14 ms·

Myths about how the brain works

• MrDrDr 6y ago
  There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against our conscious experience - we really don't know anything.
  • steverb 6y ago
    I would further add that those oversimplified concepts of how the brain works have hung around because they are useful for us as an abstraction to think about how our brain works. They may be bad abstractions at a lower level of detail, but for general purposes they seem to be useful enough.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      What are they useful for, though? The usefulness of wrong models, and why they hang around so long, mainly seems to be to provide income to people selling solutions. Solutions offered based on bad simple metaphorical models have the benefit of being intuitive, so they stick around. Theory-theory is the Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to common sense.
      • lukas099 6y ago
        They are useful as a standard way to talk about the brain. If I say I am 'right-brained' in casual conversation, most people in my culture know what I mean.
  • ianhanschen 6y ago
    I'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true. Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain were correct. This was in reply to "I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list" -- I want to know what this person thinks, thanks.
    • tamatech 6y ago
      Look into corpus callosum separation (split-brain) and some of the experiments that have been performed after this procedure. Fascinating displays of two separate consciousnesses. Sam Harris' Making Sense Podcast #234 had Iain McGilchrist to discuss this in some detail.
      • ianhanschen 6y ago
        That is what I am referring to :)
    • sradman 6y ago
      See Ian McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: > McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
      • judge2020 6y ago
        Without listing the actual misconceptions some people have, it's hard to say 'the left brain/right brain divide' is a misconception since I was already aware of this understanding that they just observe in different ways, not that "left brain is creative and right is logical". I grew up with the internet, though, so my understanding didn't solely originate from grade school science books that might be simplifying this phenomenon.
  • the__alchemist 6y ago
    I had the same reaction to parts. This in particular: > So why does the myth of a compartmentalized brain persist? One reason is that brain-scanning studies are expensive. As a compromise, typical studies include only enough scanning to show the strongest, most robust brain activity. These underpowered studies produce pretty pictures that appear to show little islands of activity in a calm-looking brain. But they miss plenty of other, less robust activity that may still be psychologically and biologically meaningful. In contrast, when studies are run with enough power, they show activity in the majority of the brain. Another, more relevant reason, is that brain-scanning studies are in their infancy.
    • meepmorp 6y ago
      I don’t think your point is more relevant than theirs. It’s expensive to run brain scanning studies, so studies have smaller populations or lower resolution data collection in response. Yes, brain scanning studies are new, but we’ve been doing fMRI studies for nearly 3 decades and it’s still expensive. Had that cost been scaled back, we’d have more and/or better data because grants are (very) finite.
    • Retric 6y ago
      The issue here is the brain of test subjects aren’t simply doing exactly one thing at a time. Your ears don’t turn off because you’re doing a memory task in an MRI. As such it’s impossible to say what subset of brain activity is directly related to some activity rather than some related mental processes.
      • jonnycomputer 6y ago
        The brain is doing multiple things at once. But that doesn't mean its impossible to subset brain activity related to specific activities.
        • jonnycomputer 6y ago
          I think I wasn't fair in this comment, because it suggests that it is easy to do, when it actually isn't. For example, a cogntive control task might have an easy and hard condition. You'll end up with significant activation all over the brain for either of them, and their contrast will still have significant differences between the conditions all over the place too (e.g. SMA, pSMA, Anterior Insula, Anterior Cingulate, Posterior Cingulate Cortex, visual and motor cortex, cerebellum, etc. etc. etc.). Because the brain is doing all kinds of things during the task, and any "subroutine" is still going to involve communication between lot of places. But if the idea that function isn't localized, i.e. going back to a naive connectionist paradigm, then, sorry, no. The distribution of activations we get are often quite stereotyped, and if we are more careful and specific with our models we can localize function often even better.
