Chemicals in our brains

March 2, 2012, 7:17 pm , The Island


A. N. Suranimala

René Descartes wrote his famous piece "I think, therefore I am". My reconsideration of his view was published in The Sri Lankan Journal of the Humanities, 2001/2002. My arguments were theoretical, mainly from Buddhism but also from recent biological research, (Andrew Newberg, Edward O Wilson, Eugene D’Aquili & Vincent Rause, and Richard Dawkins) that there is no "I". But then, something happened to me last year that made me really experience it, that in fact, there is no "I".

I had a fall that probably broke some ribs and I was in severe pain and without sleep so I gobbled two pain killers – paracetamol with codeine, and a strong opiate. And on top of all that I had a bad flu. At this same time, I stopped smoking and that might have further withdrawn stimulation. I felt weird things, and was mildly claustrophobic, felt frightened inside a lift, little things (like the mis-behaviour of our politicians) made me unhappy and I couldn’t sleep. My friend a head-shrink said that the mild depression that followed was probably mainly due to the flu caused by Sneaky, the flu germ, compounded by the drugs. So when the doc gave me fluoxetine, it was to restore and maintain the levels of my brain’s chemical transmitter, serotonin. It did, wow. What I am therefore saying is that small things altered my personality, first the flu germ, then the added insult of the 2 drugs and then the lack of a natural chemical and other factors that added to it: thus my mind (if I had one) was really so fragile, and so dependent on the transmitter. No serotonin, and I get to be odd. Now bananas are full of serotonin but it is illogical, and certainly insulting, if I am equated to a banana. However, the mind is so flexible and fragile; there is no permanent entity that I can call "me" or "I". It is a matter of brain chemistry, so I agree with Andrew Newberg et al. in their important book Why God won’t go away: Brain science and the biology of belief, in which they say "In simpler terms, brain makes mind". Thus we cannot have a permanent entity called a soul at all, as I discussed in the aforesaid Descartes essay. Chemicals compose us and we are always in flux, as Buddhism says. If we drink coffee, we feel pepped up, if we guzzle beer, we get happier, if we swallow panadeine and Tramadol we become mild nuts, so we seem to be different persons at these different times. Did you know that if you, a man, gets an overdose of an oestrogen, a hormone that makes females, females, you, the man, become a sort-of-female, a feminised male (ooops, I nearly said womanized). But if you give a female an overdose of testosterone that makes a male a male, she gets to be a macho male with all his paraphernalia. And what is the difference between these aforesaid males and females? I’ll tell you – just some hydrogen and oxygen atoms and what chemist egg-heads call ‘double bonds’. And so macho Shah Rukh Khan and fabulous Ashwariya differ essentially only by some hydrogen or oxygen atoms and one or two chemical double bonds. Sharon Begley (NEWSWEEK February 18, 2008) says: "…women in several studies say their husbands or lovers are more attentive and amorous when they are ovulating" while producing these chemical hormones.

When I look at a picture of sculptor Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece The Kiss, I re-title it "See, my androgens are working" and when I see his "La Danaide" (below), which brings into vivid life, the utter beauty of a woman or the beauty of an utter woman, I re-title it "See, what my oestrogens can do".

So, girls and boys, and you dolled-up Hi-society females who prance about in your finery waiting for the camera of a Hi Society magazine, your sublime feelings of love that wreak havoc on intended in-laws, or your notion of "I" that wreaks havoc on others, are merely a matter of chemistry. Maybe the olde alchemistes got it right when they tried fiddling with chemicals to make the elixir of life for eternal youth. But as Sidney Harris, the master science cartoonist, depicted, that can never be tested for proof as the experiment will last till eternity.

Then, being an admirer of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, his vibrant colours - yellows, blues, reds and greens – and whorls of corn fields, trees and vivid scenes of nature, painted with bold strokes of his brush - struck me as a parallel with the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley after his experimental dose of LSD, the mind-expander (The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell). The parallel that I think exists, is with the chemically-induced visions of Huxley and the mental disease of van Gogh for it is known that such diseases are due to dis-equilibrium of the chemicals in the brain. Indeed an article Manic Depressive illness and Creativity by Kay R. Jamison (Scientific American 1995) wrote: "Several studies now show that creativity and mood disorders are linked".

And finally came a report – The amazing brain - from the UK (The Island, 3rd April. 2010) that "… researchers revealed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had essentially been able to switch off their subjects’ moral compasses by applying powerful magnets to a small region of the brain just behind the right ear". This is a very disturbing and degrading finding because what thousands of years of civilisation and life-long Sundays in temples and churches achieved, if at all, were undone in a moment by a cheap magnet over a small piece of the brain.

But my head-shrink-friend told me that one of his tools-of-the-trade Cognitive Psychotherapy can cure depression without drugs, which means that, after all, we are not dependant on a load of chemicals. Head-shrinkers and Newberg et al say there is a link between mind and body so we probably have this nebulous thing called a mind on which Cognitive Psychotherapy acts, however confused a mind it is, and then the mind affects the body. But that is too much philosophy for me though René Descartes revelled in it.

And why do "I" (or whatever it is) have these exhilarating musings at 5 am? I have my best ideas at 5 am, if they are any good at all. I think it is because there is, after an overnight’s starvation, mild hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), or a high cortisol level that jolt my brain and when in the morning I have a belly-full of corn flakes, the "transporting effect" (Aldous Huxley’s experience of LSD) of the hypoglycaemia disappears till tomorrow’s 6 am when I will be again in the hum-drum world of income-tax and shopping for potatoes and onions for my wife.

This progressive demolition and reduction of the psyche of a human, supposedly the acme of biological evolution, into a bag of chemical-tricks has had its macro-precedents. First came Copernicus to show us that planet-earth is not the centre of the universe but a speck of dust in outer space; then Charles Darwin came in to show us that the human, the "Lord of all I survey" was preceded over billions of years by other creatures big and small including slugs and worms. Then we had Karl Marx who proposed that we were mere pawns of economic forces; Sigmund Freud then showed that we are not even masters of our much-vaunted selves, and that we are under the tight, inexorable control of unconscious thoughts, our Ego and our Id.

Eggheads have had these thoughts before I had them: for one, Hippocrates: "Specifically, he blamed the imbalance of natural body fluids for emotional disturbance. The brain, he said, is influenced by the presence of four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. When these fluids were in the wrong place or wrong proportion, illness (both physical and emotional) was the result. An excess of yellow bile could overheat the brain to the point of mania and rage. Black bile, on the other hand, tended to chill the brain and cause melancholic feelings", (Overcoming anxiety, Panic and depression: New ways to regain your confidence. [Gardner and Bell 200] ).

So don’t exult in the vain thought that you are the ‘highest form of life in the universe’ (James Thurber in I Believe), you are not; you are just a bag of chemicals.