Why Our Brains Don`t Always Mind Us

Researcher Looks At Links In Mechanics Of Thought

December 01, 1991|By Jon Anderson.

Everyone has a brain, whether they use it or not. It`s that thing beneath the scalp, behind the forehead and between the ears, ``a three-pound mass of protoplasm with the consistency of an over-ripe avocado,`` according to Dr. Richard Restak, whose aim in life-as a neurologist and a writer-is to get us to contemplate how the brain works. It`s not an easy task.

Part of the problem is the way we think about the brain. We use what is commonly known as ``the mind.`` The brain and the mind can`t really be separated. The brain can change its mind. The mind can change its brain-and other people`s brains as well. Take an abstraction, such as the word ``fire.`` ``If someone burst into this room and yelled, `Fire,` we wouldn`t continue this,`` Restak noted, settling into a Tribune interview room recently for a chat about the brain, and the mind, and other matters. ``We`d flee the building, startled by this one word.``

Words alter the brain, Restak said. They can lead to insight, to thinking about one`s life, to changing oneself or, in the case of fire, to getting out of there, an idea probably planted in the mind of early man millennia ago when a caveperson, rubbing two sticks together, poked into the resulting reddish-orange flicker and discovered how to burn a finger.

Now, thousands of years later, someone opens a door, moves lips and tongue, sends waves across the air, stimulates timpanic membranes, auditory canals, temple cortexes and association cortexes. Two men, their hearts pounding, get up and run. There might be no fire at all. Just the mere thought of it, expressed symbolically, can make other people`s bodies flee.

It`s this kind of stuff that Restak, 49, author of such best sellers as

``The Brain`` and ``The Mind,`` writes about in his new offering, ``The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own`` (Harmony Books, $18). It`s a collection of 41 short essays on topics ranging from emotional storms to information overload. ``Understanding the human brain is such an effective antidote to rigid and inflexible thinking,`` Restak said, ``that all those in a position to influence public opinion should be required to study it.`` That job category includes ``all newspaper columnists, talk show hosts and authors, including me.``

For starters, Restak began, such knowledge might counteract the tendency of many individuals to overreact-stammering, blanching, going red in the face, or turning argumentative-when they hear certain words and phrases, among them ``tax audit,`` ``welfare,`` ``abortion,`` ``mistress`` and ``racial quotas.``

In recent years, neuroscientists have discovered that such ungluings, all in response to mere words, are the results of actions by a small, almond-shaped nucleus within the limbic system of the brain, thought to control behavior and emotions, that selects and ties together the varied experiences that make up our lives.

Because of that nucleus, ``some of the stimuli that bombard us every second are imbued with positive and negative emotions,`` Restak explained.

``They are then encoded in our brain, where they provide underpinnings for memory and personality.`` Take two people having dinner together, he said. For one, the word ``love`` can trigger feelings of affection, commitment and solace. The other, in ways that affect mind and stomach, might feel claustrophobia.

Two-pronged career

``I wanted to reach an audience that wouldn`t pick up a 400-page book on the brain,`` said Restak, who maintains a bustling practice as a neurologist and psychiatrist in Washington. ``I took everyday subjects, such as how we learn to ride a bicycle, what it`s like to talk to a parrot, would we be smarter if we had bigger brains? It`s the kind of thing I like to read myself, something that wakes the curiosity.``

Restak was born in Delaware and raised in Pennsylvania. His parents, he writes, encouraged him to ride off in two directions. His mother wanted him to become a writer. His father told him to ``take up medicine.`` So Restak earned a degree from Georgetown University Medical School, trained in psychiatry at hospitals in New York, switched to neurology and the biology of emotional disturbances, and started writing for The New York Times, among other newspapers. Much of his material was drawn from patients who came to him suffering, though it was often hard to tell from what.

``I talk to them, examine them, sometimes talk more,`` Restak said.

``You`re not always able to make a distinction between an emotional problem and a brain disease. Sometimes it`s both. A person who has a seizure disorder may also be delusional, thinking he is Jesus Christ. Or it might be a post-traumatic psychosis, which can be chemically treated.``