Introduction:
In any mental health episode, where is the destination of thought?
When someone has a certain kind of reaction, where did thoughts go?
Why do words hurt?
Why can hurtful words not just be ignored, or dismissed?
Why would a new spigot that gets damaged on an important weekend with guests cause a major meltdown?
What is the relationship between that spigot and the eventual mood disorder?
These questions belong to the thought pathway in the brain — how thoughts emerge, then transport, to hold this power.
Words that hurt aren’t just sound but thought that goes somewhere. Damaged spigot isn’t just an object, but a thought version that goes to a destination of upset.
Ordinarily, a device could bring happiness, if thoughts of it go somewhere, or could cause sadness if thoughts of it go elsewhere.
What is the relationship between an external device and the brain, or words and the brain?
This opinion editorial below proposes thoughts pathway in the brain.
All the links in the article are to scientific papers, and wherever suggestions are made, it is said to be proposed.
There is no literature in neuroscience on how thought transports in this brain, this will be a first, along that line.
And knowing where thoughts go could be useful to understand how to adjust approaches to mental health and how to give emotions to AI, for safety and entropy in self-driving cars.
Opinion Editorial on Psilocybin
There is a recent paper {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01744-z} on how psilocybin mushroom rewires the brain {https://www.livescience.com/magic-mushroom-psilocybin-treats-depression-brain} of those with depression, connecting isolated brain regions, shown by fMRI. This follows a convention of measured changes in the brain, via circuits but misses out something more important: the effect of psychedelics on thoughts.
The mind often knows thought albeit many mental health cases remain approximate. With some dosage of psilocybin, what does it change about thought motion and destination? What does it affect in the memory and how does it induce or inhibit regions of feeling effects?
Thought pathways are vital because what thoughts are to the mind are different from neuroimaging displays. There are activity centers in the brain, but it is what {thought} visits those centers that also matters, not just their normalcy or anomaly, their activity or passivity.
The physicality of neurons and brain regions should be one aspect of neuroscientific studies. The construct of thought should be another.
The brain is constantly rewired, that a psychoactive substance is able to do so matters, but does not say much about what it means for how the thought, responsible for a problem – transports across the brain.
Rewiring in the brain could mean different things: it could mean a new store or group in the memory. It could mean adjustments at some centers for feelings. It could mean a process of active to passive thought interchange. It could mean diversion of activity from one circuit to another and so on.
If someone is depressed, thoughts may seem heavy, or static. Thoughts may also be on one thing. There are some clinically depressed states not easily defined. Seeking out thought, then its corresponding pathway can be useful for experiential comprehension.
If someone has PTSD and a psychoactive substance makes changes, it can be interpreted that the thought equivalent of whatever caused it was removed from a destination.
Thought pathways are important, outside the canopy of brain rewiring that may not say much, sometimes.
How does an experience become PTSD? Before that question, how does anything external become something that is able to affect the mind?
Going through war, illness, pain, a violent experience, harassment, discrimination or more, what version does the memory take and where else does it go?
Theoretically, there is a thought version of everything. Or every internal and external sense gets converted to thought or a form of thought. It is the thought version of anything that goes to the memory to be known and stored. Or the uniform unit of what the memory stores is a form of thought.
It is also a form of thought that goes to centers where feelings effects are determined like sadness, worry, anger and so on. Sometimes, a combination of feeling effect could result in anxiety, depression and others.
The war, strikes, shelling, fire, tremors, everything sensed mostly goes to the thalamus to be integrated {https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104137118}. For smell, it goes to the olfactory bulb.
It is proposed that senses are integrated to thought and it is this thought that is relayed to the cortex for interpretation.
Whatever results in feelings must first go through the memory, or be known. The sound of an alarm may cause panic for those who know what it means, but do nothing to others who don’t.
It is the thought version of senses that goes from the memory, to the destination of feeling effect. So when danger is seen externally, this is integrated to thought, goes to the memory to be known as danger, then to the spot to feel fear, norepinephrine may be secreted, then reaction to flee.
The effect of psychedelics on this transport of thought across the brain or its pathways carries more importance, theoretically than to seek what is generally rewired.
Psychedelics maybe could remove thought from the destination to feel depressed, or it could prevent the giver in the memory to not frequent the store or group where the trigger is, it may also make it such that whenever the heaviness comes, it becomes passive not active.
fMRI still dominates how the brain is understood and answers required, but how thoughts transports, that fMRI does not exactly show remains a disadvantage towards important progress in mental health and many neurologic conditions.
These are the links to articles on the recent study:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61070591
Stephen blogs at troic.medium.com
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
