> [Myth 1] specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs ... [Rebuttal] Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy.
This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, and I say: It's a myth that specific parts of the car have specific functions. For example, the engine is involved in starting the car, accelerating the car, decelerating the car, regulating the car's speed, producing heat for the cabin, and running the alternator to produce electricity for the lights, power systems, and radio! That's so many things! But of course the engine has one dedicated, primary function, and the others are either downstream functions or side benefits. The anterior cingulate cortex is clearly not as specialized as a car engine, but it is highly specialized; it's just that its specialized function is not so easy to describe (or even discern) in words like "memory", "emotion", etc. Each of those words describes a huge group of functions that are downstream of the function of the anterior cingulate cortex and many other specialized structures.
I believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk. But we have a huge body of evidence showing that there is a big difference in how the left vs. right brain processes information and that different brain regions are highly specialized, but that their specialized functions don't map cleanly into the language we were already describing human behavior with.
> I believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk.
I still see PopSci articles with a title along the lines of; "Scientists have discovered the part of the brain responsible for X". Even in studies or experiments in the literature, I still see color gradient scales used for fMRI. These are known to vastly over exaggerate the discrepancy between functional areas. And yet they allow for a more easily digestible view of what the study is after, which is probably why they're still used.
I think what the author is getting at is that, yes, some parts of the brain are more specialized than others. But there is no specific part of the brain that regulates a specific function and nothing else. Rather, it's an enormously complex system.
edit: Color gradient scales are fine for academic studies and research. However, they can be misleading to laypeople.
And remember that those pictures are themselves the result of lots and lots of clustering and dimension reduction, so are about as useful as cluster analysis of unsupervised data (which is what they are), that is not particularly useful at all.
I mean, the actual problem is that fMRI is expensive, and gives good spatial understanding, but bad temporal understanding (i may be mixing this up, I haven't seriously looked at any brain research in about a decade).
The statistical problems in fMRI are sadly unappreciated, much like the statistical problems in human research more generally.
>This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car,
You're simply asserting that the car is analogous to the brain to make an argument. Humans designed the car and fully understand how it works. If you take out the engine - it doesn't run. The brain is not the same - tons of evidence of neural plasticity. There is simply no analogy here. Also, the author is a subject matter expert in cognitive neuroscience so they do have credibility IMO.
>But we have a huge body of evidence showing that there is a big difference in how the left vs. right brain processes information and that different brain regions are highly specialized, but that their specialized functions don't map cleanly into the language we were already describing human behavior with.
You're saying we only use certain parts of our brain for certain things, and the author is saying (with citations) that multiple regions of the brain are involved in most brain tasks. To me, this makes sense when you read about people who got brain surgery or whatever and then their brain re-wired itself, etc. Clearly there is a disagreement here. Can you point to this huge body of evidence that disagrees with the author?
Strokes or head traumas can produce very specific loss of abilities in adults.
I am not quite sure why this is being "debunked" now. Perhaps in part as status jockeying, i.e. "I'm ahead of the curve and not stuck with knowledge that was en vogue 10 years ago and all the Discovery-watching plebs has internalized" and in part a strange new dualistic movement that seeks to mystify the brain for some reason, perhaps in service of blank slatism.
I think the key here is that some tasks are very clearly localized, such as speech in Broca and Wernicke.
But others are not as localized. And functional areas might even move during phases of plasticity (i.e. being born blind).
So it seems very clear that some functionally distinct regions exist, but researchers still struggle to pinpoint very abstract things like memory, personality, and complex behavior.
Can we be sure what "localised" means in this context?
If you destroy an area and some people lose one particular function, while other people only lose small fragments of the function - which seems to be true of Broca's region - can the function really be said to be localised?
And even if Broca's region is necessary for speech, that does not mean it is sufficient. You wouldn't assume an electronic circuit is localized to one resistor just because it breaks when that resistor is removed.
That's a good question, I'd need to ask a neurologist friend of mine.
IIRC there are some areas that are localized almost in the sense of a circuit.
Hearing is an example, which needs to process sensory information much faster (and more direct) than ordinary pathways would, in order to be able to construct spatial representation from latency differences.
