The Disordered Mind Book Summary - The Disordered Mind Book explained in key points

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The Disordered Mind summary

Name: The Disordered Mind
Rating: 4.5 (270 reviews)
Author: Eric R. Kandel

Eric R. Kandel

What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

4.5 (270 ratings)

27 mins

Topics

The Brain Neuroscience

Table of Contents

The Disordered Mind
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn how your brain works from brains that work differently.

Brains are like really fancy computers. They consist of billions of tiny, interconnected parts that work together in programmed patterns to produce our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. And as with computers, sometimes we can learn most about how things work when they don’t.

Since French doctor Philippe Pinel founded psychiatry in 1790, the study of brain disorders, injuries, and illnesses has produced amazing insights into the inner workings of our minds and brains. That’s because such disruptions allow us to observe how concrete biological changes in our brains affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

In recent years, technological advances have allowed us to study disordered minds in more depth than ever before. These blinks present some of the most important insights that modern neuroscience has gleaned from such research. Connecting biology, psychology, and neuroscience, we’ll explore what we can learn from autism about the brain’s social nature, from schizophrenia about creativity, from Alzheimer’s about memory, and more.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

which brain chemical links schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease;
why addiction is a chronic illness; and
how our unconscious minds rule our lives.

Brains that work abnormally can teach us how brains normally work.

We all get terribly sad sometimes. Everyone occasionally has wild ideas, strange urges, and moments of anxiety, euphoria, or forgetfulness. But what if we’re sad, euphoric, or forgetful all the time?

When ordinary mental experiences go into overdrive and begin to interfere with our daily lives, they might indicate a mental disorder. Mental disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, or dementia are often characterized by exaggerations of everyday thoughts, feelings, and behavior. When you’re clinically depressed, for example, you don’t feel down occasionally – you feel debilitatingly sad over weeks and months.

The key message here is: Brains that work abnormally can teach us how brains normally work.

Psychiatry, the medical study of mental disorders, was founded by French physician Philippe Pinel in 1790. Pinel was the first scientist to suggest that mental disorders have a physical basis.

Today, we know that all mental disorders are also disorders of the brain. Genetic defects, environmental factors, or injury can change the brain’s normal structure and functioning. Because there’s a direct link between these physical changes and their effect on a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior, mental disorders reveal a lot about how our brains work.

Before we dive into this field of study, let’s go over some basics. The brain is made up of millions of specialized nerve cells called neurons that form intricate networks to pass information between our brain, body, and senses, which give rise to our mental processes. Neurons communicate with each other through a system of electrical signals, and chemical molecules called neurotransmitters. In many mental disorders, certain networks of neurons become dysfunctional, hyperactive, or unable to communicate.

Modern neuroscience studies why and how this happens, using the latest scientific technologies. For example, scientists can now alter, delete, or insert certain genes in mice to learn how these genes affect the brain. Thanks to such animal models, we now know that there’s simple genetic disorders of the brain like Huntington’s that are caused by a single mutated gene, and complex genetic disorders like depression that involve multiple genes and environmental factors.

In addition, modern brain imaging techniques allow neuroscientists to study the activity of the brain in action. An fMRI, for instance, measures changes in the concentration of oxygen in red blood cells to determine which parts of the brain are active at any given moment. Equipped with these technologies, the study of brain disorders is shining a light into the healthy brain.

Autism reveals the deeply social nature of our brains.

Did you know that most of us can read minds? Well, at least our brains pretend we can.

Because humans are social creatures, our brains learn to attribute thoughts and emotions to others nearly automatically. Around the age of three, most children begin to understand that the people around them have a mind of their own. This theory of mind, as psychologists call it, helps them understand and predict other people’s behavior, and allows them to navigate the social world quickly and efficiently. For children with autism, however, these things are neither easy nor automatic.

Mood disorders are linked to chemical imbalances involving the brain’s emotional system.

Emotions are a big part of how we experience the world. They help us connect with others, recognize our desires, and make judgement calls when reason alone won’t suffice. When the emotional system in our brains goes haywire, it can cause a great deal of suffering.

