Free The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley Page B

neuroscience, if stark physical reductionism can be replaced by an outlook in which the mind can exert causal control, then, for the first time since the scientific revolution, the scientific worldview will become compatible with such ideals as will—and, therefore, with morality and ethics. The emerging view of the mind, and of the mind-matter enigma, has the potential to imbue human thought and action with responsibility once again.

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BRAIN LOCK
    To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one.
    — Sir Charles Sherrington ,
“ The Brain and Its Mechanism,” 1933
    The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
    — Sir William Lawrence Bragg
    Dottie was a middle-aged wife and mother by the time she walked into my office at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Research Group at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, but she had been in the grip of obsessive-compulsive disorder since she was a little girl of five. Early on, it was the numbers 5 and 6 that paralyzed her with fear, she told me with some distress. I soon learned why: her obsession with the “magical” powers of numbers still consumed large portions of her life. If, while driving, Dottie glimpsed a license plate containing either a 5 or a 6, she felt compelled to pull over immediately and sit at the side of the road until a car with a “lucky” number in its license plate passed by. Without a lucky number to counteract the digits of doom, Dottie was convinced, something terrible would befall her mother. She would sometimes sit in the car for hours, waiting for the fates to bestow permission to hit the road again. When Dottie had a son of her own, her obsession shifted. Now it was eyes: Dottie was certain that if she made theslightest misstep, her son would go blind. If she walked where someone with vision problems had walked, she would throw out her shoes; if she so much as heard the word ophthalmologist she would cringe in terror. As she spoke, I noticed the word vision written four times in the palm of her hand. Oh, that, she explained, eyes downcast: while she was watching television that afternoon, a terrifying thought about eyes had popped into her head. This was her way of exorcising it. If she hadn’t, there was no telling what might have befallen her son’s eyesight.
    Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a neuropsychiatric disease marked by distressing, intrusive, unwanted thoughts (the obsession part) that trigger intense urges to perform ritualistic behaviors (the compulsion part). Together, obsessions and compulsions can quickly become all-consuming. In Dottie’s case, the obsessive thoughts centered first on her mother’s safety and then on her son’s eyesight; her compulsions were the suite of “magical” behaviors she engaged in to ward off disaster to the people she loved. The unremitting thoughts of OCD intrude and lay siege to the sufferer’s mind ( obsession comes from the Latin verb that means “to besiege”), insisting that the doorframe you just brushed is contaminated with excrement, or that the bump in the road you just drove over was not an uneven patch of asphalt but a body sprawled on the pavement.
    One of the most striking aspects of OCD urges is that, except in the most severe cases, they are what is called ego-dystonic: they seem apart from, and at odds with, one’s intrinsic sense of self. They seem to arise from a part of the mind that is not you, as if a hijacker were taking over your brain’s controls, or an impostor filling the rooms of your mind. Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience an urge to wash their hands, for instance, while fully cognizant of the fact that their hands are not dirty. They ritualistically count the windows they pass, knowing full well—despite the contrary message from their gut—that failing to do so will not doom their child to immediate death. They return home to checkthat the front door