Odd behaviour

I'm reading a fascinating book called Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter at the moment. One section deals with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Rita quotes from Richard Restak's Brainscapes). The bold emphasis is mine:

"[One] OCD patient has a fixation with the number four. Everything has to be done four times: four foldings back of the duvet in the morning before getting out of bed; four steps to the door, teeth-scrubbing movements in groups of four and so on. He has a particular horror of being left on an uneven number. Once his girlfriend told him that she loved him. He wasn't too sure if he reciprocated this feeling but the words 'sort of hung about in the air... like a big number one,' so he told her he loved her, too. His tone of voice was not, perhaps, convincing enough for the girl to feel satisfied with this exchange, and she said it again: 'I love you.' Now, of course, the words hung like a huge number three, so he had to repeat them again, to make it up to four. Satsfied by this, the girl then said she wanted to marry him—a proposition that brought about a further cascade of reciprocal pledges."

If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry.

[The] mental and behavioural ticks [of OCD] are, like the physical jerks of Tourettes Syndrome sufferers, fragments of pre-programmed skills. But in this case the memories are not personal ones picked up during the person's lifetime [as with Tourettes] but those that are built into the species as instincts. The instinct to keep clean, to check the environment constantly for signs of anything untoward, the need to keep order and balance—all these things have a basis in survival. In OCD they have simply come adrift from the survival super-structure and appear as isolated, inappropriate and exaggerated habits. [...] [OCD sufferers'] error-detection mechanism has somehow become stuck on alert, and no matter how often the appropriate turn-off action is carried out it continues to shriek its warning.

This seems like a great example of the havoc that fragmentation amongst components of a network—in this case, the neural network of the human brain—can wreak with that network's overall functionality.


Topics: neurology OCD network_fragmentation