Transcription
In this talk, I'm going to give you the single most important lesson my colleagues and I have learned from looking at eighty three thousand brain scans. But first, let me put the lesson into context. I am in the middle of seven children. Growing up, my father called me a maverick, which to him was not a good thing. In nineteen seventy two, the army called my number, and I was trained as an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born.
But since I truly hated the idea of being shot at or sleeping in the mud, I got myself retrained as an x-ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging. As our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look? In nineteen seventy nine, when I was a second year medical student, someone in my family became seriously suicidal, And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist. Over time, I realized that if he helped her, which he did, it would not only save her life, but it would also help her children and even her future grandchildren, as they would be shaped by someone who is happier and more stable. I fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it had the potential to change generations of people.
In nineteen ninety one, I went to my first lecture on brain SPECT imaging. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. SPECT was presented as a tool to help psychiatrists get more information to help their patients. In that one lecture, my two professional loves, medical imaging and psychiatry, came together and quite honestly revolutionized my life.
Over the next twenty two years, my colleagues and I would build the world's largest database of brain scans related to behavior on patients from ninety three countries. SPECT basically tells us three things about the brain. Good activity, too little, or too much. Here is a set of healthy SPECT scans. The image on the left shows the outside surface of the brain, And a healthy scan shows full, even symmetrical activity.
The color is not important. It's the shape that matters. In the image on the right, red equals the areas of high activity, and in a healthy brain, they're typically in the back part of the brain. Here's a healthy scan compared to someone who had two strokes. You can see the holes of activity.
Here's what Alzheimer's looks like, where the back half of the brain is deteriorating. Did you know that Alzheimer's disease actually starts in the brain thirty to fifty years before you have any symptoms. Here's a scan of traumatic brain injury. Your brain is soft and your skull is really hard. Or drug abuse.
The real reason not to use drugs? They damage your brain. Obsessive compulsive disorder, where the front part of the brain typically works too hard so that people cannot turn off their thoughts, and epilepsy, where we frequently see areas of increased activity. In nineteen ninety two, I went to an all day conference on brain SPECT imaging. It was amazing and mirrored our own early experience using SPECT in psychiatry.
But at that same meeting, researchers started to complain loudly that clinical psychiatrists like me should not be doing scans, that they were only for their research. Being a maverick and having clinical experience, I thought that was a really dumb idea. Without imaging, psychiatrists then, and even now, make diagnoses like they did in eighteen forty when Abraham Lincoln was depressed by talking to people and looking for symptom clusters. Imaging was showing us there was a better way. Did you know that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that virtually never look at the organ they treat.
Think about it. Cardiologists look. Neurologists look. Orthopedic doctors look. Virtually every other medical specialties look.
Psychiatrists guess. Before imaging, I always felt like I was throwing darts in the dark at my patients and had hurt some of them, which horrified me. There is a reason that most psychiatric medications have black box warnings. Give them to the wrong person and you can precipitate a disaster. Early on, our imaging work taught us many important lessons, such as illnesses like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and addictions are not single or simple disorders in the brain.
They all have multiple types. For example, here are two patients who have been diagnosed with major depression that had virtually the same symptoms, yet radically different brains. One had really low activity in the brain. The other one had really high activity. How would you ever know what to do for them unless you actually looked?
Treatment needs to be tailored to individual brains, not clusters of symptoms. Our imaging work also taught us that mild traumatic brain injury was a major cause of psychiatric illness that ruined people's lives and virtually no one knew about it because they would see psychiatrists for things like temper problems, anxiety, depression, and insomnia, and they would never look, so they would never know. Here's a scan of a fifteen year old boy who fell down a flight of stairs at the age of three. And even though he was unconscious for only a few minutes, there was nothing mild about the enduring effect that injury had on this boy's life. When I met him at the age of fifteen, he had just been kicked out of his third residential treatment program for violence.
He needed a brain rehabilitation program, not just more medication thrown at him in the dark or behavior therapy, which if you think about it is really cruel. To put him on a behavior therapy program when behavior is really an expression of the problem, it's not the problem. Researchers have found that undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, panic attacks, ADHD, and suicide. We are in for a pending disaster with the hundreds of thousands of soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and virtually no one is looking at the function of their brain. As we continued our work with SPECT, the criticism grew louder, but so did the lessons.
Judges and defense attorneys sought our help to understand criminal behavior. To date, we have scanned over five hundred convicted felons, including ninety murderers. Our work taught us that people who do bad things often have troubled brains. That was not a surprise. But what did surprise us was that many of these brains could be rehabilitated.
So, here's a radical idea. What if we evaluated and treated troubled brains rather than simply warehousing them in toxic, stressful environments? In my experience, we could save tremendous amounts of money by making these people more functional, so when they left prison, they could work, support their families and pay taxes. Dostoevsky once said, A society should be judged not by how well it treats its outstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals. Instead of just crime and punishment, we should be thinking about crime evaluation and treatment.
So, after twenty two years and eighty three thousand scans, the single most important lesson my colleagues and I have learned is that you can literally change people's brains. And when you do, you change their life. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, and we can prove it. My colleagues and I performed the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players, showing high levels of damage in these players at a time when the NFL said they didn't know if playing football caused long term brain damage.
The fact was they didn't want to know. That was not a surprise. I think if you get most thoughtful nine year olds together and you talk about the brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter, it's housed in a really hard skull that has many sharp bony ridges, you know, twenty eight out of thirty nine year olds would go probably a bad idea for your life. But what really got us excited was the second part of the study where we put players on a brain smart program and demonstrated that eighty percent of them could improve in the areas of blood flow, memory, and mood, that you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better on a Brain Smart program.
How exciting is that? I am so excited. Reversing brain damage is a very exciting new frontier, but the implications are really much wider. Here is the scan of a teenage girl who has ADHD, who was cutting herself, failing in school and fighting with her parents. When we improved her brain, she went from Ds and Fs to As and Bs and was much more emotionally stable.
Here's a scan of Nancy. Nancy had been diagnosed with dementia, and her doctor told her husband that he should find a home for her because within a year, she would not know his name. But on an intensive brain rehabilitation program, Nancy's brain was better, as was her memory. And four years later, Nancy still knows her husband's name. Or my favorite story to illustrate this point is Andrew, a nine year old boy who attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason, and at the time was drawing pictures of himself hanging from a tree and shooting other children.
Andrew was Columbine, Aurora and Sandy Hook waiting to happen. Most psychiatrists would have medicated Andrew as they did Eric Harris and the other mass shooters before they committed their awful crimes. But SPECT imaging taught me that I had to look at his brain and not throw darts in the dark at him to understand what he needed. His SPECT scan showed a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his left temporal lobe. No amount of medication or therapy would have helped Andrew.
When the cyst was removed, his behavior completely went back to normal. And he became the sweet, loving boy he always wanted to be. Now, eighteen years later, Andrew, who is my nephew, owns his own home, is employed, and pays taxes. Because someone bothered to look at his brain. He has been a better son and will be a better husband, father, and grandfather.
When you have the privilege of changing someone's brain, you not only change his or her life, you have the opportunity to change generations to come. I'm doctor Daniel Amen. Thank you.