For decades researchers have found no physical evidence of any chemical imbalance in the brain underlying any mental disorder, no matter how hard they looked. Yes, Big Pharma has been promoting that myth so you’d buy their antidepressants, but that’s just so they can make  money, not so they can cure you.

     Now scientists are looking even deeper into the brain for a physical cause behind dementia, autism, and other mental “disorders,” as labeled by psychiatry’s DSM.

     An international team of 150 researchers have probed microscopically into a piece of a mouse brain no larger than a poppy seed and have mapped a network of synaptic pathways for 500 million of the tiniest little neural transfers, the journal Nature reports this month.

     First, one team at Baylor College of Medicine had a bio-engineered mouse watch short videos of sci-fi movies, animated clips, and video sports moments while they recorded the brain neurons they’d treated with a special gene to glow so the synaptic activity could be recorded.

     Next, scientists at the Allen Institute sliced that tiny piece of brain into 25,000 minute layers and took one hundred million high resolutions photos of those sections.

     Finally, scientists at Princeton University used AI to color each of those synaptic “wires” so they could easily be identified. This microscopic mouse brain wiring, if laid out end to end, would stretch some three miles. The resultant 3D multi-colored imagery allows scientists to see how these synaptic transfers vary as a mouse watches a movie.

     Researchers hope that they will now be able to tell normal from abnormal synaptic responses and from that distinction identify “some kind of abnormal pattern of connectivity that gives rise to a disorder,” Princeton neuroscientist and computer scientist Sebastian Seung said.

     Really?

     How could anyone  possibly say that the reaction of a mouse watching one movie is abnormal compared to its watching another movie?

     Even more importantly, that abnormal pattern that they will decide “gives rise to a disorder,” based on this physical evidence, is a purely subjective evaluation of what’s normal or abnormal.

     No matter at what microscopic nano-level a brain is dissected, there will only ever be an objective description of the activity observed in it. The evaluation of cause and effect to what is observed will only be subjective human opinion. No chemical imbalance – no matter the nano-microscopic level — as a cause of mental disorder can be discovered.

     Clinical studies show that psychotherapy alone – talking — is almost as effective as pharmacotherapy – drugging — in improving the mental health of those with depressive disorders. If that is so, and apparently it is, the “cause” of a mental disorder cannot be biological or it couldn’t be cured by talk therapy.

     There might be a biological abnormality observed in the brain, yes, with someone who has a mental disorder. However, that physical abnormality is more likely to be the effect of an external environmental cause – just like a mouse watching a bad movie. The resultant upset to the  person’s overall mental, emotional and physical equilibrium might then also include those cute little multicolored synaptic flashes that have now been observed in a mouse brain.

     No?