Everyone has a brain, whether they use it or not. It`s that thing beneath the scalp, behind the forehead and between the ears, ”a three-pound mass of protoplasm with the consistency of an over-ripe avocado,” according to Dr. Richard Restak, whose aim in life-as a neurologist and a writer-is to get us to contemplate how the brain works. It`s not an easy task.
Part of the problem is the way we think about the brain. We use what is commonly known as ”the mind.” The brain and the mind can`t really be separated. The brain can change its mind. The mind can change its brain-and other people`s brains as well. Take an abstraction, such as the word ”fire.” ”If someone burst into this room and yelled, `Fire,` we wouldn`t continue this,” Restak noted, settling into a Tribune interview room recently for a chat about the brain, and the mind, and other matters. ”We`d flee the building, startled by this one word.”
Words alter the brain, Restak said. They can lead to insight, to thinking about one`s life, to changing oneself or, in the case of fire, to getting out of there, an idea probably planted in the mind of early man millennia ago when a caveperson, rubbing two sticks together, poked into the resulting reddish-orange flicker and discovered how to burn a finger.
Now, thousands of years later, someone opens a door, moves lips and tongue, sends waves across the air, stimulates timpanic membranes, auditory canals, temple cortexes and association cortexes. Two men, their hearts pounding, get up and run. There might be no fire at all. Just the mere thought of it, expressed symbolically, can make other people`s bodies flee.
It`s this kind of stuff that Restak, 49, author of such best sellers as
”The Brain” and ”The Mind,” writes about in his new offering, ”The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own” (Harmony Books, $18). It`s a collection of 41 short essays on topics ranging from emotional storms to information overload. ”Understanding the human brain is such an effective antidote to rigid and inflexible thinking,” Restak said, ”that all those in a position to influence public opinion should be required to study it.” That job category includes ”all newspaper columnists, talk show hosts and authors, including me.”
For starters, Restak began, such knowledge might counteract the tendency of many individuals to overreact-stammering, blanching, going red in the face, or turning argumentative-when they hear certain words and phrases, among them ”tax audit,” ”welfare,” ”abortion,” ”mistress” and ”racial quotas.”
In recent years, neuroscientists have discovered that such ungluings, all in response to mere words, are the results of actions by a small, almond-shaped nucleus within the limbic system of the brain, thought to control behavior and emotions, that selects and ties together the varied experiences that make up our lives.
Because of that nucleus, ”some of the stimuli that bombard us every second are imbued with positive and negative emotions,” Restak explained.
”They are then encoded in our brain, where they provide underpinnings for memory and personality.” Take two people having dinner together, he said. For one, the word ”love” can trigger feelings of affection, commitment and solace. The other, in ways that affect mind and stomach, might feel claustrophobia.
Two-pronged career
”I wanted to reach an audience that wouldn`t pick up a 400-page book on the brain,” said Restak, who maintains a bustling practice as a neurologist and psychiatrist in Washington. ”I took everyday subjects, such as how we learn to ride a bicycle, what it`s like to talk to a parrot, would we be smarter if we had bigger brains? It`s the kind of thing I like to read myself, something that wakes the curiosity.”
Restak was born in Delaware and raised in Pennsylvania. His parents, he writes, encouraged him to ride off in two directions. His mother wanted him to become a writer. His father told him to ”take up medicine.” So Restak earned a degree from Georgetown University Medical School, trained in psychiatry at hospitals in New York, switched to neurology and the biology of emotional disturbances, and started writing for The New York Times, among other newspapers. Much of his material was drawn from patients who came to him suffering, though it was often hard to tell from what.
”I talk to them, examine them, sometimes talk more,” Restak said.
”You`re not always able to make a distinction between an emotional problem and a brain disease. Sometimes it`s both. A person who has a seizure disorder may also be delusional, thinking he is Jesus Christ. Or it might be a post-traumatic psychosis, which can be chemically treated.”
