Mental Health and the Brain Model

Because of my long term interest in mental health matters I recently decided to do a FutureLearn course on Psychology and Mental Health and the reading material included a paper by Peter Kinderman entitled A Psychological Model of Mental Disorder. This made me think that I should be looking at my evolutionary model of human intelligence to see whether it might be able to model some mental health problems. The model already predicts some weaknesses in how the human mind works in areas such as confirmation bias - so could it suggest possible causes for mental illness.

The evolutionary model is based on the idea that at the neuron level our brain works in exactly the same way as any other mammal but we have developed a tool, which we call language, to bridge over some of the weaknesses due to the way the animal brain has evolved. Some of these inherent weaknesses could underlie some mental health problems because the genetically evolved mechanism  is being asked to do a lot of extra work.

The following can be considered draft discussion notes looking at some of the areas which my model suggests there issues which could adversely affect mental health.

Modelling how the Human Brain Works

On the FutureLearn course "Psychology and Mental Health" I am currently following I have just reached a section which starts:

The New Scientist has a very good, user-friendly, account of the human brain and how it works.

I would be the first to agree that the New Scientist is good at explaining science in easily readable terms – having been a fan since I brought a copy of the very first issues when I was a student. Its web site has good descriptions of the brain, and its components, and other aspects of modern brain research. However there is a glaring omission – there is no overall description of “how it works” which explains how the neurons in the brain work together to support intelligent human mental activities.

 

The New Scientist is not alone. The Scientific American has just published a special issue “Humans: Why we’re unlike any other species on the planet” which fails to answer the same question. In fact you can read book after book about the brain, and also many research papers, and while there are a number of purely descriptive surmises, the best answer you can get is that there is currently no adequate predictive model of how the brain’s biological computer actually works to convert activity at individual cell level into a system capable of doing what the human brain can obviously do.

I am currently working on "An EvolutionaryModel of Human Intelligence “ which attempts to show how activity at the neuron level supports the high level mental activities which characterize the human species and it is perhaps appropriate to add my ideas on the subject with outline details of my research.