Some Unanswered Questions About the Nervous System
Recently I have been studying the nervous system and have developed a number of thoughts. The answers to these cannot be found in textbooks, and consulting teachers may not yield answers either. I am jotting them down so I do not forget them over time, and I will go deeper into them later.
Why do humans think? What is the neurological basis of thought? How do neurons operate during the process of discovering or raising a question? Why do some people easily raise all sorts of questions while learning, while others do not? Is the ability to discover questions innate, or can it be cultivated through education? If it can be cultivated through education, what kind of education produces people more capable of discovering problems?
Since myelinated nerve fibers conduct faster, then from an evolutionary perspective, should not more and more unmyelinated fibers evolve into myelinated ones to improve the efficiency of information transmission? We say practice makes perfect; after long training, a person's reaction speed becomes faster and faster. How does training change our nervous system so that its reaction speed increases? Does training cause unmyelinated fibers to become myelinated, or make the myelin sheath of myelinated fibers progressively thicker?
What is the neurological basis for conditioned reflexes? What is the neurological basis of the feedforward system mentioned in physiology? Can neurotransmitters or neuromodulators be increased or decreased through deliberate training? How are false memories produced? Why do mistaken memories of the "mixing-up" type occur?
Can deep breathing and meditation bring about changes in the nervous system? Many classic works in Western psychiatry (for example, Burns' When Panic Attacks and Matthew McKay's Dialectical Behavior Therapy) use meditation and deep breathing to treat anxiety disorders and borderline personality disorder, with some effect; in particular, dialectical behavior therapy has become an important method widely accepted by patients and psychiatrists for treating emotional disorders. Do these practices imply that deep breathing and meditation can change the nervous system? If so, what is the mechanism?
Textbooks state that the reticular formation of the brainstem is key to maintaining wakefulness. Is the occurrence of insomnia related to the reticular formation? Is it caused by overactivity of the reticular formation? Can refractory insomnia be treated by repairing the brainstem reticular formation?
In current clinical practice, there are still large numbers of patients with nervous-system damage for whom there is no effective treatment, such as survivors of cerebral hemorrhage. But in my own clinical practice, drawing on the idea of Dr. David Ho's cocktail therapy, I have combined many formulas recorded in ancient Chinese medical classics for treating stroke and bi-syndrome, and have restored neurological function in some patients with stubborn stroke sequelae. How do these Chinese medicines and formulas cross the blood-brain barrier and act to repair the nervous system? Or, do they actually help repair the nervous system, or do they promote the differentiation of neural stem cells so that neurons regenerate in the damaged area?
Neuroblastoma arises from undifferentiated neuroblasts during their differentiation and proliferation; it is known as the king of childhood tumors and is very hard to treat. Could a new therapeutic approach be designed—for example, inhibiting mutated neuroblasts or promoting their differentiation into normal nerve cells—to treat this disease? Likewise, in the clinic I have used the idea of cocktail therapy together with Chinese medicines and formulas for tumors and nervous-system diseases, achieving some improvement in a few child patients; the mechanism is not yet understood. If the mechanism could be worked out, the effective rate might improve.
Because we currently have many courses, a heavy study load, and final exams approaching, I cannot spare enough time to look through the literature and deeply study these questions about the Western medical nervous system. I leave these notes for now and will investigate further during the winter break.