Applying Ayurveda to the Brain: How Can It Be Disrupted?

        The brain is an organ known as the center of the nervous system and, in part, the whole body. It is arguably the most complex organ in the human body, containing over a hundred billion nerve cells that communicate with one another through neurotransmitters, which are chemical messengers that transmit a message from a neuron to a target cell. The communication between the neurons and the rest of the cells in the body thus allow the brain to perform a variety of information processing tasks that, for example, convey information about the external world and produce movement. It also allows the brain to store and utilize the memories and experiences that shape our personalities and behaviors, affecting how we perceive the environment around us. Like with any complex organ in our bodies, if something within the brain malfunctions, it can result in drastic changes in the personality and behavior of the injured person.

        One way the brain can be disrupted is through traumatic brain injuries. Traumatic brain injuries are damages to the brain that results from an external physical force (Ghajar 2000). Considering that the brain is enclosed in a hard shell of bone and surrounded by the meninges, a tissue that is unbreakable by human hands, the amount of force needed to injure the brain must be either terribly traumatic or repeated enough times to be traumatic. They are also difficult to recover from, relative to something like a broken wrist, mainly because nervous tissue is difficult to repair in the central nervous system. One drastic example of traumatic brain injury is the case of a man named Phineas P. Gage. When he was 25 years old, Gage was struck with a large iron rod that passed through the left frontal lobe area of his brain. While his physical body had seemingly completely recovered, his personality did not. He was impatient, vulgar, and rude — a drastic difference from his previous personality, causing his friends and family to go so far as to claim that he was a different man (Harlow 1868). This drastic difference in personality was caused by the damage to his frontal lobe, which is responsible for purposeful mental action, such as suppressing socially unacceptable responses and the modification of emotions to fit societal norms. While Gage’s case showcases the effects of severe damage to the brain, smaller injuries can also count as traumatic. Despite the smaller area of damage for these injuries, they still affect the brain in the same magnitude as Gage’s case, affecting the things we do not usually think about, such as retaining old memories or making new ones.

Another way that the brain can malfunction is through mental disorders. Mental disorders are a group of disorders characterized by a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairs personal functioning (Bolton 2008). They can be further categorized into five types: neurological disorders, storage disorders, developmental disorders, prion diseases, and personality and mood disorders. The most common type of mental disorders are personality and mood disorders. They affect a person’s behavior and emotional states, which are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. We often think that such disorders are unnecessary and a hindrance in our daily lives. These disorders, however, may have been useful to our human ancestors, who faced stressful situations that made the difference between living and dying. For example, anxiety may have been useful in helping them be more aware of their surroundings and activating their fight or flight response. Additionally, since food may have been difficult to come by, depression, whose symptoms often include low energy levels and sleeping longer than usual, may have come in handy in situations where they needed to preserve their energy. While the environment they are useful in are no longer the norm for us in this day and age, these chemical imbalances in the brain still persist among the human population.

The chemical balance of the brain can also be shifted by more synthetic substances such as drugs. When entered into the bloodstream, both legal and illicit drugs change a person’s physiology and psychology. They can, for example, affect the way we perceive pain and make us feel less of it, which is the main function of drugs like paracetamol. These substances act like neurotransmitters, binding to specific receptor sites in the body to affect the way we think, feel, and behave (Rang et al. 2011). There are, of course, good and bad examples of this. Legal drugs are used to help alleviate symptoms or treat a disease. Illicit drugs, on the other hand, are highly addictive and may pose both physiological and psychological problems in the long run. For starters, they can negatively affect and damage the liver, which is the organ that processes and breaks down the drugs that we ingest orally. Their main downside, however, is that they form long term connections in the brain that can affect their perceptions of the world. The brain is an organ that is constantly rewiring itself to accommodate our experiences and the different things we learn, making new connections and severing old ones. For illicit drug users, this ability of the brain can prove detrimental, particularly if they get into the illicit drugs with more drastic effects. A person who constantly uses hallucinogens, for example, can have their perceptions, ability to learn, and the ability to control their behavior could be affected and rewired forever. There is also the negative impact of addiction because most drugs affect the release and production of dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and the rewards system. Having that connection built up and reinforced by drug use can result in that person having a dependence on drugs for happiness and to reach the feeling one gets after being rewarded. 

From an Ayurvedic standpoint, it is easy to see that everything is connected, and too much of something can end up being a bad thing. In the case of traumatic brain injury, applying too much force to the head can break through the brain’s protective covering and irreversibly damage it, thus affecting important functions such as memory, information retention, and decision making. The loss of such functions, while they may seem like small issues, can lead to bigger problems in the long run. Similarly, the changes caused by mental disorders and illicit drug use exemplify the Ayurvedic concept for the need for balance in life, considering that both are due to chemical imbalances in the brain, induced with or without the help of a substance.

References

Bolton D. (2008). What is Mental Disorder?: An Essay in Philosophy, Science, and Values. OUP 

Oxford.

Ghajar J. (2000). Traumatic brain injury. Lancet (London, England), 356(9233), 923–929. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)02689-1

Harlow, J.M. (1868). Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar Through the Head. Publications 

of the Massachusetts Medical Society, 2(3), 1-22. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Recovery_from_the_passage_of_an_iron_bar_through_the_head

Rang, H.P., Dale, M.M., Ritter J.M., Flower, R.J., Henderson, G. (2011). “What is 

Pharmacology.” Rang & Dale’s pharmacology (7th ed.). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.