What Is This?

I left these pictures standing for a couple of days without comment. I am curious what viewers may have thought about them, without any further knowledge (well, most of you, I'd guess).

What you seen is the human brain, 'rendered' in as good as a 3-D-like presentation as could be achieved. Do not mind about the detailed structures present in the green area, think of that mass as our brain.

Now, a bit of theory. I already wrote about the deficits in inhibition inherent in OCD. Nor intrusive thoughts, nor repetitive behaviours can be controlled or dismissed at free will in a patient. What is wrong here?

A chief task of our brain is the processing of information. That information can take on an unlimited number of guises: rational interpretation, rational instructions, emotional information (e.g. on the states of various moods, or pain... any type of feeling, in fact), information on numerous bodily states (hunger, thirst, sexual arousal), our movement... everything that has to do with ourselves in any way, and with our interaction with our environment, including other people.

This processing occurs in neuronal circuits. Brain parts have their identity by interaction with other brain parts. You can't take a brain part out of the whole, and then claim that it still is busy processing a particular piece of information... because (apart from withering away quickly) it lacks input and the possibility for output. Perhaps you've heard of the term wholism, referring to a quite popular worldview that the world, or the universe, or a human community, can't be reduced to single entities; there's considerably more to the whole than to the sum of its parts, so to speak. Well, the brain is an excellent example of wholism.

There is one particular neuronal circuit that seems to be somewhat out of order in OCD. This is called, very poshly, the cortico-striatal-thalamo-cortical circuit, a.k.a. the CSTC-circuit (you may want to impress your G.P. with that sometime!).

Core structures in this circuit are areas in the brain cortex. Well, our circuit starts with the cortex and ends with it. Makes sense. Two parts of the cortex are very important in our model. I must use Latin once again: these parts are the anterior cingulate cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex, or: ACC and OFC, respectively. You don't have to learn these names by heart.