Richard G. Petty, MD

The New Frontier in Brain Control

Posted by on January 9, 2006 · Leave a Comment 

In the 1970s, many of us in the scientific and medical fields started becoming very interested in the burgeoning field of biofeedback, in which we used monitoring devices to measure certain biological processes, like skin temperature an blood pressure, so that we could then teach people to gain some voluntary control over previously involuntary functions. I remember being particularly impressed that some people seemed to be able to gain some measure of control over epileptic seizures. Much of this interest grew out of some extraordinary experiments conducted at the Menninger Clinic in 1969, when it was still in Topeka, Kansas. An Indian Yogi named Swami Rama was shown to be able to voluntarily stop his heart for between 16.2 and 20.1 seconds, and subsequently others were shown to be able to control temperature, pain and bleeding.
In 1981, I had the privilege of setting up the first biofeedback system in the Department of Neurology at Charing Cross Hospital in London. I was quite astonished when a teenager working on the staff was, in less than 30 minutes, able to learn to increases the temperature of one hand more than three degrees Celsius (5 over in degrees Fahrenheit), compared with her other hand. We tried to use biofeedback in painful conditions and migraine, with some benefit. During the intervening years, there has been continuing interest in the whole field, but we have not seen any real reproducible breakthroughs.
But now, with the advent of new technology, things may be changing. There is an interesting report on the use of functional MRI scanning and chronic pain that was highlighted on the Nightly News with Brian Williams.
The report refers to work being done on chronic pain at Stanford University. When a person with chronic pain imagines the pain to be as bad as bad can be, specific regions of the brain become activated. Then by using an array of relaxation techniques, including breathing, muscle relaxation and thinking pleasant thoughts, the person can watch the over-activity of the brain gradually calm down as their pain lessens.

This is important work for several reasons:

It may well help people with chronic pain to use non-pharmacological approaches to the control of their pain, even if they do not have access to fancy high-tech scanners.
The work is pushing the frontier of what is possible in terms of controlling one’s own body.
It is an amazing confirmation of the teachings of many schools of teaching about health, from yoga and qigong, to Science of Mind.
It raises very interesting questions about who or what is actually controlling the pain: it gets us straight back to the whole question of where is the mind and is it the same as the brain. (The answer to that is NO: a subject for many more entries)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that pain is often a lot more than aberrant firing of neurons or an imbalance in the some of the serotonin and norepinephrine systems of the brain. It can be brought on or exacerbated by psychological and social factors, and I have seen many people in extreme spiritual crisis, who then began to develop pain in various part of their bodies, yet had no overt signs of depression or of any other psychological or psychiatric problem.
Chronic pain often develops into a “habit,” or what I term a “pain cycle.” This may have both a physical substrate (abnormal firing in circuits in the thalamus of the brain), and a strong psychological component (pain becoming “learned”). Interrupting a pain cycle for even a few hours can often have long-term effects.
There may also be other non-pharmacological approaches that can help an individual. When dealing with chronic pain, it is also important to sort out the effects of medications. However appropriately used, some may have long term effects on the body/mind complex.

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Autism and Mirror Neurons

Posted by on December 12, 2005 · Leave a Comment 

On November 28th, I made some comments about the discovery of "mirror neurons" in the frontal cortex that enable us to imitate other people. I have just seen a most interesting report implicating these cells in autism. The paper was published in the journal Nature, but click here for a good summary.

Autism, an illness that affects a person’s ability to communicate with others and to mount appropriate responses to environmental cues, is part of a spectrum of developmental differences, which run all the way from people who are severely disabled to people who function at extremely high levels. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the apparently linked disorder, called Asperger’s Syndrome. There has been a lot of speculation that some well-known high achievers have a form of it. We are always loath to describe something as an "illness, " unless there are strong grounds for doing so: some people’s brains are just wired differently. So perhaps the best criterion for calling something an "illness," is whether it is causing suffering. I was once cussed out by someone whom I had treated for a manic illness. He was as happy as a clam and was not suffering in the slightest. But he was causing great suffering to his wife and young children. And to fellow motorists, as he drove his car at extremely high speed down the wrong side of the highway.

Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles found that some children with autism had less brain activation in a region in the frontal lobes that is involved in understanding another person’s state of mind. The degree of activation of the ‘mirror neurons’ in this region correlated with measures of social impairment. The children with the lowest activation had the most severe social impairment.

I do not doubt the value of this neurological approach to autism, but it is important to recognize that it is only a part of the picture. We also need to respect the importance of other ways of looking at an individual. As an example, using the Four Quadrant model developed by the philosopher Ken Wilber, we also need to consider not just the objective neurological aspect, but also the subjective, social an cultural aspects of a person. And each of these perspectives is irreducible: we cannot explain culture by neurons or how your liver works by an appeal to cultural dynamics.

So although studies like this are valuable in that they show that there is a neurological association with autism, and it is not the result of, say, bad parenting, they do not tell us the whole story. And we must not allow these findings to blind us to the other domains when we are working on coping strategies or treatments.

"I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."

–James Thurber (American Writer, 1894-1961)

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