ijustreallylikebrainsok

[ijustreallylikebrainsok]

Wow ok...

So turns out my urge to create this blog at all was the result of a (hypo)manic episode and reading my vaguely manic rambling about neuroscience and mental health is...interesting to say the least. A little funny to me that that's what my mania decided I needed to obsess about and maybe a tiny bit embarrassing that I posted it at all but whatever, could've been much worse I suppose.

Now that I've fixed my meds and manically screamed at various mental health professionals I have much less of an *urge* to post about whatever tf I was talking about in the first post but it's still an interesting topic I think and I'll try to come up with more things mostly because thinking that way helps me navigate my own mental health ~journey~

Not sure who this post is even for other than myself but thought I'd put it out there I guess, welcome to my breakdown

[ijustreallylikebrainsok]

Why do I want an annoying blog that probably won't mean anything to anyone?

Brief intro to me, I'm working on my PhD in neuroscience and the focus of my research is psychiatric disorders, how they arise from within the brain, and if there are different ways to target these disruptions in the brain to provide more effective treatment for those suffering from a mental illness.

Personal details that shape my experience/interpretation of all this nonsense: in my late 20s, lesbian, non-binary, grew up in a very conservative suburb in Dallas

I'm so sorry for anyone reading this, it's really just self-indulgent analysis of mental health and psychology and neuroscience, but I wanted an outlet for my seemingly sudden obsession of *why* feelings even happen in the first place.

I've kind of always been interested in this concept but I haven't really acknowledged it or spent much time with it since it is such an overwhelming concept to even begin to understand the human mind and why we act the way that we do.

I have to assume my initial interest in why mental illness happens came from an actual interest to understand myself. Even at a young age something in me knew that my thought processes and seemingly overwhelming feelings weren't "normal", in that they were deeply affecting me in ways that didn't seem to be happening to other people. And it seems that the way my brain is wired that led to a NEED to understand WHY exactly this was the case as a way to cope with feeling alienated and different than everyone else.

I've struggled with depression the vast majority of my life and gone through so many different treatments to try to alleviate my symptoms and some things have mildly helped but mostly just left me back in the same place I've always been, depressed, overwhelmed, apathetic, avoidant. And I think this struggle with my own brain fighting against me being happy (whatever tf that means) is a lot of what drove me toward neuroscience in the first place.

It's almost a coping mechanism actually to put the psychological distress aside to focus exclusively on what is going wrong *in the brain* that makes me this way instead of examining any other external factors.

Don't get me wrong, the study of neuroscience (or any biology affecting humans for that matter), can definitely be a largely noble pursuit. I want to help the world cure an infectious disease, I want to cure cancer since it's such a large problem. But I think what I'm getting at here is that underlying that "noble" pursuit of helping humanity, there's almost always a selfish reasoning for that. For people studying Alzheimer's, a lot of them know someone who has or is experiencing that horrific disease. For people studying various forms of cancer, they know someone who was affected by the currently available treatments for cancer and how devastating that whole process can be to your life.

But neuroscience seems uniquely positioned to be a selfish study, in my opinion. We want to understand ourselves so strongly that it drives us to delve deep into the brain and pick it apart to understand what makes us human. This is an obnoxiously philosophical approach to why we do science but I think it's an important one to consider ESPECIALLY in the realm of neuroscience and mental health.

I think there's historical evidence of this too. When the field of psychology was first coming about there was some interest in what was happening in the brain to make us act in certain ways, but a movement of thought-leaders or whatever you want to call them shifted the field AWAY from the brain entirely to focus on behavior. And I'm sure there are a ton of different more "logical" reasons for approaching human behavior this way, but in my mind part of that reason has to be that at the time we had no method of accessing the brain at all so it was essentially an unknowable void. If we can't physically get to the brain to mess with it or see it or anything how can we possibly begin to understand what's going on in there, so the response is to then say the brain doesn't matter at all because it's too overwhelming to imagine a singular organ controls every aspect of our experience.

Now, however, neuroscience is a massive field of research and there's almost a complete divide between neuroscientists and psychologists and I don't think this is the approach we should take either. My boss is a very strict neuroscientist and that school of thought is really interesting to me in a deterministic way. His thoughts about behavior essentially boil down to dysfunctional behavior is EXCLUSIVELY maladaptive wiring within the brain. And I don't think this is incorrect necessarily since basically any type of experience or even weird genetics can rewire your brain in a way that's very strange to others and cause behaviors that are destructive to your life.

However, I find this approach to be too narrow-minded to fully understand the human experience and how mental illness comes to be. Yes, the brain is affected by everything you do and all the people around you and your parents and whatever else you can possibly imagine, BUT we still don't have the technology or techniques or methods to explain everything that affects being a person as a whole and why some people seem to have a much harder time with that experience than others.

Essentially it boils down to, neuroscience is an incredible way to understand biologically why we are like this, but I also think in some ways the human experience is too complicated to ever fully understand how social interactions shape us as we get older or how the collective experiences we share affect some people much more deeply emotionally than others. Right now, in 2024, we just don't have the tools to fully understand the complexities of conscious thought. Neuroscience aims to understand this in many ways but it's limited by how we can dissect the brain to understand it. Not only is generally the human experience complicated but the brain itself is constantly changing and the ways different regions are connected to each other and interact is so complex and we simply do not have the ability to unravel all of that complexity.

In short, neuroscience is the coolest science ever, but we are complicated. In this blog I will ramble about psychology (maybe neuroscience too who knows I don't have a plan) and just the fun ways our brain decides to interpret things and rationalize our behaviors.