I have often wondered if thoughts don't actually come from the mind, per say, but rather if the mind is only the medium through which they are expressed. For instance, when we take an EKG of the brain and flash images of loved ones on a screen, we can see all sorts of brain activity. But maybe that is the brain discerning what is sees and as a result, you see all of these components of the brain active. Afterall, I think we might agree that love isn't actually just firing synapses or the release of dopamine. Indeed, there is something that yearns to be more laudable than mere chemical reactions.
It is more than that. Neuropsychology shows us how damage to certain areas of the brain results in very exotic conditions. If thoughts or love between people is separate from the brain then how do individuals who suffer Capgras syndrome, a condition that can be due to psychiatric illness or neurological lesion, result in an individual claiming their loved one is an imposter?
Mrs. D, a 74-year old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the imposter, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalize her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognized other family members and would misidentify her husband only.
There is strong neuropsychological evidence that the Capgras delusion is, at least in part, related to a loss of emotional response to familiar faces. This is in the context of generally good (although not always perfectly intact) face perception abilities. This seems to be the reverse of prosopagnosia. In prosopagnosia, conscious face recognition abilities are severely impaired, and in some cases sufferers still show a covert emotional response to familiar faces, detectable by measuring (for example) skin conductance
Capgras delusion - Wikipedia
Individuals who suffer prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces) still have the emotional response associated with their loved ones, but they cannot explicitly recognise from face alone (they tend to use hair and clothes, perfume etc). This suggest a dissociation between explicit recognition and the association of faces with their emotional 'label'.
Whereas in Capgras syndrome we have a disorder where an individual can recognise faces but seems to have lost the emotional response to certain familar and loved individuals. So because they lack the emotional response associated with a loved one, they rationalise that they are an imposter. They should feel positive towards a loved one, they do not.
Memories, emotions, empathy, feelings etc are derived from the brain. A individual who suffers damage to the orbitomedial frontal lobe may change personality altogether but show no change in intelligence, showing what has been called 'acquired sociopathy', an individual with a particular tumour may suddenly start abusing children. We even know that fear is expressed before conscious recognition of fearful stimuli via subcortical processes (the body is primed to respond to a threat before you know of a threat).
"Minds are what brains do"
Anyone interested in these very exotic conditions and the neuropsychological view of the mind and brain should read Ramachandran's "Phantoms in the brain" and Damasio's "Descartes Error".
Edited by melatonin, : No reason given.
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