The article 7 (and a half) myths about your brain by Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett, a neuroscientist, has important implications for counsellors.

But how did these myths develop? History teaches us that throughout history, myths developed because of a lack of knowledge and sometimes pure ignorance. For the longest time it was believed that the earth was flat and stood on pillars. In premodernity abnormal behaviours were explained, understood, and attributed to evil spirits. Ancient people mostly attributed illness, all illness, but specifically mental illness, to demonic possession, sorcery, or the effect of an offended ancestral spirit. The early Greeks, Chinese, Hebrews, and Egyptians used exorcisms as treatment for mental illness.

With the flowering of Greek civilization and its continuation into the era of Roman rule (500 bc – ad 500), naturalistic explanations gradually became distinct from supernatural ones: Naturalistic explanations dominated the Greco-Roman thought. Even though they had no real understanding of brain function, but they believed that “abnormal behaviour” should be attributed to the brain and natural explanations and not spiritual or supernatural explanations. Plato (429-348 BC) believed that the brain was the organ of the mind, but his pupil Aristotle still believed that the heart was the organ of the mind, and that the brain merely served to cool down the blood.

Galen (AD 130-200) – a most important physician of the Roman imperial period – believed that the heart was the crucial organ of the body because it contained the ‘vital spirit’ – the spark of life that provided the substance of the mind that was transported by blood vessels to the base of the brain were the vital spirit was mixed with inhaled air and transformed into “animated spirit’ that was stored in the brain ventricles. This ventricle theory of the brain was accepted as truth for 1,500 years, and it was given it’s spiritual authority by the church father Augustine of Hippo. For the longest time no one was allowed to even challenge this belief in fear of the church.

Another ancient practice that survived for a long time was trephining. The doctors would treat the mentally ill by drilling a hole in the scull in an effort to relieve the abnormal behavior. Remember, this was a time before anesthesia or antibiotics –  if the “demon” (or the exorcism) did not get you, the “doctor” might. For the longest time, bloodletting was the desired treatment for mental illness. Irrespective of the crude treatment options, in the Greco-Roman period there was a move away from spiritual and supernatural explanations and a movement towards a more naturalistic understanding of mental disorders.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, rational and scientific thought gave way to a reemphasis on the supernatural. During the Middle Ages (400 – 1500 AC) the medical expertise of antiquity was lost and people reverted back to believing in evil and diabolical witchcraft. The reversion to extreme superstition took the church into the dark middle ages, and introduced a period where people with mental illness were treated much worse than ever before. Illnesses were believed to be the result of supernatural forces or God’s wrath and mentally ill people did not get any compassionate care. The mentally ill were locked away in the damp basements of monasteries. ‘Treatments’ were drastic and painful – prayers, holy water, floggings, starving, immersion in hot water, branding with hot irons, etc. They would scar the face of a mentally ill person with a branding iron, so that no self-respecting demon would want to live in that body.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the authority of the church was increasingly challenged by social and religious reformers. According to the church, Satan himself fostered these “attacks”. By doing battle with Satan and with people supposedly influenced or possessed by Satan, the church actively endorsed an already popular belief in demonic possession and witches. The cure seemed obvious – burn them at the stake. 20,000 people executed as witches in Scotland and more than 100,000 throughout Europe – mostly of them women and many mentally ill. Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull (decree) in 1484 calling on the clergy to identify and exterminate witches. This resulted in the 1486 publication of the extremely influential Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch’s Hammer). This papal bull ordered witch hunts by the church and  torture was used to obtain confessions. It is hard to understand why these barbaric practices continued right up to the infamous witchcraft trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Several hundred people were accused, many were imprisoned and tortured, and twenty were killed. Sadly the practice is still found among some groups in Africa.

