The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Children With ADHD Show Brain Differences (ABC News Healthology 11/29/2004) (link retired)
MONDAY, Nov. 29 (HealthDayNews) - Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have abnormal brain anatomy in addition to imbalances in brain chemistry.
"We found abnormality of the fiber pathways in the frontal cortex, basal ganglia, brain stem and cerebellum," said study author Manzar Ashtari, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Hyde Park, N.Y.
"These areas are involved in the processes that regulate attention, impulsive behavior, motor activity and inhibition - the key symptoms in ADHD children. They are also known to be part of a bigger circuit in the brain that establishes communication between the frontal lobe and cerebellum," Ashtari said in a prepared statement.
The brain learns itself into its organization and shape. Every disorder is caused by a collection of stress and it is only where this stress collects that defines the disorder. Most disorders will appear before the observable changes in the shape of the brain occur because it is the adjustments in the tracks of inhibition and excitation that cause all learning and cause all disorders as well. It is only after a great amount of change in the choices of firing, the choices in excitation and inhibition, occur before the observable cell death occurs. (And it may not be cell death as much as it is the lack of development of new connections in an area where new connections normally develop in control subjects.
All learning causes change in the brain. All change in the brain is learning. Every disorder will cause change in the shaping of the brain although the current tools to examine the brain might not be able to pick up certain changes. If a region of the brain is changed, every region that shares connectivity with the changed region is changed too. Even if such change is very subtle when using brain scans of various types, the changes in the wiring of the parts of the brain that don't show change with current tools are changed much more than is expected.
That any disorder creates brain differences is never worthy of a headline in a health-related press release. All disorders are the result of brain differences. That is never new news. These press releases are intended to promote the use of the drugs even though these observations are considered "new."
A second study by the same research team found that stimulant medications used to balance brain chemistry in children with ADHD normalize some of these brain abnormalities.
This last paragraph shows the real purpose of the press release: to promote the concept that the drugs cure people of brain differences when such a thing has never been proven and never will be proven (with the current approach to using these drugs). How did they show that the stimulant medications “normalize” the brain as suggested? They never tell. There has never been anything to ever indicate that these drug treatments “balance brain chemistry” when the medication increases the level of these chemicals in the brain far beyond what is found in normal controls, and when there is decline in function if you use too little medication (an indication that the concept of replacing a depleted supply is erroneous). This is just a press release to encourage more parents to put their children on the drugs (to “normalize” their brains, as they say).
Note, also, that they claim to normalize just some of these brain abnormalities. This parsing of words could mean that a change in shape of one part of the brain could be closer to normal while another part of the brain could be worse. Nothing is explained here so nothing can be trusted.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
