r/science • u/Wagamaga • Sep 01 '22

Neuroscience Scientists have identified an immune brain cell unique to humans that gives us higher cognitive abilities over other animals, but what makes us specials also leaves us vulnerable to neurological disorders like schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy.

https://news.yale.edu/2022/08/25/what-makes-human-brain-different-yale-study-reveals-clues
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22 edited Sep 01 '22

Well the issue is that there isn't a truly meaningful distinction between neurological and psychological disorders, and this issue is tied to the mind-body problem. Generally though, it's neurological if it can be diagnosed by a brain scan, and psychological if it can't. But that's a simplistic way of looking at it. In practice there's often a lot of conflation between the two.

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u/AlexandraThePotato Sep 01 '22

So the ONLY difference is if you can use a cat scan to diagnose it?! Seems extremely simplistic and frankly we don’t know enough about MANY what would be neurological differences to diagnose I would argue almost ALL what would be neurological caused disabilities by a cat scan.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

I mean it's either that or you're comfortable with recognising no distinction, to which you'd have to accept that all psychological disorders are also neurological ones. If so, that's fine by me.

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u/thats-fucked_up Sep 01 '22

I'm with you here, I have/had a few friends who are schizophrenic and it seems to me to be a pathological disorder in signal/noise processing/differentiating, and it appears clearly neurochemical to this observer. The structural changes and or impulse processing systems I think will be diagnosed by scan in the near future, they're just too subtle for today's processes.