MAPPING THE MIND

Leonardo Bonilha
lxb@psychology.nottingham.ac.uk
Post-doc Researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience
University of Nottingham, UK

If human mind were simple enough to be understood,
we would be simple enough to understand it .

In a quiet night, a traveler passes by a house where he once lived. In this house he had been really happy experiencing the truthful love of a woman who long ago left him. Looking through the window, he sees an image of a man who is regarding nowhere and is clenching his fists, consumed by pain. When the moon lights up the room, the traveler is taken by the horror to recognize in that man his own face. Even tough appalled by that sight, the traveler cannot help being washed by jealousy of this man, who, despite being his own copy, dares to mock the pain he suffered in the same place years ago.

This is the history of the poem Der Doppelgänger by Heinrich Heine, which was adapted to music by Franz Schubert. In the German language doppelgänger means free and outgoing copy. According to the tradition, everyone has an own doppelgänger , which remains unseen most of time. The one who unfortunately sees his/her own doppelgänger knows that the end is impending. In fact, days before her death, Queen Elizabeth I of England stated having seen her image lying on her death bed, pale and still. For that reason, when the Russian Empress Catherine II, the Great, saw her image walking toward her, she took no risk and immediately ordered her guards to shoot it. During 18 th and 19 th centuries the romantic works, with theirs natural appreciation of the supernatural, explored intensively the myth of the doppelgänger , and there is no surprise that famous writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed having seen their copies.

However, to see one's copy is not a privilege of romantic poets. A surprising great number of people currently state that they can see their own body from an external point of view. This phenomenon is known in medical jargon as autoscopy. Autoscopy is somehow similar to OBE (out-of-body) experiences that are related by individuals who recovered from moribund states. Both phenomena have for long been considered as pertaining to the spiritualistic spectrum and they were the main defense arguments for the theory that the mind and the processes generated by the brain are two independent entities. Roughly similar to say that everyone has a conscious yet independent and ethereal part that, eventually, can leave the body and fool around.

Figure 1: - Temporo-parietal junction is highlighted in orange

On March of this year, a team of Swiss researchers led by Dr. Margitta Seeck published an article in which this issue was investigated scientifically ( Brain 127:243-58 ). His team studied a small set of patients who experienced OBE and autoscopic symptoms, but presented different sorts of neurological diseases. In order to investigate whether there was a common point, i. e., if these experiences could be determined by a disorder of a specific cerebral area, different tools were used to map the brain of these patients. Combining the analysis of the high-resolution images of the brain anatomy, obtained through Magnetic Resonance, with functional recordings from electroencephalography, it was possible to determine the affected area of each patient. Surprisingly, when superposing injury maps were obtained, a defined brain region, known as temporo-parietal junction (Figure 1), was present in almost all cases. The temporo-parietal junction is fundamentally responsible for the integration of different types of sensory stimuli, such as tactile, visual and body posture ones, which constantly reach the brain. This region then “builds” the spatial understanding of the world and of ourselves in relation to it. Thus, a disorder of this region can lead to the disconnection of the unconscious perception of body and its representation on space. When tactile, equilibrium and visual sensations do not coincide, the comprehension of body localization and what is personal or extrapersonal is lost, and the intriguing autoscopic / OBE sensation occurs.

With this paper, further evidence accumulates that mind and thought are actually the same thing. In fact, few people still believe that mind, thought and brain are completely independent. Everything, childhood memories, fear of flying, to be in a hurry, coffee craving, supernatural faith, is somehow confined to the brain. We are what our brain generates, and we understand the world as our brain can perceive our environment, especially in accordance to the way our brain can get information from what is around.

Yet, there are plenty of “mysteries” of brain function that remain to be solved and the quality of the current investigating tools makes brain research each time more interesting and productive. This is the interesting topic of the lovely book “Mapping the Mind”, by the medical journalist Rita Carter (Brazilian publication as “Livro de Ouro da Mente”, ed. Ediouro).

The book's highlight is to be straightforward, in concert with the idea expressed by Albert Einstein: “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother ”. Written in a light and plain English and being richly illustrated, the text clearly approaches a set of complex subjects about brain and mind, without drifting from scientific strictness. A set of naturally interesting points such as memory, affective states, chemical dependence and neurological disorders are lavishly discussed. The history of doppelgänger myth is not fully discussed in the book, but several similar phenomena, even more interesting, are discussed and explained through the neurological and scientific point of view. Many famous scientists from the neuroscience field contribute with small articles that are inserted amidst the text. In these articles different points of view are expressed about the discussed topics. And this enriches the text and open field to interesting discussions as, for example, if the neurological condition known as autism could not in fact be an extreme form of the male brain.

Still, as the author states in the introduction, the human brain has been slow to unveil its secrets. We only know few key-points about the brain functioning; even so, the understanding of a set of phenomena that were enigmatic in the past is nowadays trivial, as the history of doppelgänger illustrates. Likewise, we don't know what will be the social and therapeutic contributions of the current findings. The author builds a logical net of possible benefits of the current efforts in “mapping” the brain and its functions. What is more, when presenting several tools used today to investigate neuroscience issues and theirs limitations, the author seduces the reader to the next steps to be adopted by the cognitive neuroscience.

Consequently, as a good book of scientific disclosure, the work keeps fidelity to another idea expressed by Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

mciencia@unicamp.br