All of Jeremy Hadfield's Comments + Replies

Hmm, OK, I guess your model is that every thought coming from the thought-emitting system is treated as a "good idea" by default, and then the point of the thought-assessing systems is to find problems with them. (You can correct me if I'm wrong.) Whereas my model is that there's no such thing as a default because the thought-assessing systems assess every thought no matter what, and judge it as good or bad or neutral. That said, within what I'm calling the thought-assessing systems, especially within the brainstem, there are presumably little pockets that do specialized processing involved in negative-valence things like panicking and other little pockets that do specialized processing involved in positive-valence things like relaxing. For example, the lateral habenula is involved in the detailed mechanics of setting up dopamine pauses (= judgments that a thought is bad), or something like that, so obviously the lateral habenula is over-active in depression when all your thoughts are bad. But I would think of "lateral habenula under-activity" as probably not usually a root cause of depression but more like a symptom. I currently think that things the amygdala and ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus and brainstem are all involved in finding both good and bad aspects of thoughts. (Well, I'm not 100% sure about the amygdala.) If you have an idea of "distinct neural systems" for finding good and bad aspects of thoughts, I'd be curious what specific neural systems you would assign to each, or if you have a reference that might have that breakdown. I would be really interested to see that. (Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.)

Thanks! Sorry if this is dumb, but you put mania on the thought-emitting side … why can't mania look like the thought-assessing system just saying "Hell yeah that thought is friggin awesome!!!!" all the time?