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Edward Shorter comes up occasionally in TMS books as, essentially the historian of TMS. Both Dr. Sarno and Dr. Schubiner refer to his book about the history of TMS in their own books. He is the Jason A. Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
He's come out with a new book called "How Everyone Became Depressed" and now has a blog at Psychology Today to promote it: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-everyone-became-depressed . Since he is a professor, his book and his blog can be a little on the dry side. At the same time, because he is a professor, he sometimes talks about very important subjects and does so with the benefit of great learning.
I was browsing his blog and came across and article that I thought is important. With advances in biomedical technology in the last 30 years, most notably MRI brain scanning technology, we are beginning to learn huge amounts in neuroscience that we didn't know before. This new knowledge about the brain is popping up in all sorts of books about various different regions of the brain, such as the amygdala, which handle fear, and the frontal cortex, which handles rational thought.
At the same time, there is a backlash against all of these new neuroscientific writings, and Adam Gopnik, a longtime writer at the New Yorker, summarized several books that talk about the limits of neuroscience. Edward Shorter thought that he was being too critical of neuroscience and wrote the following piece: (my comments are the ones that aren't indented)
If you're curious, here's a link to the New Yorker article:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/09/09/130909crbo_books_gopnik
I read it and actually preferred Ed's piece to the piece it was discussing. Gopnik's article wasn't without interest but was a little too academic and abstract without actually telling me much more.
He mentions that psychoanalysis was very popular in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps that is why it showed up in Forbidden Planet.... Howard Schubiner's book, Unlearn Your Pain, is more updated, relying more heavily on recent Neuroscientific research.
I think that Shorter is right on the mark here. Many well designed studies have shown that anti-depressants work well to relieve depression. Many of these studies are double blind randomized controlled trials, so they rule out the placebo affect. However, with their antidepressant medical affect documented, they can be prescribed by doctors, which makes them even more powerful, because anything which is given to you by a doctor who says that it will heal you is even more effective. So these antidepressant pills benefit from both powerful medical action and a powerful placebo response.
... But that doesn't mean that depression is just "too little serotonin." Yes, Prozac does operate by making serotonin more available in the synapse, but that doesn't mean that depression is just an imbalance of serotonin. The brain is much more complicated than that and I am glad that medical science is making that clear.
This is where I think Shorter really shines. Some medical remedies have been shown to be very helpful with some very serious conditions such as bipolar, psychosis, and depression. Some of these studies have been done with the highest levels of rigor and then replicated by multiple teams. They really help people, and that is very important. Neuroscience was part of this and he is right to defend it.
Bottom line: neuroscience can save lives, and that is worth defending.
He's come out with a new book called "How Everyone Became Depressed" and now has a blog at Psychology Today to promote it: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-everyone-became-depressed . Since he is a professor, his book and his blog can be a little on the dry side. At the same time, because he is a professor, he sometimes talks about very important subjects and does so with the benefit of great learning.
I was browsing his blog and came across and article that I thought is important. With advances in biomedical technology in the last 30 years, most notably MRI brain scanning technology, we are beginning to learn huge amounts in neuroscience that we didn't know before. This new knowledge about the brain is popping up in all sorts of books about various different regions of the brain, such as the amygdala, which handle fear, and the frontal cortex, which handles rational thought.
At the same time, there is a backlash against all of these new neuroscientific writings, and Adam Gopnik, a longtime writer at the New Yorker, summarized several books that talk about the limits of neuroscience. Edward Shorter thought that he was being too critical of neuroscience and wrote the following piece: (my comments are the ones that aren't indented)
Adam Gopnik Blots His Copybook
There is a huge area of neuroscientific research that has made a difference
Published on September 29, 2013 by Edward Shorter, Ph.D. in How Everyone Became Depressed
Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker is one of my favorite writers, especially when he goes on about how wonderful Paris is. But he’s blotted his copybook recently (New Yorker, Sept 9) with a piece about “neuroscience” that pretends to be skeptical about the skeptics.
If you're curious, here's a link to the New Yorker article:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/09/09/130909crbo_books_gopnik
I read it and actually preferred Ed's piece to the piece it was discussing. Gopnik's article wasn't without interest but was a little too academic and abstract without actually telling me much more.
