Chapter 8 - Healing and the Brain

Chapter 8 is an essay by Alice Brand that really takes a departure from the other chapters we've read previously. Instead of talking about writing and healing in a soft science sense, Brand is determined to discover the true root of the healing powers of writing by studying the hard science of the brain. In fact, the first half of the piece is simply an overview of the structures of the brain and how they work in relation to cognition, emotion, and healing. Brand seems to be fixated on the amygdala, a small part nestled in the bottom of the brain that allows us to have completely emotional and non intellectual responses to events in our lives. Brand uses the amygdala as evidence to support her theory that we do not experience everything with intellect and cognition first and then emotion, but rather we process emotion before intellect a lot of the time, and that our reaction to events often lie in emotions first and logical thinking later. Brand also refers to the hippocampus, which is where (from what I understand) we keep the records of our life events. Brand suggests that the intersection of writing and healing comes between these two structures of the brain. She submits that our long term internal autobiography is linked to our immediate and purely emotional responses to life events. I think this is just a more scientific way of explaining how traumatic memories have a hard tie fitting into our mental timeline, a concept we've discussed before. Brand believes that using language and writing to unite these two parts of the brain is what allows for healing when we write about our toughest experiences. Although language is a complex act that takes place in an entirely different place of the brain, Brand believes that using language as a tool to activate the amygdala and the hippocampus is the exact intersection of activity that makes writing an act that can heal. She suggests that healing is accomplished by our ability to modify thoughts and memories into something that is easier for us to understand. However, she is careful to note that if we believe in healing, we must believe in emotion as scientific fact, and subsequently, the only way to heal is to start with emotion--not necessarily intellect.