For several decades now, scientists and psychologists have been trying to link the mind and the brain. A sophisticated picture is emerging that conceptualizes mental illnesses as disorders of mind arising in the brain. There have been several researches done on mental illnesses in recent years, supported by conceptual and technological developments in cognitive neuroscience. Several of these researches have been on schizophrenia, depression, and hallucinations. The article in which I will be critiquing will be: Andreasen, N.C. (1997). Linking mind and brain in the study of mental illnesses: A project for a scientific psychopathology. Science, 275 1586-1593. There wasn't actually a study done in this article but there were results from other researches done on people with schizophrenia and depression and also on normals. The investigators of those researches were not named. The topic of interest was well measured. Detail and explanation was excellent. Pictures of the human brain (frontal cortex) are shown to explain the activity of the brain and the links between the brain and activity. The human brain was the subject of study. A systematic study of hallucinations showed the activity in the brain. It was hypothesized that hallucinations are due to an erroneous attribution of the person's own inner speech to another person, reflecting a defect in self-monitoring. Studies found that the supplementary motor area and the left superior and middle temporal regions were affected. Hallucinations are not caused by only one factor, there are several factors involved. Working memory or the ability to hold a representation and perform cognitive operations using it, allows people to respond in a flexible manner, to form and modify plans, and to base behavior on internally held ideas and thoughts rather than being driven by external stimuli. It was said that a defect in this ability can explain a variety of symptoms of schizophrenia.