Neuroscience is hot right now. No doubt about it. The psychoanalytic explanations of behavior so popular in the 1960s and -70s have given way to explanations favoring pieces of the brain as the center of action. One early 19th century writer, riffing on phrenology, referred to this kind of cerebral localization as “bumpology,” and Gopnik leaps on the phrase with glee as a way of ridiculing both those who criticize neuroscientific explanations and those who favor them. A pox on everybody, cries Gopnik, who yearns for good-old-fashioned Humanism, and Erasmus didn’t need to know about his amygdala, thank you very much.
He mentions that psychoanalysis was very popular in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps that is why it showed up in Forbidden Planet.... Howard Schubiner's book, Unlearn Your Pain, is more updated, relying more heavily on recent Neuroscientific research.
Hmmm. We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Some of the recent crop of books criticizing neuroscience are actually quite good: psychiatrist Sally Satel and psychologist Scott Lilienfeld’s recent Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic Books) warns that perps may go free because they can now blame their brains for their misdeeds rather than their characters. We see this with every new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association: that some new diagnosis provides potential exculpation for criminal acts. The changes that DSM-5 makes, for example, in “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder) stipulate that the existence of the various personality states within the individual may be self-reported, as opposed to reported by others. This opens a wide portal for pleas that “my personality as Jim made me rob the bank.” So, yeah, these fears that neuroscientific findings may have forensic consequences are not unrealistic.
But I suspect that Gopnik is not really interested in the courts. He wants to put the shiv into Sally Satel, who is a prominent conservative media intellectual based at the even more conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.
Yet my beef isn’t really with Gopnik’s politics. It’s that he seems unaware of a huge area where neuroscientific research really has made a difference in human welfare, and that’s psychopharmacology, the study of drugs that affect the brain and mind.
I know, I know. Some aspects of psychopharm have been seized by the pharmaceutical industry and converted into pseudoscience as a way of selling drugs. The whole neurotransmitter play, for example, claims that too little serotonin makes you depressed but the remedy is Prozac. Nobody in neuroscience believes this anymore, but it’s what doctors tell their patients every day (because they feel they have to tell them something).
I think that Shorter is right on the mark here. Many well designed studies have shown that anti-depressants work well to relieve depression. Many of these studies are double blind randomized controlled trials, so they rule out the placebo affect. However, with their antidepressant medical affect documented, they can be prescribed by doctors, which makes them even more powerful, because anything which is given to you by a doctor who says that it will heal you is even more effective. So these antidepressant pills benefit from both powerful medical action and a powerful placebo response.
... But that doesn't mean that depression is just "too little serotonin." Yes, Prozac does operate by making serotonin more available in the synapse, but that doesn't mean that depression is just an imbalance of serotonin. The brain is much more complicated than that and I am glad that medical science is making that clear.
But on the whole the historic record of psychopharmacology, including convulsive therapy, is stunning. The suicides prevented by the timely prescription of tricyclic antidepressants such as imipramine; the patients lifted from the depths of despair by electroconvulsive therapy; the manic agitation stabilized by lithium; the back wards of the old asylums emptied out by the first antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine: These are accomplishments comparable to the introduction of penicillin in internal medicine. And they have given rise to modern neuroscience. Neuroscience set out to explain how these drugs worked, and soared from there.
This is where I think Shorter really shines. Some medical remedies have been shown to be very helpful with some very serious conditions such as bipolar, psychosis, and depression. Some of these studies have been done with the highest levels of rigor and then replicated by multiple teams. They really help people, and that is very important. Neuroscience was part of this and he is right to defend it.
I am not faulting Gopnik because he failed to write about imipramine. The problem is that he acts as though current neuroscience is mainly focused on the localization of things within the brain. But localization is secondary to the discovery of mechanisms. Because once we discover the brain mechanism of something like melancholia we can treat it more effectively. And much of the research in neuroimaging, neuropsychopharmacology, and the rest of it aims to do just that.
What’s the problem here, Adam? It’s like criticizing the Atomic Table or Boyle’s Law: This is mainline science, man. It’s not scientism (phony science), and it’s not an assault on your precious Humanism. No one wants to do away with the classics, and figuring out exactly why Shakespeare appeals seems pointless.
But why melancholic patients kill themselves: That’s not so pointless.
Bottom line: neuroscience can save lives, and that is worth defending.
