On the Sidelines

There are intricacies in the human mind — trip switches and trauma hazards, all of which should be treated with care and applied practical knowledge.

For instance, I learned about the anterior insula yesterday after reading a Stanford study about a potential cause in the brain for psychosis. The study showed that for those with a rare genetic disease and those who experience psychosis with unknown origin, the anterior insula is responsible for filtering important information about subjective feelings.

There is a key relationship between the anterior insula and the ventral striatum, which plays a role in reward processing and brings to mind dopamine. This would make sense when considering how antipsychotic drugs, like Abilify, are meant to balance dopamine and serotonin.

If the anterior insula belongs to the network responsible for interpreting and allocating importance to thoughts and subjective feelings, there is a certain sense of wonder as to why certain falsifiable thoughts pass through and motivate reward-seeking behaviour.

Is it because those falsifiable thoughts are linked to an adverse childhood experience or event of similar importance? Did substance use have something to do with it? Is there no relation whatsoever and simply a misfiring and mistaken rewiring of a neural pathway in the brain? There is room for error, a probabilistic necessity.

Stanford Study: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/04/brain-systems-psychosis.html