw it anchored in the ventricles. But even the great Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE) recognized in the brain only a body-own air conditioning and located the reason in the heart.
The doctor Galen discovered in the 2nd century n.u.Z. the nervous system. He said that the fluid-filled brain chambers contained a substance that passed sensory perceptions to the brain through the nerves and steered the muscles. This pneuma psychikon should form in blood vessels at the brain base.
In the Christian era, human autopsy was forbidden, and so in the Occident the whole Middle Ages remained unknown, that such a network of blood vessels in humans does not exist.
The ventricles were in the succession of Galen as the seat of the immortal soul, and this dogma remained inviolate until the Enlightenment in the 18th century.
More precisely, the Persian physician Abu Bakr Mohammad bin Zakariya al-Razi illuminated the brain functions. He described around seven hundred seven of the twelve brain and thirty-two spinal nerves. Around the year 1000, Abu i-Qasim az-Zahrawi reported on psychiatric surgery to treat nervous disorders.
René Descartes (1596-1650) saw the function of the heart as that of a mechanical pump and recognized nothing more than a machine in the brain. Thus, animal behaviors were merely mechanical processes, and so were the vegetative functions of man.
However, in Descartes's conscious perceptions, thinking, and will, an immortal as well as an immaterial soul would be in contact with the body through the pineal gland.
Descartes thus founded the modern dualism, that is, the separation between mind and body, thus rationalizing the Christian myth of the disembodied soul. This has long been refuted scientifically, because the brain controls the functions of the body as well as the mental abilities.
But the Cartesian construct shaped the science of Europe - until today. Among other things, it led animals to renounce reason and awareness - generations of Descartes' attached researchers tortured and killed innumerable animals with full consciousness, cutting them alive and seeing in their cries of pain only the reactions of a machine.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) recognized that different parts of the brain have different functions. His assumptions about the function of the frontal brain were already approaching the current state of knowledge.
The physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) founded the neurology. He recognized multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's as nervous disorders and separated the epilepsy of mental disorder, which at the time was called hysteria.
Pictures of the living brain
Since the 1970s, imaging images of the living brain have been developed using imaging techniques. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows directly when brain centers become active, and diffusion tensor imaging makes it vivid as the nerve bundles align.
Today, it's all about living contrast agents to measure substances in the brain by measuring how their magnetic properties change with the MRI scanner. If this method proves to be successful, it would be possible to follow in real time how the brain releases neurotransmitters or how calcium flows into the nerve cells.
How the neocortex, synapses and cells work is another focus of today's brain research. This is one of the fastest computer ever with 360 Teraflops.
A social organ
A crucial result of recent times is the change in the brain. Traditionally, research has assumed that the brain does not change. Today it is clear that the brain works as a social organ. It has the task of interacting with other people and to learn anew from the communication with other people, to recombine and to shape these learning experiences.
Above all, the social relationship is about learning. So if the performance of students falls off because the chemistry between them and a teacher is wrong, then that is not a metaphor, but literally. Who absorbs knowledge, whose brain establishes a connection.
We can also condition our brains. The structures are not static: Who uses his brain differently, who thinks differently and directs his feelings differently, whose brain changes the structure of this thinking and feeling.
The brain can not help but restructure into shock, and the changes in the brain also suggest a new view of mental disorders. While the traditional bourgeois idea is that "lunatics" are, first, abnormal, and secondly, that their brains are "sick" or "limited," many psychiatric symptoms can be interpreted to mean that the brain restructures to accommodate the shocks :
It releases neurotransmitters, which dissolve old structures and make new solutions possible. When we have conflicts with other people, lose our (working) place in life, and our social environment collapses, we not only adapt to a new situation "from the head". The brain produces messengers and creates new "data highways" that build a new information and action network.
Research on mirror neurons shows how the brain works socially: when we see another person experiencing pain, it causes us unpleasant feelings. What's more, with empathic and real pain, the same areas become active in the brain.
What did brain research find out??
The latest brain research turned many old certainties on its feet: Feelings are not a particularly primitive element of the brain stem, but indispensable for the development of the individual brain.
- The brain is changing.
- Experiences are anchored in the brain. Children internalize their early experiences for a lifetime. Experiences must make people themselves, so that they arrive in the brain.
- Ideas and ideas form action-guiding structures in the brain
- the brain and the body are inseparable, the structure of the brain dependent on organic processes
- The brain is a social organ and is essentially shaped by culture and relationships
- Humans can not be changed by external compulsion, but when the inner urge is there, the brain works with it.
Brain research and psychotherapy
Recent brain research has brought new insights into mental and neurological diseases. For example, in depression, hormones and neurotransmitters are out of control.
Brain research in psychotherapy. Picture: vetre - fotolia For example, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders are difficult to treat in classical psychotherapy. This is where Deep Brain Stimulation, electrodes that are surgically implanted into the brain, helps. Electrical impulses "repair" the brain structure.
For mental problems, the general rule is that the brain can be changed through training, the social environment, and inspiring the environment, at any age and in any state of mind.
The brain is empathetic: Therapeutic methods such as changing perspectives, role-play, posing or circular questions sustainably improve the handling of one's own feelings by activating gehry structures.
Solution-oriented therapies are better than analytically working through past conflicts. The brain stores "solutions" in its "databases" and these can be activated. To vividly describe a solution and to present oneself in a positive way puts the brain on the move.
Positive feelings, friendly feedback, and respect increase the levels of dopamine, and that's how the brain can form new networks.
Brain research is still pretty much in the beginning. The interplay of better knowledge about how it works and how we work with therapeutic methods promises exciting times in the healing practice. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)
literature
Peter Düweke: Small History of Brain Research. From Descartes to Eccles. 2001
Michael Hagner: Ingenious brains. The history of elite brain research. Munich 2007
Ders .: The spirit at work. Historical studies on brain research. Göttingen 2006
Erhard Oeser: History of Brain Research. Darmstadt 2002.