There was a really good article in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago about a man trying to get off anti-depressants. Reading it made me realize how scary things are becoming with all the different drugs being prescribed for supposed brain dysfunction. The amount of these drugs being prescribed really worries me for a number of reasons. We don’t really know how any of these drugs work and what their actual effects are. And changing your brain chemistry is basically changing who you are.

Our brain is who we are. When we think of ’self’ and and our memories and our personality, thats all represented and contained in the neurons and synapses of our brain. Trying to say that being depressed or having difficulty focusing is a brain dysfunction is very close to saying that any kind of quirky personality is a brain dysfunction. But it is in pharmaceutical companies best interest to say these problems can be solved easily with a drug.

The problem is that we don’t have any good idea how these drugs work. Preventing the re-update of serotonin like the anti-depressants do, or adding more dopamine precursors like drugs for Parkinson’s disease do will have effects all over the brain. We don’t know what the effects are in the rest of the brain, and we only have vague notions of how these drugs work for the problems they’re prescribed.

If the essence of who we are and our personality is just the transfer of neurotransmitters in synapses between neurons, then changing this brain chemistry all over the brain seems like a big deal. You are changing who you are. Are you the same person on these drugs that you are off of them? Can you be the same person once you stop taking them? What other side effects are there? In the article, the author notices that he has more vivid feelings and perceptions once he stops taking the drugs. He also has side effects from withdrawal such as ‘brain zaps’.

Obviously these drugs are very helpful and sometimes necessary for lots of people. I just think we should be more careful about prescribing them since they have the capability to change who we are and we don’t understand their full effects.

There was a very interesting article in the New York Times on “cumulative advantage.” Basically some research was done showing that a major cause of different things becoming popular is their popularity. People are more likely to like a song or an artist if lots of other people already like it. The researchers in the article did experiments where they set up separate music downloading communities that showed counts of how many times each song had been downloaded and played. Different songs became hits in the different communities depending on which ones just happened to hit the right peak at the right time. In communities where download and play counts were not listed, the differences between hit songs and other songs were not as extreme.

So what does this mean? All the music industry executives and others who are out looking for the next big hit may be going about it all wrong. Instead of looking for the band with the perfect sound or perfect look, they may be better off trying to come up with new ways of marketing the bands to make them popular quickly and thats what will lead to even more popularity. This also means that the bands that do make it are not necessarily any better than the ones who don’t (although they are more popular).

This research is somewhat concerning in a sense though. Why is the popularity of a song or artist so much more important to us than the actual quality of the song? Can we not judge songs on our own? Do we feel the need to be the part of some herd mentality? How does this affect our views on other issues such as politics? This effect would seem to make it even harder for someone to stray from the majority, or to make their own decisions on the issues rather than just go with the crowd.