When I first started on this path, I think one of my primary questions (whether I was aware of it or not) was not so much “How do brains work?” but “How does behavior work?”. I think this is largely shaped by the view of nervous systems as facilitators of behavior, rather than interesting in and of themselves.
Nearly all research into nervous system function is driven by behavioralism, and how we describe that behavior is almost entirely generated through psychological and psychiatric practices. Even “neurodegenerative” conditions are ultimately framed by behavioralist constructs, from “dyskensia” to “disability”.
And this presents a significant problem because those definitions are assessed subjectively, through a lens specifically geared toward behavioralist constructs created largely before we had even the slightest clue how nervous systems actually worked.
Further, since the 1950’s when psychiatry took the mindshare lead over psychology in defining these constructs, we’ve been left with this construct of “ordered/disordered” which explicitly describes any deviation from “normal” as disordered. This is antagonized by nearly all psychiatric definitions requiring SES interaction, meaning two similarly constructed individuals are not similar if they have differing SES support under current psychiatric dogma. It’s bad.
More pressing than that is that none of these concepts are decomposeable to anything else, I can’t describe nervous system function in terms of chemistry, or physics, or any other mechanic to cross check the validity of the core concepts. There is no universal measurement to all conditions to verify, there’s no set of SI units which form a reliable basis for that measurement. It’s all just subjectivity piled on top of subjectivity, disguised as “science”.
It’s my belief that this ordered/disordered construct is not just harmful, it’s flat out wrong.
Talking about behavior in terms of metabolism repairs a lot of these issues.
First, metabolic interactions are decomposable to chemistry, decomposable to current physics understandings, and ultimately describable in the context of our SI units. And the SI units are important because (to our current best knowledge) are invioble bases upon which we can build on top of.
Ironically, the metaphor that pops into my head is from a religious pamphlet I came across as a child, which depicted a storm along a beach, with a house high up on a cliff side. The text stated “Would you rather build your house on the sand or the rock of Jesus?” or something very close. While that context makes me chuckle, the underlying conceit, that building on top of consistent, non-vioable principles is nearly always going to result in much more consistent results/outcomes.
Now that we are able to clearly determine that these metabolic interactions result in specific and quantifiable behavior, transitioning away from the sand onto the “bedrock” of SI units would resolve the issues of decomposability.
Second, talking about behavior in terms of metabolism not only frees us from a “disordered/ordered” dichotomy and allows a much wider range of metabolic constructions without stigma, it also increases the nuance and specificity of that discussion.
As an example of this, one of the most useless things you can tell someone is your “psychiatric diagnosis” (actually that has information in and of itself, unrelated to your actual construction). “I have been diagnosed with ADHD” is nearly always (and rightfully so) followed up with “Well what does that mean?” How do I react to this information? If I have to keep asking more questions to figure this out because there’s so much nuance to the individual presentation, is this “ADHD” descriptor even useful?
Along the same lines, it also frees us from this SES requirement in psychiatric diagnosis. It recognizes that even with a great support system, these conditions exist, and it recognizes that these conditions may only be an artifact of a lack of a support system. Nuance, and specificity.
Third, talking about behavior in terms of metabolism is evenly applicable across ethological lines. Instead of talking about “models” of behavior, which may not (and nearly always are not) similar to the actual expressed human behavior that’s the subject of research, it forces consistency.
This also has the great knock on affect of reinforcing the consistency of our construction with the rest of the ecosystem, it degrades the anthropocentric viewpoint that allows us to justify our worst behaviors. Ultimately, this will also allow us to critically examine our own ingroup/outgroup behavioral biases, and provide a path to obtain that shiny egalitarian society our fiction seems to yearn for, but we can never seem to achieve.
So how do we do this?
Well, right now we obviously need a lot more work to understand the exact interplay between metabolics and behavior. Even with that, we do have some pretty good places to start which should remain consistent with new information.
For starters, we can start looking at conditions like “depression” and “anxiety” as “suppressed” and “cranked” (I vote cranked be the official term) metabolic inputs. With this correlation alone, imaging could reveal particular nervous system modules which represent these high/low states (especially if we do better at getting baseline measurements).
We can extend this by describing the particular section associated, e.g. “Cranked Nucleus Accumbens(e)” would give a specific behavioral phenotype of “High Valence for an external Stimulus (or “addiction” if it’s chronic)”. Having this information would give everyone involved, including the individual insight to understand that they are at higher risk than other people when exposed to this particular type of stimulus.
Or “High ventral habenula” activation, which would equate to “Major Depression – extended social distress” type of stimuli.