  • anaphor 6y ago
    Obviously you know this, but the brain does localize some functions to either hemisphere, just not in the way most people think it does. My vague memory from having taken a class in psycholinguistics is that people with aphasia who've had some part of their brain damaged are good evidence of this localization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
    • phkahler 6y ago
      Yeah, and the amygdala has specific functions. Not that it's the only piece needed for that, or that it's not good for anything else. The evidence for more advanced brains in higher mammals is also plainly there. The author seems to be over-stating all this stuff in order to reject it.
      • anaphor 6y ago
        And it's also the case that even though certain brain functions are linked with specific locations, the brain can still use plasticity to re-organize things and adapt to damage. And when you're doing any language related task, there are always going to be other more domain-general brain functions involved too, which aren't as localized.
  • ramzyo 6y ago
    > However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works Interesting that you had this takeaway, I didn’t get a sense of this at all. My takeaway was that the author presented modern findings (which constitute our present model for how the brain works, speaking nothing to a notion of some absolute correctness) to dispel older hypotheses that are disprovable based on the latest research. As presented, IMO, the author captures well that these modern findings are just a reference point against which to refute the stubborn tropes.
  • dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Left/right divide is a myth-myth. Check out "Master and His Emissary" for the enormous amount of evidence about left/right divide. The mirror neuron system is also a myth-myth. While there aren't "mirror neurons", per se (e.g., biochemically different), there is a system of mirroring and it is very important
    • caddemon 6y ago
      I think there are a lot of myth-myths where basically the general public ran with a wildly pseudoscientific interpretation, and then the scientific community decides to dismiss the entire thing (at least outside of whatever subfield, although I've sometimes seen it within too). Speaking specifically to left vs right brain, in popular media I've mostly seen it presented as logic vs creativity, which completely disregards that people can be creative verbally, and that certain quantitative/technical things are very non-verbal.
  • lycopodiopsida 6y ago
    Having done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hack on single neurons or do some fishy fMRI studies instead. But of course, our tooling today is not adequate for this task.
    • hn_asker 6y ago
      Yet somehow Pharma can prescribe drugs that affect the brain's functions. How do they get away with that knowing so little about the brain?
      • vlunkr 6y ago
        They give random drugs to rats until something happens.
        • pvarangot 6y ago
          And then to humans
      • devindotcom 6y ago
        Psychiatrists are doctors who prescribe substances that have been closely studied - but their effects may be easily and specifically understood, their mechanisms may not be. Lithium is a great example - very effective treatment for bipolar. No one really knows why. Prescribed for decades as they've tried to figure it out because tests showed it was effective and relatively safe, just no one knew exactly what it was doing in there. It's sort of how you can be a woodworker without knowing the cellular biology of trees, and without being an electrical or mechanical engineer who can build a table saw from scratch.
        • adolph 6y ago
  • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    What surprised me most about the replication crisis was that neurology actually seemed to be more affected than psychology in how non-reproducible it was.
  • tonystride 6y ago
    What about using the RB/LB as a metaphor for teaching? I feel like it helps me build a ladder of abstraction for certain concepts as a music teacher. Of course I add the disclaimer that this is not ACTUALLY how your brain works, but all that neuro-jargon isn't really helpful for understanding syncopation...
• killtimeatwork 6y ago
  > The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible. The deep learning concept itself did not "discover" anything, it's just a technical contraption that happens to work well for some classes of real-world problems. Granted, there were some maths advances in the eighties and nineties that made current SLAM possible, but again, new math is not "scientific discovery".
  • ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    Wish someone had told me that I wasn't doing real science before I started in academia, would have saved me a lot of time and effort. On a more serious note, seems like weird gatekeeping of what constitutes scientific discovery and what doesn't.
    • killtimeatwork 6y ago
      Scientific discovery is learning new facts about the world. Inventing new contraptions to help us in our goals is technology. I.e. I don't think anyone would call Henry Ford a scientist or Albert Einstein an inventor. I thought it's basic and well-understood distinction.
