Your Brain, Your Illness

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From the course by The University of Chicago

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

621 ratings

The University of Chicago

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

621 ratings

Learn how the nervous system produces behavior, how we use our brain every day, and how neuroscience can explain the common problems afflicting people today. We will study functional human neuroanatomy and neuronal communication, and then use this information to understand how we perceive the outside world, move our bodies voluntarily, stay alive, and play well with others.

From the lesson

Abstract Function

You've now learned an incredible amount about the way the brain functions to perceive and act upon the world we live in. You've gained an understanding of neurobiology on a cellular level, and how many diseases and disorders of the nervous system can affect our bodies and minds. In our final module, we will journey into the realms of emotion, attention, memory, and language. By the end of this module, you will have a greater understanding of the more abstract cognitive functions the brain.

Your Brain, Your Illness6:08

Future Challenges5:45

Meet the Instructors

Peggy Mason
Professor
Neurobiology

[MUSIC]

One of the things the neocortex does for us is that, it interprets events,

and it interprets them in our own individual ways.

And one of the things that we interpret is what's going on with our body.

We interpret diseases and the disease may produce an illness.

How we experience that can not be predicted.

If you knew everything about a disease, if you knew everything that caused it,

everything thing that was gonna happen down to the molecular layer and

up to the behavioral level.

If you knew every single thing about it, you still couldn't predict

how that disease is going to affect any given individual.

That a completely personal reaction.

It's a completely personal event.

And, I've been struck by this.

I remember talking to my aunt after she had a stroke and,

after she recovered, she has actually called her stroke of luck.

She feels like that event took her out of a bad place in her life and

put her into a better place.

So she calls it her stroke of luck.

Did she enjoy having a stroke?

I am sure she didn't.

But, she used it and

it ended up having a beneficial effect on her life.

In the same way, Jill Bolte Taylor, I'm sure she's...

Not happy.

She didn't enjoy having a stroke but she calls it her stroke of insight,

and I think that she's found a way to have made that stroke actually work for her.

That she is now a person and she's happy with the person who she is.

And part of who she is is due to her experience

having a massive hemorrhagic stroke.

When I was thinking about this, I actually sent out an email to a few friends,

and asked them, on a scale of one to ten, with one being a curse,

and ten being a growth experience, how would you rate your own disease?

And this is a reaction that I got back from a friend of mine who has Parkinson's.

I got it back, to be fair,

at a time when the Parkinson's was fairly mild to maybe moderate.

And what this individual says is,

my first reaction to the diagnosis was one of relief.

Now that is absolutely, 100% common.

So if something's going wrong,

who's gonna know the best that something's wrong with you?

You are.

And to have a name for it, to have a prognosis,

to understand that something is happening, that you're not crazy.

That is a huge gift.

And, this was experienced that way by my friend.

So, my first reaction to the diagnosis was one of relief.

I knew what I was dealing with.

My PD, my Parkinson's Disease, has brought my spouse and

me together as we contend with a common enemy.

My PD has also rendered me more sympathetic to the trials and

tribulations of others, including members of my family and friends.

My mother once said that my father could not appreciate the suffering of

others because he had been sick only once in his life.

Well that's fixed now, for this individual.

Accordingly, assume that on a scale of one to ten, one designates PD as a curse and

ten as a growth experience, I would grade my PD as an eight or a nine.

An eight or a nine, that's amazing!

It's a growth experience.

Almost in it's entirety.

Upon reflection I think that my PD has made me a better person with respect to my

own self and to others about me.

That's really phenomenal and I just want to close this segment by showing you

how this can extend even, not just to disease, but in fact to death.

So, people have a way of making their own meaning out of their experience.

We can't assign a meaning from the facts.

The neocortex is going to assign that meaning and

everyone's neocortex is slightly different.

So, in Washing there's a law that allows terminally

ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death.

Everybody thought that this was going to be about pain.

That if you're in unrelenting pain,

you're going to chose to get these drugs that will hasten death.

It turns out pain is kind of irrelevant.

By far the most common reason was the desire to be in control,

to remain autonomous and to die at home.

It turns out that for this group of people,

dying is less about physical symptoms and more about personal values.

So, what I want to leave you with is,

it's really important to understand our biology and

I'm sure no one doubts that I feel that it's

very important to understand neurobiology, and that neurobiology is all around us.

None the less, from the facts of disease,

does not translate into the experience of people, and who's the boss.

You're the boss.

You and your own neocortex are gonna define your

own experience and your own reactions.

>> [MUSIC]

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