A healthy human brain is preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to detect which parts of the brain are affected by mental illness.
It really is all in your head. Your brain makes trillions of choices every second of every day, without rest, and controls your physical and mental health.
But the brain you are using to read this newspaper is not the same brain you used to watch TV last night. That’s because your brain is changing all the time, even when you’re sleeping, says Dr. Ryan D’Arcy, a neuroscientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
D’Arcy says that brains are like plastic – they are always changing. This characteristic complicates the treatment and tracking of mental illness.
“The trick is getting the brain to change back to a previous healthy state,” he said.
Dr. Stanley Kutcher, a psychiatry professor at Dalhousie specializing in brain functions, said that mental illnesses are like a game of golf.
“If you take a shot and it goes into the woods, you don’t blame the course, you blame your hit. The same is true with the brain.You can’t blame the symptoms you see; you have to target the underlying causes,” he said.
Kutcher said that brain functions depend on the interaction of different factors, including genetic traits, living environment and the development of brain cells.
He explained that damage to any of those factors can cause a malfunction in the way the brain normally functions.
“Imagine that the brain is a computer. Disruption of the normal activity of any of those factors is like pouring water onto your hard drive, it can cause the whole system to crash and result in mental illness,” Kutcher said.
Dr. Dwight German, a neuroscientist at the University of Oklahoma, contends that the definition of a normal brain should not be so clear cut.
“Normal is defined by how the majority of society functions . . . but people with mental illnesses are built differently than you or I.”
People with mental illnesses are reacting properly to their environment, but they experience it differently because of their different brain organization, German said.
One example of a mental illness is schizophrenia. It’s a major psychosis that occurs when someone cannot tell what is real from what is imaginary. One of the tell-tale symptoms is hearing voices.
German said that in a unique study, people with schizophrenia were examined by brain imaging equipment when they heard voices.
The experimenters noticed that the sections of the brain that respond to hearing were active, as if they had heard someone speaking to them.
“Because the same area of the brain is lighting up, they believe it to be as real as any conversation,”German said.
Simply put, areas of the brain that are supposed to be off are turned on.
And one way to find out which parts of the brain are at work is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or an fMRI, D’Arcy’s specialty.
The fMRI is a non-invasive imaging tool used to identify blood-flow to specific areas of the brain. The area getting the most blood and oxygen appears red or orange on the scan, and can be used to diagnose patients with some mental illnesses.
However, different illnesses have different areas that are affected, so treatment and research is in a constant state of flux.
Despite ongoing research, most of the brain still remains a mystery as it’s constantly changing. Many secrets are still waiting to be discovered, D’Arcy said.
“They talk about space as being the final frontier, but the truth is, the brain is the ultimate unknown.”