      • beaconstudios 6y ago
        If you follow the constructivist philosophy of science (spoiler alert: I do) then absolutely Albert Einstein is an inventor. He invented a mental model (essentially a lossy compression) of some parts of reality that better fit observed phenomena than its predecessor. Our mental/scientific models are not descriptions of reality; objective reality is unknowable. What they are, are tools (technologies!) that we can use to predict effect, given a cause and a state.
        • 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• harshreality 6y ago
  I don't want to be too critical, because I've learned a lot from the author's books, but a fair amount of the article (mainly myths 1 and 2) seem to be over-generalization or skewed based on the author's bias. Her field is psychology, not primarily neuroscience; specifically, the psychology (and some neuroscience of) emotion. I recommend Jeff Hawkins's new book for a perspective closer to a neuroscientist's. (He's technically not a neuroscience Ph.D., but he has equivalent knowledge.) Myth #1: Brain areas aren't separate and didn't evolve in stages. 1. Brain (neocortex) areas aren't single-purpose. Obviously neuroplasticity is a thing, but the article ignores that areas of the brain develop to be focused on a single category of tasks (visual, auditory, etc.). The author's example, blindfolding someone and watching their visual cortex get repurposed when learning to read braille, ignores that if you don't blindfold them, other areas will probably take up most of the task of learning braille because it's not a visual activity and the brain tends to separate areas of responsibility. 2. The number of significant evolutionary steps may not be just three, so the triune brain theory may be technically false, but I've never seen any actual neuroscientist argue that it isn't roughly accurate. The evidence in the article is molecular genetics: the fact that there aren't radically different kinds of neurons. This is like scaling up an argument that ethanol and glucose are the same thing because they share the same elements. If the limbic system and neocortex have roughly the same kind of neurons, what does that matter? We know they serve radically different purposes, and we know that reptiles don't have a neocortex (at least, nothing of significance). Myth #2: Brain is stimulus/response machine Her argument against this myth seems tortured. Of course the brain is not a simple impulse/response machine, but it's still essentially taking in inputs and responding in various ways. It just has a mind-bogglingly complex internal state. Myth #3: Strong dividing line between diseases of the brain and body Everything seems to point to her being right on this one. Science knows, nearly as much as it can know anything, that neurological stress leads to physical stress responses which can screw up other parts of the body, often through hormone dysregulation. Similarly, physical problems from gut health to inflammation can trigger immune responses or simpler biochemical reactions that have neurological side-effects. And, of course, diet. Psychoactive drugs are a clear example of how an external physical influence can have psychological effects.
  • jessriedel 6y ago
• frereubu 6y ago
  I get the author's beef with the idea that discrete brain areas peform discrete tasks - if there's one thing my neuroscience MSc taught me it's that the brain processes things in parallel rather than series, which is what most of those theories rest on - but I think part of the issue is that we try to impose existing words, like "memory", onto the brain. One of the more productive lines of thinking I used when studying was trying to throw out all of those definitions and try to work from first principles about the kind of processing various areas were doing. Of course it's impossibly complex to get understand it in totality (which is probably partially what drives specialising in particular brain areas), but discarding the limits imposed by language really helped me think more flexibly about what it might be doing. Also, a small nit about the way it was presented was using plasticity (i.e. areas area able to perform different kinds of processing if the inputs change, e.g. blindfold + braille) as evidence of non-specialisation. That's doesn't follow. Just because neurons can be flexible doesn't mean they're not performing a discrete task, although I agree with the general conclusion.
  • nosianu 6y ago
    > a small nit about the way it was presented was using plasticity ... as evidence of non-specialisation. That's doesn't follow. A small nit about your small nit: The article does not make that claim. Quote: > I’m not saying that every neuron can do everything, but most neurons do more than one thing. I mean, it's kind of obvious that all neurons are far from completely interchangeable, like RAM cells on a memory chip, since there clearly is quite a bit of higher level architecture.
    • frereubu 6y ago
      That's different - plasticity shows that neurons can change what they do, not that they can do different things at the same time.
