Do You Know How You Get from one Thought to Another?

The comment on yesterday’s blog is quite understandable. For some reason neither the medical establishment, the psychological or psychiatric community nor the educational system in this country thinks it is important to teach people how their own brain works. They would rather douse all our mind problems with medicine.

We are not born with this knowledge, and without it how can we make the best use of this very enabling (or, if not managed properly, this very dis-enabling )faculty? We realize we have to get training before we drive a car, otherwise we would be helpless passengers to a run away machine. But we do not seek training in how to use our brain, and so we become captives to this bio-electrical machine. And the brain is the most complex and powerful piece of machinery on the face of the earth.

Do you know the process by which you get from one thought to the other? Unless you do you will be the servant of your mind rather than its master.

Doctors teach you how to regain proper use of your arms and legs, or speech, following a stroke or physical trauma. But following a depressive episode, they somehow feel no obligation to teach you how to regain proper use of your brain. Maybe they don't know enough about how the brain actually works, the process of pain perception, learned association and the role of neuro-transmitters, the fact that all depression is produced in the subcortex and there is never any depression in the neocortex, and the reality that you can learn to move from focusing your attention on the agitated subcortex to beefing up the neural activity in the neocortex in order to regain the proper use of the neocortex and your normal rational faculties.

And if doctors and psychiatrists don't know these things about how the brain works, how do they have the nerve to prescribe dangerous drugs to alter the chemical balance of our brains which dangerous drugs, so the latest research tells us, are no more effective than sugar placebos.