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Originally Posted by bpcyclist
I do generally agree with this for most people and most disorders. However, as I have stated before, it is my personal opinion, and experience, that some of those with severe iterations of antisocial personality disorder, particularly of the psychopathic subtype, simply lack the neural pathways to support anything approximating normal emotional human fucntioning. Now, the really fascinating question is, can those absent pathways be created anew, or, can some kind of workaround using other pathways they do possess and can use, be created and relied upon? For now, it appears the "experts" are divided, with those of a more psychology background/bent believing it may well be possible for some and those of a more neuroradiology/neuro background feeling it is likely not anatomically or electrically possible.
But you know, stroke victims sometimes improve miraculously, right? They walk and speak again. Same with TBI people. So, why not these folks, too? I think one of your last comments is the most sage one. Just because we don't know how to do it today does nto mean it is not possible. Who would have thought we could transplant a pancreas 100 years ago?
In time, it is just an opinion, but I believe some of these personality disorders will be shown to clearly have a neuroanatomic basis, that they are reall illnesses. It will be interesting to wach...
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I feel you. I'm deeply interested in the same subject.
My faith won't let me believe in the notion of being lost forever.
There has been some interesting research done over the past decade or so about wiring new pathways through piggybacking on primal pathways that exist already. We do this when we use metaphors. So my young child may not understand calculus, but I can use metaphors of motion and cars and airplanes to explain the concepts to him. Over time, he uses his primal experience of motion to learn something abstract to him like calculus and eventually create a neural structure specific to calculus as his experiential database grows through the application of motion. That may not make sense, but you're someone who I think will get what a non-neuroscoence expert is struggling to convey.
I think we could maybe do something like that with some of these harder to reach disorders, but I'm not sure it has ever been applied in that way. Stop trying to reprogram what we percieve to be missing and instead layer it into pathways that are in the root of all and build from there one experience at a time???