  • imbnwa 6y ago
    > I think part of the issue is that we try to impose existing words, like "memory", onto the brain This is also what Freud meant by "time doesn't exist in the unconscious". What we call memory isn't discrete like RAM, nor is it organized around what we perceive as time, these are illusions of how we experience perception and consciousness. He described by suggesting we imagine the modern city of Rome, then, directly physically overlay ancient Rome on top of modern Rome, physics be damned, if an ancient column goes through a modern building, then it goes through the modern building without destroying it, directly occupying the same space at the, er, same time
• deleted 6y ago
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• Geee 6y ago
  I wouldn't say that the Triune brain theory is a 'myth'. It's just not accurate, but it's not a complete lie either. There certainly are different parts of the brain that have evolved at different times, and have different functions. The older parts have evolved to specific functions, while neocortex, which is found in mammals, has a uniform structure and is capable of learning and adapting to different tasks. 75% of human brain is neocortex. Jeff Hawkings explains the difference between the 'old parts' and 'new parts' pretty well in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EVqrDlAqYo&t=366s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EVqrDlAqYo&t=366s
  • ksm1717 6y ago
    Yea, I think that in some ways the “myths” presented can be seen as abstractions that lack details for the sake of being digestible. It is also a fair point that these abstractions can be poorly carried to detailed conclusions like the example of humans being essentially more evolved; I think that’s the bone to pick
  • orhmeh09 6y ago
    Barrett's views are not the only ones there are, and they are still debated in the field, however much she may insist to the media that her view is the only correct one and that all else are myths. Things are not nearly as settled as she claims. Panksepp, J. (2007). Neurologizing the Psychology of Affects: How Appraisal-Based Constructivism and Basic Emotion Theory Can Coexist. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 281–296. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00045.x Panksepp, J. (2008). Cognitive Conceptualism—Where Have All the Affects Gone? Additional Corrections for Barrett et al. (2007). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(4), 305–308. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00081.x
  • tgv 6y ago
    Brodmann distinguishes 47 or so different areas in the cortex. Idk how many are exclusive to the neocortex, but it's not a uniform structure.
    • Geee 6y ago
      I'm not an expert on the topic, but as Jeff Hawkings says in the video, the differences are caused by the fact that different areas of neocortex are connected to different inputs. The underlying structure is uniform, which can adapt to different inputs.
• EamonnMR 6y ago
  While it's not a fixed function pipeline, there is some level of correlation between 'brain damage at site x' and 'effect y' so while phrenology is bunk, the brain is also not just a blob of compute.
  • mathw 6y ago
    I was really annoyed by that one because the "areas of brain do different tasks" hypothesis has very little to do with phrenology, which is about how studying the shape of the skull might tell you things about the personality and thus has very little to do with the brain itself. And is complete bunk, unlike the brain regions thing which is not simple but does have some basis in fact as you pointed out.
• rnetymtndfn 6y ago
  this is more democrat brainwashing - seriously if you are a democrat you are a total piece of fucking shit
• 40four 6y ago
  Great article, as usual from Nautilus! I would like to add one more myth the list. The idea that we all have a finite amount of brains cells. They used to teach that we’re all born with a certain amount of brain cells, and over time from aging, or getting a concussion, or if you ‘do drugs’, you would lose said cells. And that’s that. No more new brain cells :) We know this to be false now. I don’t know how much this one has persisted, I haven’t heard it in a while. But it was drilled into my head as a kid. Not related to brains, but another health myth that comes to mind is the idea that our tounges & taste buds are divided into ‘zones’ that perceive the different flavors. I don’t remember the order, but something like the tip tastes sweet, the middle is umami, the sides are sour, et cetera. Now we understand all taste buds taste all flavors. Is is interesting these old models science came up with to try to explain things, and how long some of them persisted. PS: Check out the 2002 album ‘Phrenology’ by the Roots. It’s a classic!
  • abellerose 6y ago
    Do you have links to share for what you're claiming is now false? I haven't seen any conclusive evidence yet for what you're claiming.
