Is the Mind in the Brain?
By Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler
Pioneer Brain/Mind Researcher
© 2006 All Rights Reserved

'I think, therefore I have a brain."

This may not be as catchy as Rene Descartes's original maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” But were the philosopher alive today, he'd probably agree that his famous assumption that the mind and brain are totally separate could use some updating.

Recent scientific studies of stroke victims, and other brain imaging research, now seem to support the idea that the mind essentially is the brain. Or perhaps more accurate – it is what the brain does.

Consider this recent study, which seems to demonstrate that psychotherapy can actually alter brain function: Researchers at UCLA gave patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 10 weeks of cognitive and behavioral therapy. They took “before” and “after” pictures of the patients’ brain activity using PET scans.

The PET scans revealed that for OCD patients, several parts of the brain (the caudate nucleus, orbital cortex, and thalamus) seemed to be running in “simultaneous overdrive.”

In the patients who responded positively to the psychotherapy, these brain regions no longer lit up in unison on PET scans. "What therapy does is break up this reverberating loops – the worry circuit," reports Louis Baxter, M.D., a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at both UCLA and the University of Alabama .

In short – purely psychological therapy had some very definite biological effects on the brain. All of which might give second thoughts to those who still divide mental disorders into two categories: diseases of the brain, and diseases of the mind.

“I think that to separate the brain from the mind at a deep level doesn’t make much sense,” says Baxter. "Descartes was a great mathematician, but a bad philosopher.”

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