I suppose "more direct" can be interpreted differently, but to the best of my knowledge the signal from your cochlea takes more axonal jumps[0] than e.g. visual, which jumps "only" through LGM[1]. Even more direct is the olfactory pathway which skips the thalamus altogether[2].
However, in the context of the article you might be referring only to intertelencephalic processing, in which case I'd love to read a paper which compares the directness of hearing vs other modalities.
Hi @porkbrain, it's going to take a few days but I'll ask and come back with such an article if my friend (whose specialty is auditory processing and sensor fusion) can recommend one.
Suffered some minor strokes. Right left brain stuff was interesting. Lost ability to hand write. But could draw fine. Right side of body became very weak and numb.
Some mental stuff was fine. Others were not. Last I looked up it seemed to match left and right brain theory. Creative vs math side, etc.
You've probably already heard of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, but if you haven't, you should look up "My Stroke of Insight". The TED talk version is quick and interesting -- she talks about exactly this. I'm working through her "Whole Brain Living" book and it addresses many of the exact points in this Nautilus article, although I can't resoundingly recommend the book as it has its own flaws.
I mean, cases like yours are one of the ways we learn about brain function.
Historically it was more about people who had some part of their brain removed or otherwise grossly damaged, but the principle is the same: when people lose part of their brain, how does their mind change? What can they still do, what can they not?
All math or programming tasks become oddly hard. Something simple that I had done 1000 times before in seconds became a week long project.
After I had been on blood thinners for a bit and my mind recovers I sat down at a problem that I couldn’t figure out for six months. 10 minutes later it was done.
Had an ER visit were I was getting all questions wrong. Year, president, etc. I knew my answers were wrong. But I didn’t know why, or what they should be.
You know where pub med and google scholar is, perhaps you should start with Nobel prizing winning Prof Bruce Ames Triage theory for starters, his paper is on his website.
I guess you are not Japanese because they are about 10years ahead of everyone else on vit K studies, but its likely you do know something because vitamin RDA's do control the behaviour of populations. Personality and behaviours is massively controlled by our diet and you dont this many people living on a planet in close proximity without some dietary changes to manipulate people into docility.
There are a lot of people who take vitamin B megadoses daily. Also, Americans are not known for getting much calcium. If micronutrients were really this powerful in clinical use, you'd simply expect to see a lot more miraculous recoveries anecdotally than we actually do.
What do you think of the part where they say that when you measure whole brain activity you'll see that most tasks actually involve all of the brain? That's not really how q car works at all, some parts can have a primary and alternate effects, but not everything in the car will always be part of each process.
Also, I might misread, but it seems to see neurons are not different in different parts, so it seems that you could interchange the functionality and the pathways might not be due to specialization, but more to topology and arrangement of interconnections and proximity to things.
The books of William Uttal cover the issues of localization and neurological modeling at different levels of detail. The most popular I think is The New Phrenology[1] and the most technical is Mind and Brain[2]. A quote from the latter:
To sum up, the new metaphor proposed here asserts that it seems more likely in the light of current research that there are no demarcatable regions nor any regions of predetermined and fixed cognitive functionality in the brain; there are, rather, just "softly" bounded areas that may shrink, enlarge, or be recruited as the current task demands. Furthermore, none of these weakly bounded regions has any specific, preassigned, or fixed function. They all serve as general-purpose processing entities as required by whatever cognitive task is being processed. The whole notion of a place on the brain having a specific identifiable purpose has to be abandoned as an unreliable and outmoded metaphor.
This article bothers me a little bit. It makes it sound like the brain is completely structureless, and that the division of brain into "parts" is a myth.
I'm not a neurologist but this seems a disingenuous. Surely we know that the limbic system serves a major role in emotions. We know that the hippocampus serves a major role in long term memory formation. The amygdala controls the fear response. Plenty of other examples.
But this article is very high level so maybe I'm completely misunderstanding what "myth" they're trying to debunk.
Also not a neurologist, but my reading of it was not the brain is "completely structureless" by any means. More that the 'structures' aren't clearly defined and, crucially, that the 'structures' don't act completely independently from the rest of the brain.
"Pretty much everything that your brain creates, from sights and sounds to memories and emotions, _involves your whole brain_."