    • 40four 6y ago
      Sure. I’m not an expert or anything, but the term ‘neurogenesis’ would be what you want. I guess the fact that many neurons are formed in the womb, and last our whole lives still holds true, but the realization that at least some parts of the brain continuously generate new cells is significant. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306487/ From the introduction: ”For a long time, it was thought that the nervous system is fixed and incapable of regeneration. Although it is indeed true that most neurons in the brain are generated before birth and are never exchanged, it is now well established that new neurons are continuously generated by stem cells in at least two discrete regions in the brain throughout life in most mammals: the hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped structure underneath the cortex that is important for memory formation and cognitive functions; and the olfactory bulb (OB)—a structure located above the nasal cavity that is important for the sense of smell.” “Tongue map” -> https://www.livescience.com/7113-tongue-map-tasteless-myth-debunked.html https://www.livescience.com/7113-tongue-map-tasteless-myth-d... To be honest, after reading a little more, I’m a little unclear on if ‘all taste buds taste all flavors’. I might be wrong to say it like that. I saw one thing that said there are actually different types of receptor cells, but they are not isolated into zones, and somewhat evenly distributed across the whole tongue.
• neilpanchal 6y ago
  Highly recommend the MIT course on the human brain if you have the time, absolutely amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216634
• toolslive 6y ago
  obviously, Jerry Fodor was wrong. But anyone who studies cognitive science still gets this stuff shoved down his throat. The followers will however claim there's a difference between the brain and the mind. from Wikipedia: "For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs"
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  >Brains, however, don’t work by stimulus and response. All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time. What are they doing? Busily making predictions. Is this a polling system... Oh actually more like a branch predicting system...
• narrator 6y ago
  I love the twitter account of Neuroskeptic. He makes fun of all the asinine stuff people say about the brain: https://twitter.com/Neuro_Skeptic https://twitter.com/Neuro_Skeptic
• jbandela1 6y ago
  > According to this myth, the brain is like a collection of puzzle pieces, each with a dedicated mental function. One puzzle piece is for vision, another is for memory, a third is for emotions, and so on. The author makes too much about parts of the brain not being specialized. As a neurosurgery resident in a former life who actually operated on brains and took care of people with strokes and trauma, yes, different parts of the brain are specialized to do different things. Yes, there is plasticity, but there are limits to it, especially once you reach adulthood. I will give some anecdotes, but these are very, very typical. Example, frontal lobe and impulse control. Saw an older patient with a giant tumor in the frontal lobe. His family came with him. Seeing where the tumor was, I asked the family if they had noticed any recent decline in his impulse control. Their response: "Now that you mention it,..." and out came all sorts of stories how their previously very proper father, was now doing all sorts of very things with very poor judgement and had even gotten in trouble with the law. If your frontal lobes get damaged, you will have issues with impulse control, long term planning, etc. Another example is speech. Speech is very localized to areas of the left brain. As an example, there was patient with seizures in the left brain so bad that we would have to remove parts of the brain to control them. We did a surgery where we opened up the skull, and then woke the patient up. Psychologists asked the patient to do various verbal tasks, while we touched different parts of the brain with an electrode. When the electrode touched the parts of the brain that control speech, the effect was instantaneous, the patient suddenly stopped talking mid-word. By doing this, were were able to map precisely which parts were being used for speech, and in the surgery, avoid those areas. The patient had a very good outcome with his seizures stopped, and still able to speak. Another example is movement disorders. Worked with a surgeon who is a world class expert in deep brain stimulation. In there you precisely place an electrode into a specific part of the brain and turn it on. Once you do that, you can have someone with severe tremor or Parkinson's who has been unable to even write their name for years, suddenly are able to write. You turn off the electrode, and the effect goes away. If the electrode is off by a millimeter, it does not work. It has to be precisely positioned. In terms of mental illness, I have seen patients with severe depression and obsessive, compulsive disorder improve significantly after precise placement of an electrode in the correct part of the brain. This thing about parts of the brain specializing is not just abstract theory. It is used every day by neurosurgeons, neurologists, etc to make life and death decisions. It has a lot of real world evidence backing it up. The most important question to answer when you see someone with a stroke or brain trauma, is "where is it located?" The same size injury can have vastly different effects on the person depending on where it is.