A resurgence of rational and scientific inquiry during the Renaissance (fourteenth through sixteenth centuries) led to great advances in science and humanism, but unfortunately strongly opposed by the church. When Johann Weyer (1515–1588), a German physician, published his revolutionary book that challenged the foundation of ideas about witchcraft in 1563 – the church and the state condemned him. Modernity brought about a split between the church and the scientific community. The Church mostly believed that abnormal behaviour was rooted in the spiritual world, and the scientific community started observing human behaviour and started categorizing what they observed (the beginnings of our understanding of psychopathology). More and more there was a conviction that there had to be a biological basis to abnormal behaviour. Within the church community there where those who started to reject the spiritual model for mental illness, and there were those who unwavering believed that demonic spirits were responsible and rejected the medical model outright. This split could be seen in some churches building hospitals, while others kept on condemning the use of medication.

In the 19^th Century even serious physicists believed that the Universe was filled with an imaginary substance called luminiferous ether, and doctors believed that illnesses were caused by smelly vapours called miasmas. 

At the start of 1900’s Biological Psychiatry came to a halt. Disappointing medical results and the failure to develop any effective treatment, caused people like Freud to turn away from a biological explanation and to adhere to a psychological explanation. Freud, a neurosurgeon became so disillusionment by the lack of medical advances in psychiatry – he developed his psychological theories.

 

In spite of the scientific advances, many misbeliefs remained or resurface in the church and in social media. The field of neuroscience likewise has a stable full of myths about the brain that have slowly been eroded by accumulating data, but somehow still remain. Some survive today, mainly in the social media and some popular pseudo-science books and articles, and in conspiracy theories.  In her article Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett says that they are maintained not by evidence, but by repetition and belief. She lists the following 7 1/2 myths about the brain.

Myth #1: You have a lizard in your head. It is important for counsellors to understand the concept of the primal brain, but recent neuroscience clearly shows that brains don’t evolve in layers like adding icing to an already-baked cake. The only animal with a lizard brain is a lizard.

Myth #2: The left side of your brain is logical and the right side is creative. This misconception has somehow even found it’s way into theological theories in Christian counselling.  In general, no part of your brain is exclusively dedicated to artistic endeavours, mathematical reasoning, or any other psychological or spiritual function. Pretty much every action you take and every experience you have is computed by neurons distributed across your whole brain. The cerebral cortex does indeed consists of two halves or hemispheres, but both are intricately connected to many subcortical bits that make up the rest of your brain. So it’s simply not the case that some neurons in the left hemisphere create a computer engineer and some on the right create a poet. To add to this conversation is the myth that men are left-brain and women right brain orientated. How this has become a believed theological fact, is beyond me.

Myth #3: Cortisol is a stress hormone, and serotonin is a happiness hormone. Knowledge of psychopharmacology and neurology has become an essential aspect in the training of counsellors. We just cannot ne uneducated in this field. Understanding the neuropsychological development and functioning of the brain is essential.

Myth #4: Your eyes see, your ears hear, and your skin feels. All of your sensations – including religious sensations, are computed in your brain, and not simply detected in the world by your sense organs. Your brain is secretly combining several sources of information, including touch, temperature, and your knowledge from past experience, to construct a feeling or sensation.

Myth #5: Your brain reacts to events in the world. It serves counsellors well to remember that their client’s brain is constantly guessing what might happen in the next moment, and comparing its guesses to the sense data that it receives from the outside world and inside their body. These guesses are the seeds that give rise to their actions and experiences.

Myth #6: Mirror neurons are special cells that create empathy. IT speaks for itself – understanding empathy is important for counsellors.

Myth #7: Your brain stores memories. Memory recall is especially important for the inner healing practitioners and the iatrogenic memory recall techniques used in these ministries. Counsellors always have to be aware of the danger of false memory syndrome.

Myth #7½: You can’t grow new brain cells. Brain plasticity and brain regeneratively, and the limitations of it, has become critical for counsellors understanding prognoses and the brain’s ability to heal. New neurons, like the ones that sprout in your hippocampus, may be for learning new things and making new memories, rather than remembering (reassembling) the past. In a sense, new neurons enable your brain to cultivate your past as a way of charting your future.

In an era where speaking the truth has lost its flavour, and where lying , half-truths and plain false conspiracy theories are boomeranged around the word, and the church – we need to speak out against myths and be counsellors of integrity.

Dr Mervin