They briefly mention that our notion of distinct brain structures may be influenced by our hyper-focus on certain areas of the brain, rather than wholistic study of the brain (because it's expensive).
As a kid, I certainly thought each portion of the brain was independent. As in, I believed that my motor functions came from the clearly distinct "motor function structure" of the brain and without that structure, I would have no motor function at all (and with no ability to regain motor function). I think that is the myth they are referring to.
My feeling is that the "myth" they're trying to debunk is that there are rigid, "bright-line" separations between different brain regions, and that specifics regions are completely and uniquely responsible, for now and forevermore, for some specific "thing". Where the reality is that there is structure, but the lines are fuzzier, functionality overlaps, and neural plasticity allows for brain region to alter their function (to some extent) over time.
Yes, the mental image I got is a sort of Venn diagram of overlapping networks. In any sort of processing, more or less the whole brain is involved and one subset of the network isn't involved in only one thing, but possibly specialized for a few.
I suppose one should also account for a sort of neurological "noise floor" where noise means general background predictive activity. Your brain is always (trying to be) doing something all over, independent of sensory input, which becomes really apparent with the Ganzfeld experiment [1] without the bunk about "psi" and that esoteric BS.
Agreed.
Phrenology was the old hat idea, where names of folk psychology concepts were scrawled across areas of cortex.
The brain is specialised and differentiated.
However our concepts of what it does are being refined.
Instead of hunting for "the place where happiness lives", imposing ideas from culturally laden folk psychology onto the gelatinous mass... we are moving towards more fundamental notions of complex nervous system axioms. Like seeking, avoidance, arousal, mood, emotional valence, attention.
> The third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression.
I love articles like this. But I have NO facility or background to evaluate them. Given their premise is "everything you've been told is wrong", how do I know that this one is right? :-/
I just finished Blindsight, which is a SciFi novel but written by PhD Biologist and highly respected in Neurological circles... which pretty much commits to every.single.one. of these 'myths'.
Note, this is not an issue of "it's a young empirical discipline with a lot of uncertainty" (though that is the case as well:). For things which we should be able to discern some basic patterns and models, there seems to be tremendous amount of disagreement in seemingly-authoritative and knowledgeable sources; which just allows so much Woo-Hoo of the world to arise (and I'm not just thinking of Deepak Chopra:).
If you find the subject interesting and would like to read more, I recommend Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, which was released earlier this year and covers a theory that a large part of your brain is made of 150,000 near-identical subsystems called "cortical columns." It's geared toward people who have little background in neuroscience. You might also follow up with Anil Seth's "controlled hallucination" theory in Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
If you prefer to pay for this knowledge with just time rather than also money, on YouTube there are three videos from Numenta that cover Jeff's book, and then there's a Ted talk by Anil on consciousness.
Hawkins has been on Lex Fridmans podcast at least twice now. I think the first one is when he dives into this a bit. I don’t know where he’s at in the spectrum between right and wrong but i found that his ideas mapped well to my subjective experience of thinking, particularly the hierarchical reference frame concepts.
I think we should let anyone propose any theory in good faith. If you think you're being sold some 'woo-woo' - you simply ask - if this was true what can I do to apply this theory in practice and go out and test it? The onus should be on the person pushing for the theory to propose methods of practical application of this knowledge. Consensus only comes with repeated tests are in agreement. Until then, IMO, a theory is in the same category as an opinion - and people often do disagree with others' opiniosn.
Tbf Blindsight also features aliens and vampires. Unusually plausible vampire, but its very much a case of sciency-sounding detail to serve the points the story wants to make rather than a lecture on how the brain works. Plus I never believed the narrator was as detached from his emotions as he kept claiming anyway...
I think this article focuses on too much on some nuances of neuroscience, that in the end it becomes misleading. I guess a similar example would be making a statement like, all programming languages are equally useful since they are all Turing complete. It has some basis of truth, but is very misleading as in the real world, Javascript and QBasic are used in radically different ways.
Though I no longer am practicing neurosurgery, I did do 6 years of training in neurosurgery and probably treated thousands of patients with various brain issues.
So let me give my perspective on the first myth, and if I have time may address some of the other ones as well.
> Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs.
