February 17, 2025

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Healthy and Happy, the Main Key

Treating the Neurons and Mental States

Treating the Neurons and Mental States
Lakshmiraman Oza/Pixabay

Source: Lakshmiraman Oza/Pixabay

“Do you think all mental conditions have a physical component in the brain?” someone once asked me.

“Absolutely!” I answered. Then I qualified that I didn’t believe the mind and brain are the same nor that the mind gets sick. I side with Descartes on dualism.

The subtitle of my memoir Concussion Is Brain Injury, is “Treating the Neurons and Me.” That, to me, expresses the heart of treating brain injury: Treat the physical brain cells and their rivers of neural networks with neurostimulation and neuromodulation and use traditional methods such as dialectical behavior therapy to treat the mental states that exist alongside them.

We don’t know whether the mind arises out of brain activity or exists in a form we cannot detect, which form “speaks” through the brain. We don’t know if mental states arise purely from physical brain activity or are a combination of brain activity and the mind. But we know that the brain controls everything in our physical, mortal body; and that phenomena like terminal lucidity suggests a mind exists separately from the brain in an undiscovered form.

Meanwhile, doctors and psychologists are left with the practical reality of treating brain injury.

To do that, we must treat both the neurons and the mental states that result from whatever caused the injury and the social, environmental, financial, psychological, and spiritual sequelae. The standard treatment model encompasses rehab, neurochemicals, too-brief behavioral therapies, and superficial ideas of neuroplasticity — but not direct neuronal therapies. In other words, the focus is on mental states instead of their causative damaged physical components (neurons and neural networks).

In the last few weeks, I’ve been reading up on one aspect of the neuron for the fiction trilogy that I’m in the middle of writing, which is on life after death, and life after life after death, as N.T. Wright styles the Resurrection. Book one, The Soul’s Awakening, is out now. For the second book, I needed to know more about the neuron. How do neurons respond to direct stimulation? Normally, stimulation comes through the five sensory inputs: eyes, ears, skin and hair, tongue, and nose. That’s a simple way to put it. But we aren’t born with electrodes implanted on our brains that stimulate a neuron’s axons, dendrites, or their neural networks.

Research on deep brain stimulation and prosthetics implanted in retinal ganglion cells to give sight to the blind enlightened me. This research focuses on the electrical properties of cells that have axon potentials, whether the brain’s neurons or the eye’s retinal ganglion cells.

I learnt that high frequencies in the order of 200 Hz excite neurons and propagate high-frequency activity and for farther than stimulation at 10 Hz (alpha-wave frequency). I also learnt that stimulating retinal ganglion cells at different frequencies can create color perception. Cones send color information down the optic nerve through the retinal ganglion cells, but it seems directly stimulating the cells can create the same perception.

Neurotransmitters are widely known, even by people who don’t know about or understand how they’re secreted and detected in the brain. This widespread knowledge gives the false impression that the primary way to treat the brain is through medication—including for an obviously electrically-based disorder like epilepsy or disordered sleep, which require EEG-based diagnosis. There seems to be a firm dividing line between obvious electrical problems with the brain and all other “mental” disorders. Even so, medications are the first order of treating seizures and sleep, not the type of therapies which affect the brainwaves the diagnostic tests for epilepsy and sleep record.

Why record brainwave activity then use neurotransmitters instead of neurostimulation therapies that directly change malfunctioning brainwave activity towards health?

Neurotransmitters are simply a chemical way for one neuron to communicate to the next neuron(s) whether to generate an axon potential or not. Axon potentials and the brainwaves they create lead to brain function. You can flood the brain with neurochemicals, but if the neurons can’t generate electrical impulses, not much is going to happen.

So why do clinicians ignore brainwaves and electrical activity?

The question I was asked, I think, provides a part answer.

As a society, we generally believe that psychiatric conditions are mental states, not physical. Even many researchers and clinicians hold this erroneous view, subconsciously or consciously, including for brain injury.

In addition, my impression is that health-care professionals mistakenly view learning electrophysiology as slogging mental work with little payoff. Yet to learn about neurotransmitters and how to prescribe brain medications safely also requires a lot of studying and annual courses to keep up to date, both with medication changes and the increasing understanding of the mental states they affect. Perhaps the emphasis is on neurotransmitters and chemical treatments and surgery because that’s what society is biased towards?

A growing alternative is neurostimulation used synergestically with talk-type therapies. The latter are effective but work on the mental states rather than directly treating the neurons. As a result, though essential, they take time while not healing the injured neurons. When used with neurostimulation, they work quicker.

The clinic that treated my neurons began offering counseling in a new way. They provided regular three-minute bursts of brain biofeedback during an hour of talk therapy in order to facilitate the client’s ability to express themselves and respond to treatment. One of my psychologists used audiovisual entrainment in the same way on me.

Treating the neurons and me — my mental states — in a synergistic way proved to speed up and enhance healing. It does for other people with brain injury as well, healing their injured neurons and providing needed counseling, support, and guidance.

Copyright ©2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy

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