In mental disorders like PTSD or depression, the brain gets stuck in a loop of extremely negative emotions, causing a permanently low mood or extreme mental anguish. Unfortunately, such disorders affect nearly one-third of Americans at least once in their lives – making understanding and treating them all the more important.

Schizophrenia affects a variety of brain structures linked to thought, memory, and creativity.

Of all the mental disorders, schizophrenia might still be the most stigmatized. That’s because it affects a wide range of brain regions, and thus causes dramatic effects on thinking and behavior.

For one, people with schizophrenia often experience visual and auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. They may believe that someone is sending them special messages, or that other people are out to get them. But schizophrenia also comes with less obvious symptoms such as social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and memory problems.

In Alzheimer’s and dementia, faulty proteins erode our brain’s explicit memory system.

Henry Molaison, known to his doctors only as H.M., is one of the most important patients in the history of neuroscience. Like many of them, he wasn’t a particularly lucky guy. After injuring his head in a bike accident as a child, H.M. began suffering from severe epilepsy as an adult. To stop the seizures, his doctors decided to take out the parts of the brain that had been scarred in the accident.

The operation swiftly cured H.M.’s epilepsy, but it came at a high price: H.M. still remembered people and events from many years ago, but he could no longer form new memories. Every new piece of information he learned after the operation he immediately forgot. Surprisingly, researchers found that he could still learn new motor tasks like learning new drawing skills – he just didn’t remember practicing.

Parkinson’s disease reveals the role of brain chemicals in movement.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s aren’t the only neurological disorders caused by misfolding proteins. Since there are countless different proteins in the human brain, there are countless ways in which faulty proteins can affect our thoughts and behavior. In Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, for instance, misfolding proteins in the brain slowly erode a person’s ability to move.

Here’s the key message: Parkinson’s disease reveals the role of brain chemicals in movement.

Addiction hijacks the brain’s reward system – often permanently.

Not too long ago, even psychologists believed that addiction was simply a matter of willpower. When a pleasurable behavior becomes so destructive it ruins your health and relationships, why not just stop it? Thanks to the insights of neuroscience, we know now that things are not that simple.

Like other mental disorders, addiction – whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling or eating – fundamentally changes our brains. It primarily acts on the systems involved in pleasure, emotions, and behavior, virtually robbing us of our will. This comes at a massive cost: the power of addictions costs the US economy an estimated 740 billion dollars a year.

The development of our bodies and brains allows for many variations in sex and gender identity.

In most species, male and female animals show clear differences in behavior. Humans are no exception, though we show much greater range and variety in gendered behavior than other species.

Nonetheless, neuroscientists have discovered subtle structural and molecular differences in the brains of men and women. Gender-specific activity patterns occur in areas related to sexual and reproductive behaviors, for example, but also in regions involved in emotion, memory, and stress. We don’t know yet how these patterns translate into thought and behavior, but it appears that sex and gender also express themselves in the brain.

Neuroscience is beginning to unravel the mystery of consciousness.

Of all the complex mental states the brain produces, consciousness is one of its most puzzling features.

In simple terms, being conscious means being aware of our mental processes as they happen. When we’re awake, experiences such as seeing a friendly face, smelling a rose, or being afraid have a subjective quality that we can think and talk about later.

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What is The Disordered Mind about?

The Disordered Mind (2018) explores what disorders and diseases of the brain can tell us about the inner workings of our minds. Acclaimed neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel draws on a lifetime of research to explain what depression, schizophrenia, addiction, and more reveal about how our brains affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior – and explains how new scientific methods could help solve the big puzzle of consciousness.

Who should read The Disordered Mind?

Armchair philosophers, hobby psychologists, and aspiring neuroscientists
People affected by Alzheimer’s, depression, schizophrenia, or other neurological disorders
Anyone puzzled by the mystery of consciousness

About the Author

Eric R. Kandel is a psychologist, physiologist, and one of the pioneers of modern neuroscience. In 2000, his research on memory storage in the brain won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He has written several books on the topic of neurobiology, psychiatry, art, memory, and the mind.

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