Why Minds Break · Ian Pitchford · Chapter 2 of 10

The Separation of Contradictory Things

Name: Why Minds Break
Author: Ian Pitchford

Examines three inherited oppositions, mind and body, thought and feeling, nature and nurture, and replaces each with questions about particular processes and the evidence that could settle them.

The chapter begins with René Descartes, who placed the meeting point of soul and body in the pineal gland because he believed it was the brain's only unpaired structure. The anatomy was mistaken, but the habit of filing every cause as either mental or physical has lasted. The chapter's claim is that trouble starts when interacting causes, or different aspects of one process, are treated as rival explanations, so that a finding is simply awarded to one side. In place of such contests it asks what changes, by which route and under what conditions.

On mind and body, it recalls the compromise over the word neurosis in the 1980 manual and the later redefinition of bodily symptom diagnoses around positive features, so that a missing medical explanation no longer counts as evidence of a psychiatric cause. Studies of placebos given openly to patients report benefits on self-report, with pooled effects that shrank in a later update, while objective measures showed no matching change in non-clinical samples. The chapter reads this as a question of what each measure captures; neither result refutes the other.

On thought and feeling, it notes that Ulric Neisser separated cognition from motivation as a method while holding that both were needed. Joseph LeDoux's later work, partly with Daniel Pine, distinguishes defensive circuits from the processes behind consciously felt fear. The patient SM, whose amygdalae were damaged on both sides, showed little fear of snakes or frightening film clips yet panicked on inhaling air enriched with carbon dioxide. Luiz Pessoa's reviews and meta-analyses of imaging and bodily responses find overlapping networks, not one region or pattern per emotion, and the dispute between Jaak Panksepp's basic emotions and Lisa Feldman Barrett's constructionism remains open.

On nature and nurture, the chapter separates the several meanings bundled into the word innate and recalls Daniel Lehrman's criticism of Konrad Lorenz and the developmental framework of Rethinking Innateness. Heritability, it stresses, describes variation within a given population and set of environments. Estimates can shift between settings and cohorts, genetic associations can include environmental routes running through relatives' genotypes, which an Icelandic study called genetic nurture, and early candidate-gene findings, including a celebrated serotonin transporter result, failed in much larger samples. The lesson concerns discovery methods, since many traits depend on numerous variants of small effect, and some rare variants carry substantial risk.

A final section turns to evolutionary explanation. Drawing on Gould and Lewontin's spandrels, the idea of exaptation and the comparative method defended by Andrews, Gangestad and Matthews, it argues that a trait's present usefulness does not show what selection shaped it for, and that the question should stay open where evidence cannot decide.

Questions the chapter asks

Is a symptom that improves with a placebo a sign that the problem was all in the mind?
Is the amygdala really the brain's fear centre?
If a condition is highly heritable, does that mean genes fix it and it cannot be changed?

This is a summary of the chapter, written for this site; it is not an extract from the book. Coming soon from Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardback editions.