What is true is that specific parts of the brain have very specific physiological jobs. Psychological function is likely complex enough that multiple parts of the brain are involved, but there are areas when affected, that can have certain psychological effects. Let me give a couple of cases that illustrate both the physiological and psychological aspects.
For the physiological case, we had a patient that had seizures that could not be treated with medicine, and required some of the brain tissue to be removed. Unfortunately, the area was very close to the speech areas of the brain. What we ended up doing is putting the patient to sleep, opening up the skull and brain covering (dura), and then waking the patient back up. Neuropsychologists tested the patient's ability to name things and speak as we zapped small areas of the brain with electrodes. When we hit a critical area, the patient's speech stopped instantly. Doing this, we were able to map the speech areas with millimeter accuracy so we could safely do the surgery.
In terms of psychological function, it is know that the front part of the brain is involved in impulse control. I saw an older patient with his family who had a large tumor there. I asked them if he had done anything impulsive recently. They had surprised looks on their faces as they said, "How did you know?" and then related how the man, who had been a very upstanding person all his life, had done something that had gotten him arrested.
So I would say, for the general non-specialist, the idea that brains have specific parts that do specific things is probably less of a myth than some notion of all parts of the brain doing everything/most things.
A computer analogy to what the article is doing would be like saying that because there is no one specific part of a computer that is responsible for playing Youtube videos (the CPU, GPU, Memory, SSD, PCI system would all be involved) it is myth that computers have specialized parts.
Really interesting perspective, thank you for sharing.
Matching specific parts of the brain with physiological jobs seems reasonable enough because its testable. I'm wondering how does one empirically verify potential matches when it comes to psychological jobs? A lot of psychology isn't all that objective, necessarily so. But because psychological events or states can't be as objectively well-defined as physiological phenomena are, what does matching a given part of the brain to a psychological event or state really tell us?
Thank u for these insights. I found it rung true for me, as I experienced quite specifically physiologically local changes when I had a haemorhagic stroke in the parietal area.
Of course there is localization of function in the brain. Just because you see a lot of raw activity in the brain at any one time doesn't contradict that: the brain is doing lots of things at the same time too. But more importantly, more than one function may be necessary to achieve any particular behavior. Think of all that has to go on to type a message in a forum like this. Motor control of the fingers, memory of key-letter mappings, language, syntax, vocabulary, and organization of thought. Sure, typing a message in a web forum doesn't have a specific localization in the brain, but we wouldn't exactly expect that would we. Instead, we have functions to differentiate, associate, evaluate, to localize, generalize, infer, predict. The mechanics of reinforcement learning, for example, are predictably localized in specific brain regions in the caudate.
I think articles like this do more harm than good. The brain is not an undifferentiated connectionist network.
I agree with the other comments in here: this article takes several complex, long-running debates (modularity vs connectionism, predictive vs feedforward processing, dualism/monism) and reduces them to simplistic flamebait answers that come down definitively on one side. It's really the worst kind of popular science writing, because it's overconfident and dismissive of the opposing view rather then separating the debate out into appropriate parts that can be tackled with evidence-based research.
I regret that we have grown to call things like this myths. Seems many are then dismissed as false, without retaining any sense of usefulness they may or may not have.
Instead, simplifications and the limits of their explanation would be a much greater framing for some things.
"Today, we know the brain isn’t divided into puzzle pieces with dedicated psychological functions. Instead, the human brain is a massive network of neurons."
Wow. Speechless. Maybe it's Broca's aphasia?
It's a sad day when nautil.us is publishing stuff like this. Sigh.
Well, the first myth is a complete surprise to me, especially the bit about the lizard brain. I've parroted about it in casual conversation for decades now.
The article sets up a bit of a straw man (or maybe a motte-and-bailey) I think, because it says "all mammal brains (and most likely, all vertebrate brains as well) are built from a single manufacturing plan using the same kinds of neurons."; but I'm not sure that really refutes the notion that most of us have when we think of the lizard brain. Ontology doesn't recapitulate phylogeny, but we do have a cerebellum, and our actions and reactions happen along a broad spectrum of temporal control and conscious awareness.
I thought the "lizard brain" was the part of our nervous system that would respond before the actual brain had time to process. Like I've heard we'll pull our hand away from a hot pan before we feel pain.