• happy-go-lucky 6y ago
  I'm no expert at all on neuroscience, but when I recently got the opportunity to read a transcript of the lecture titled The Value of Science by Richard Feynman, it filled me with awe and reverence. I can't but share a sizable quote from the same. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf “For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean? It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away. So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.”
  • infogulch 6y ago
    I recall some debate around the oldest buildings, and how (I think) the Ise Grand Shrine [1] is disqualified because it is rebuilt regularly -- for the past 2000 years. Of course, one may resolve this by more carefully defining "oldest building", but this quote by Feynman makes me lean towards a definition that includes this shrine. Who are we to say that some building is different because the atoms of its beams came from different trees, and in the same breath claim individual continuity across decades in the face of this fact about our brain? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
    • wilburTheDog 6y ago
      The question has been debated longer than the shrine has been around. See: Ship of Theseus.
• teucris 6y ago
  The central thesis is excellent, but this really caught my eye: > Depression is usually catalogued as a mental illness, but it’s as much a metabolic illness as cardiovascular disease, which itself has significant mood-related symptoms. These two diseases occur together so often that some medical researchers believe that one may cause the other. That perspective is steeped in Cartesian dualism. Both depression and cardiovascular disease are known to involve problems with metabolism, so it’s equally plausible that they share an underlying cause.
  • carabiner 6y ago
    I wish this to be true. I'm in excellent cardiovascular health - low BP, 60 bpm resting heart rate, extensive cardio/endurance activity 4-5 days per week. Utterly miserable every waking hour.
    • lukas099 6y ago
      I am so sorry to hear that and I hope you are able to get any help that you need.
    • pvarangot 6y ago
      I struggle with depression for periods of time but have mostly always been fit. In my experience, even though it's contrary to most "broscience" out there, diet helps more with depression than working out. What working out does definitely improve is my sex drive and self-esteem, so it's important to know what's the triggers for your depression, as it may help anyway.
    • teucris 6y ago
      As someone who has dealt with anxiety, depression, and OCD, I am truly sorry that you have to go through that. I don’t know if you’ve talked to doctors about it, but if you found their support lacking, please keep trying. It took 5 different doctors, psychs, and therapists before I finally found a team of professionals that could treat my OCD effectively. And they really did help.
• pattt 6y ago
  I'm not somebody well informed about neuroscience hence apologies if I'm implying something that's against the common knowledge in your domain. One impression upon reading articles like these seems to be that there's a lot of research and curiosity about the way brain works together but the core model of "brain is composed of communicating neurons" seems to be generally accepted. Does that suggest that we already understand how a single neuron behaves in isolation? I'm mainly interested in the microscale model from the perspective of simulation, for example in the Wiki page of the Human Brain Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project) among the obstacles it's mentioned that "detailed neuron representations are very computationally expensive", does it mean that we already cracked the microscale, i.e., defined exactly how a neuron behaves in a computational (mathematical) model? Perhaps the substantial intricacies of the brain can also arise in the microscale level depending on cellular mechanisms, nutrition and other side effects?
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  For me the takeaway is that all the "myths" mentioned in here are often simplified abstractions, but they do have underlying truth. > Brains don’t work by stimulus and response. They definitely do, eg. when you accidentaly touch a hot object. But that's not all they do. They also have a predicting mode of operation. > specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs There are parts of the brain doing specialized things, otherwise why do we still call an area of the brain "visual cortex"? But the brain is much more malleable and plastic than we thought earlier, and entire areas can be repurposed.
• ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  I learned how to draw from the book “drawing on the left side of the brain”. I’m not so sure about the neuroscience parts, but if you want to draw/paint, get that book. All my sites looked terrible until I learned to paint.
• imposter 6y ago
  Sounds just like what they teach at vipassana centres.