In one case, a husband brought in his wife. They had been going out to dinner on a rainy night. In the doorway of their home, he`d asked his wife to wait while he went to get the car. In that interval, she`d run to the kitchen and cut her wrists. She`d had a sudden seizure of loneliness and dread, she later explained, as if she were off in the cosmos, completely by herself.
A test revealed a ”seizure focus” point in the temporal lobe, said Restak, who put the women on anti-psychotic drugs and ”turned her around.”
Similar help is available for people who have severe migraine headaches, he noted. ”We give them a drug for a year or two. It takes away the headache. Then we stop and see what happens. Some get them back, but a large percent don`t.” Why does this happen? ”I believe that the brain is self-
correcting,” he said. ”If it`s given the right experience, it can correct itself.”
A dangerous split
For most people, Restak noted, rhythms of thought and emotion interact like two trained dancers. But splits between thoughts and feelings can cause trouble. Free-floating anxiety, for example, makes a person, for no apparent reason, feel threatened and uneasy. Heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension and breathing patterns reflect this deep sense of unease.
Others may report anxiety attacks, falling into psychic black holes where they experience fears of dissolution, of imminent death. Unable to figure out why, they resort to staying home to avoid sites where such incidents occur, a phenomenon known as agoraphobia, or fear of open and public places.
Secrets, especially those we try to hide from our conscious selves, make the mind sick, Restak said. Conversely, acceptance of unwanted thoughts robs them of their power to inflict suffering. As Restak put it, ”Entertaining, rather than banishing, uncomfortable or disturbing thoughts is the surest way of achieving perhaps one of our most important freedoms.” That is, in a phrase, the freedom to be happy.
To Restak, the brain is not a machine.
For one thing, as humans age, the brain loses cells at a rate of 50,000 to 100,000 a day. Connections between cells drop away at rate of, perhaps, 10,000 a second. Yet, many people feel they are smarter in their 30s, 40s and 50s than during childhood, when their brains contained more neurons.
”Can you imagine a car or a television set, or any technical device for that matter, that would run more efficiently after the removal of many of its parts?” Restak asked. ”Not what you`d expect from a machine, is it?”
Nor is the brain some sort of supercomputer. For one thing, computers don`t get depressed, or fly into rages, over the material they are asked to process.
”In the last decade, we`ve learned more about the brain than we did in the 200 years before that,” Restak said. Thanks to powerful tranquilizers and anti-depressants, to new techniques for imaging the brain and to genetic studies showing that many emotional ills are hereditary, or associated with physical alterations, the chasm between psychiatry and neurology has narrowed. Healing thyself
”The idea I bring is that these divisions between mental and physical ailments are very artificial. People can start with an emotional problem and end up with a brain disease which can be treated with chemicals. One thing I think we`re going to see is increased reliance on psychotropic methods in which people bring about the kind of personality they want.”
One modern problem is overstimulation, Restak said. Symptoms include failure of response, irritability, boredom, an inability to take decisive action and a pervading sense of ”so what?” For ”information bulimics,” the cure may be unplugging radios and TVs, cutting off magazines and even newspapers. Also helpful is voluntary illiteracy, ”an unwillingness to read about subjects that we really don`t need to know anything about.”
Another path to mental health, Restak suggested, is to become one`s own analyst, starting by keeping a journal. His tips: Keep the pen moving as fast as possible for 10 minutes a day. ”Don`t stop or hesitate, no matter what appears.” Then, spend 10 more minutes writing in a more recollective mode.
”Monitor consciously, clearly, even a bit critically.” Don`t read entries for several weeks. Then, look for patterns of moods and impulses.
”Most of us remain blissfully and tragically unaware that the same patterns of difficulty recur again and again. Because of this, they rarely prove any more manageable the nth time round,” Restak said. One of the ways to create order out of life`s chaos and overstimulation is to write things down, he said.
It`s worked for him.