Now I both don't know if I've misunderstood peoples references, and have no idea if my version of a lizard brain does exist.
> Most neurons have multiple jobs, not a single psychological purpose. For example, neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy.
One possible answer here is that these things (e.g., memory, emotion, decision-making, and pain) actually have more in common than we perceive. It's possible that mental states that seem very different to us (from "inside" our brains) are in fact quite similar (from "outside" the brain), or vice versa. The lesson may really just be that our own introspection is an unreliable guide to the actual structure of the mind.
For those wondering/asserting if the author is an expert in neuroscience, she is actually a psychologist by training.
I'm personally very skeptical about anything psychologists say. I would not take any of this by face value without validating them against real neuroscience research or consulting neuroscientists. Psychologists love to say stuff helter-skelter and make them sound like real science.
I studied a lot of psychology in undergrad, and psychologists do study neuroscience and brain physiology. Many psychologists are responsible for making physiological discoveries about the brain and the functions of its parts, and for designing and executing experiments to study the physiology of the brain.
Overstated argument to tell a story. Their creative writing tutor should be asked for a refund. This is one of those half-right statements: the regionalism of brain function is Overstated? Yes. There is no locality to specific tasks? No, that's overstated itself. We know loss of prefrontal cortex has different effects to loss of other regions. What's disputed is the specificity and singularity of the regions. Some functions can be reacquired despite loss of a region. Some functions are more diffuse.
> Scientists have believed for a long time that severe damage to the visual cortex in the left side of your brain will leave you unable to see out of your right eye, assuming that the ability to see out of one eye is largely due to the visual cortex on the opposite side. Yet more than 50 years ago, studies on cats with cortical blindness on one side showed that it is possible to restore some of the lost sight by cutting a connection deep in the cat’s midbrain. A bit more damage allowed the cats to orient toward and approach moving objects.
I've presented on blindsight before, the phenomenon where a person cannot describe or draw items that are presented in one side of their visual field, due to trauma to their primary visual cortex (V1), but they can still guess what these items are above chance level, direct their gaze to them, reach for them and so on. The superior colliculus seems to play a large role in this, and there are also visual projections that bypass V1, which could be partly responsible for the phenomenon. But this tidbit about "cutting a connection deep in the cat's midbrain" is new to me. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
No citations are provided for the myth of triune brain. Too bad. What’s with the cerebellum? That never fit, anyway.
“It continues to hold public interest because of its simplicity. While inaccurate in many respects as an explanation for brain activity, structure and evolution, it remains one of very few approximations of the truth we have to work with: the "neocortex" represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the "limbic brain" refers to those brain structures, wherever located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that arose during the age of the mammals; and the "reptilian brain" refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behavior and other "reptile" behaviors.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
> Scientists have believed for a long time that severe damage to the visual cortex in the left side of your brain will leave you unable to see out of your right eye, assuming that the ability to see out of one eye is largely due to the visual cortex on the opposite side.
IIRC it’s well known that the left hemisphere processes visual stimuli from the right field of view of both eyes…
Supposedly hippocampus stores memories, but people with operated hippocampus still keep their memories? Psychodelic or meditative states being associated with significant reduction of all brain activity, what conflicts with the subjective experience.
Now, for example there are 12 medical cases described where blind people approaching death regained left their body and described visual information in the operating room, what was corroborated by impartial skeptic medical professionals: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Mindsight:+N... . There is very sizable amount of evidence that something is going on in conciousness than just purely material. Read this article before you make the final judgement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/ . I am not implying any magic - maybe quantum computations like in Penrose/Hammerhof theory? Maybe material world is an "icon" of more complex reality underneath like in Donald Hoffman's model?
I'm looking for a scientific discussion here, not just "someone who thinks that materialism is not all that describes reality is surely crazy".
I was surprised that the ‘you only use x% of your brain’ canard was not discussed.
Whenever I read articles like this I feel the field is about 150 years behind other sciences. What I fail to grasp is whether they are marooned at this point, will always lag a distance, or rapidly advance. I hope it’s the latter but I read little evidence.
It's funny, some argued 'myths' were a tool of the brain to explain the world and are one side of a spectrum with rationality the other, but they still linger in every thought.
"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."
Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rational thought in western philosophy is closely related to 'Gnothi seauton'
With science, as the foremost form of rationality today, of the opinion, the 'self' residing in the brain.
Which may be an albeit practical myth of the brain to explain itself to itself.
I'm surprised to learn the third myth is even a myth. My thoughts and feelings change significantly when I switch from sitting to walking/running or move from an indoor room to sitting outside in the sun. When I go from being in shape to out of shape my brain feels much more lethargic. I could go on but the general point is that changes in my physical condition have a big impact on my mental processes and vice versa.
I had thought these responses were normal and the body and brain are deeply linked to each other. Do most people not feel these same effects?
>I'm surprised to learn the third myth is even a myth.
Well, it's a "popular science" article. Even peer reviewed, well-cited papers are often unfounded BS (including "meta-studies", which are even easier to mess), so I wouldn't place much confidence in all the myths mentioned actually being myths (and vice versa).
Fieldman Barrett's book, "How Emotions are Made" is really, really interesting and goes into way more detail about the subjects she mentions here and others.
She backs up all of what she writes, as well: a good 20% of the book is simply footnotes.
Of course you don’t have depression because your wife hates your mother, you’re stuck in a job you don’t like to keep paying the mortgage and you have to live with two moody teenagers. It’s all in your metabolism. Here, have a pill to fix it.
Took a good few seconds to load what is essentially a few paragraphs of text and an image. How can people accept 21mb websites? Perhaps they're just eager to play their part in global warming.
I'm no expert, but this article seems misleading in several ways.
>Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs.
Your brain is both very compartmentalized and generalized. The neocortex contains many discrete regions with very specialized neural architectures for specific tasks. The visual cortex and Broca's Area have specific and very different psychological jobs. No one's Broca's Area does edge detection on signals coming from the optic nerve, and no one's V1 is contributing to their manner of speech. The cerebellum does one thing, the olivary complexes another, etc.
Of course there is a huge amount of uncertainty as to what various areas do and how they communicate - the brain is an amazingly plastic network and as the author points out it can reorganize and repurpose quickly, but there are certainly specialized areas like "puzzle pieces," just with somewhat fuzzy borders to them. The "triune brain" is
>Myth number two is that your brain reacts to events in the world... All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time.
I don't understand this. Of course your brain reacts to events in the world. That is what it is for, to interpret events in the world and issue instructions to respond to them. It is true that for example the reading portions of your brain are not "off" until you open a book, but it's clear that neuronal activity and blood flow increases to these areas when a person is engaged in the corresponding activity. So it is not a matter of off and on, but rather idle and under load.
Prediction is part of this process as well, but it doesn't mean that the brain does not respond in a macro or micro way to stimuli.
>The third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression.
I can see how this might be confusing, but I don't think many people take Cartesian Dualism this literally. Maybe I'm wrong. People I think generally understand that the brain is an organ, part of the body and different from individual to individual.
But what you treat with a serotonin reuptake inhibitor or antipsychotic is different from what you treat with therapy. One is a treatment for the brain, the organ, the other is a treatment for the mind, the abstract concept we have for the sum of our learned experiences. These are certainly different things.
I would not go blindly repeating the things this article claims. It is mischaracterizing both the myths and the truth, in my (amateur) opinion.
Of course the brain responds to stimuli. I really don't know what the author is talking about. Neurons work on a rate code, and so of course they are firing all the time--at a baseline rate.
This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, and I say: It's a myth that specific parts of the car have specific functions. For example, the engine is involved in starting the car, accelerating the car, decelerating the car, regulating the car's speed, producing heat for the cabin, and running the alternator to produce electricity for the lights, power systems, and radio! That's so many things! But of course the engine has one dedicated, primary function, and the others are either downstream functions or side benefits. The anterior cingulate cortex is clearly not as specialized as a car engine, but it is highly specialized; it's just that its specialized function is not so easy to describe (or even discern) in words like "memory", "emotion", etc. Each of those words describes a huge group of functions that are downstream of the function of the anterior cingulate cortex and many other specialized structures.
I believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk. But we have a huge body of evidence showing that there is a big difference in how the left vs. right brain processes information and that different brain regions are highly specialized, but that their specialized functions don't map cleanly into the language we were already describing human behavior with.