eWEAR: A New Way to Slice Up the Brain—and the Mind
Meeting Reports
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Jul 13, 2022
Epilepsy can be treated by electrically modulating—or, in extreme cases, removing—the part of the brain in which seizures originate. Parkinson’s Disease is caused by cell death in a region in the middle of the brain called the substantia nigra; stimulating nearby regions, or administering drugs that mimic the effect of the dead cells, can alleviate symptoms. And devices like cochlear implants and artificial retinas might help when someone’s sensory equipment isn’t working properly.
But things get much fuzzier when it comes to mental illness. Scientists still have very little idea which parts of the brain contribute to different psychiatric conditions—and, given how difficult it can be to treat mental illness, some psychiatrists and neuroscientists worry that terms like “depression” and “schizophrenia” may capture whole suites of different brain problems, each of which might have its own optimal treatment. Scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health have tried to combat these concerns by designing a new framework for understanding mental illnesses, the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which analyzes psychiatric conditions according to various domains of mental functioning (like “negative valence” and “cognitive systems”). But these domains, too, weren’t necessarily informed by what we know about the brain. The terms used in RDoC, and the terms used throughout human neuroscience—memory, emotion, motor control—are largely inherited from psychology, says Ellie Beam, a MD/PhD candidate at Stanford.
“What we were doing was taking what had been defined in psychology and trying to identify neural correlates of it,” Beam says. “Especially in psychiatric neuroimaging, we just weren’t finding a one-to-one correspondence between our diagnostic labels and our neuroimaging results.”
So Beam wanted to see if the wealth of human neuroscience research conducted over the past couple of decades could suggest a new, neuroscientifically informed way of talking about what the brain does—and, potentially, of understanding mental illness. The idea, at a high level, was this: If two capacities that we typically think of as separate (say, memory and emotion) seem to use exactly the same brain regions, maybe we should consider them to be the same thing. Conversely, if emotion makes use of two completely separable brain circuits, perhaps it needs to be divided up into more specific subtypes, like positive and negative emotion.
Epilepsy can be treated by electrically modulating—or, in extreme cases, removing—the part of the brain in which seizures originate. Parkinson’s Disease is caused by cell death in a region in the middle of the brain called the substantia nigra; stimulating nearby regions, or administering drugs that mimic the effect of the dead cells, can alleviate symptoms. And devices like cochlear implants and artificial retinas might help when someone’s sensory equipment isn’t working properly.
But things get much fuzzier when it comes to mental illness. Scientists still have very little idea which parts of the brain contribute to different psychiatric conditions—and, given how difficult it can be to treat mental illness, some psychiatrists and neuroscientists worry that terms like “depression” and “schizophrenia” may capture whole suites of different brain problems, each of which might have its own optimal treatment. Scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health have tried to combat these concerns by designing a new framework for understanding mental illnesses, the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which analyzes psychiatric conditions according to various domains of mental functioning (like “negative valence” and “cognitive systems”). But these domains, too, weren’t necessarily informed by what we know about the brain. The terms used in RDoC, and the terms used throughout human neuroscience—memory, emotion, motor control—are largely inherited from psychology, says Ellie Beam, a MD/PhD candidate at Stanford.
“What we were doing was taking what had been defined in psychology and trying to identify neural correlates of it,” Beam says. “Especially in psychiatric neuroimaging, we just weren’t finding a one-to-one correspondence between our diagnostic labels and our neuroimaging results.”
So Beam wanted to see if the wealth of human neuroscience research conducted over the past couple of decades could suggest a new, neuroscientifically informed way of talking about what the brain does—and, potentially, of understanding mental illness. The idea, at a high level, was this: If two capacities that we typically think of as separate (say, memory and emotion) seem to use exactly the same brain regions, maybe we should consider them to be the same thing. Conversely, if emotion makes use of two completely separable brain circuits, perhaps it needs to be divided up into more specific subtypes, like positive and negative emotion.
