The eye's mind: brain mapping and psychiatry

As mentioned by the British Journal of Psychiatry (2003), the human brain is a complex entity all by itself. The notion of thinking and brain mapping in itself amazes professors researching in that particular field. The current brain imaging serves as a guide for diagnosis of mental disorders present in patients. Despite the new and improved technical developments in neuroimaging (Andreasen, 1997), scepticism is still prevalent among researchers in that field
mainly due to its association and relation to psychiatry.


As brain imaging has been known to provide evidence and support clinical benefit for patients, it is still judgemental on how far it can bore fruits in the field of brain research and how much data that is collected will still remain relevant in today’s day and age. The research in brain studies have much proven the brain structure and function prominently of high importance in the study of how the brain works and psychiatry. The measurements that are taken into account are comprehensive and encompasses all details relevant to the study of the human brain. It is thus important to find a clear and distinct correlation between the problems arose and biological reasoning.


Although brain mapping is a distinct way to research on the brain holistically, it still merely provides a general picture of the situation that has already been discovered and known. In this instance, Schizophrenia is a disease mostly researched in the brain field. However, disappointingly the data shown has proven the obvious and no new relevant data surfaces. The functional psychosis which is part of a brain study has been found to be not linked with any organic and structural abnormalities of the brain. This discrepancy proves that there might be some jeopardising of data collected and collated thus affecting results.


This boils down to the point that researchers now have moved on and targeted that psychosis as the main cause of a disconnection syndrome adversely affecting the structure of largescale neurocognitive networks in the brain. This has been a versatile evidence in support of brain mapping and psychiatry as a whole.


There has been reports of distributed patterns of grey matter deficit in disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Castellanos et al, 2001; Overmeyer et al, 2001), autism (Courchesne et al, 2001) and various neurogenetic syndromes, prompt the hypothesis that disconnection syndromes might provide a model for the anatomy of neurodevelopmental disorders in general, not solely schizophrenia (Bullmore et al, 1997). All syndromes mentioned above from (The eye's mind: brain mapping and psychiatry, Journal 2003), serves as a guideline for us to place the basis of our argument on an agreement in which brain regions are critically abnormal in any given syndrome.


The article overview on brain mapping as a whole gives us an idea of the vague data collated in the sampling that was taken, data analysis that has been done and how the study has been designed to be like. The number of patients and the differences in demographic details of each patient may not have been sufficient to provide a clearer view on the situation given perhaps. Overall the brain mapping has been a great way in relating reasons to psychiatry as a whole.




Received for publication March 11, 2002. Revision received July 15, 2002. Accepted for publication August 8, 2002.