Healing and The Brain

The human brain is a mystery even with all the knowledge we’ve obtained over the years. It’s a powerhouse of information and interpretation, coordinating sensational and intellectual activity 24/7. For just a blob of pink mush, the brain certainly earns it’s crown for most awesome organ ever. 

In Alice G. Brand’s “Healing and the Brain,” the brain is an information center as well as a healing center. But before we get to it’s curative powers, Brand explains the fundamental units of the brain, specifically those that process perception, emotion, and memories. 

The human brain consists of three main parts: (1) The hindbrain, the lower part of the brain, is responsible for unconscious actions and processes. (2) The midbrain, the upper portion of the brain stem, contains cells involved in vision. (3) The forebrain, the largely developed cerebrum, is responsible for thought and speech control. 

As you can tell, it’s the forebrain we can thank for our potential in the human race. It’s where cognition meets action. Brand often brings up the debate of which comes first: thinking or emotion? Do we think then react accordingly and vice versa? As it turns out the brain takes in all that external stimulation and then produces an emotional response. Brand describes this processes as “the affective significance of experience” (204). 

Then Brand introduces us to the hippocampus and the amygdala, the two potions of our brains responsible for cognition, emotion, language and ultimately, healing. The hippocampus is thought to be center of memory, or as Brand puts it, “cognitive mapping” (205) where we assimilate and store maps of meaning. The amygdala is involved with the experience of emotion, “giving attentive significance to events” (207). Brand lists out the physiology process of how we experience memory, nostalgia, and other reactions to sensory specific stimuli. 

But what’s more important is the fact that the amygdala receives and interprets memory before our senses, meaning emotion comes before intellect. Brand says that the amygdala is largely responsible for what memories get stored and to what depth it gets stored. So the stronger the emotion, the longer that memory will stay with you. 

When the memory aspect of our brain crosses paths with the learning aspect, we achieve what is called healing. This “primary consciousness” is essentially what makes us human. We have the brains to know that we think, we’re aware of situations, events, and other external stimuli. What’s crazy is that language is a relatively new brain configuration. It makes me wonder if we never developed language, could we ever heal? How do animals heal? It’s been observed that elephants show grief to a deceased family member. As their ways of healing beyond conscious awareness? 

In the end, Brand pulls an excerpt from Goedicke’s “Singing & (Listening) for the Record, where she explains how writers conjoin their mind and body to make sense of their feelings and understand what their overall being is telling them. In a sense, writers speak for their brain.