“All paranormal phenomena can be explained and even provoked from the brain”

Sometimes, during the consultation, the neuropsychologist Saul Martínez-Horta (Barcelona, ​​41 years old), sends his patients to draw a clock.

“It seems silly”, he admits, but behind that circle, with the 12 numbers placed around it and some hands marking the hours, there is “a display of very elementary cognitive processes”, such as planning, order, sequence, spatial processing... Seeing how a patient draws that simple outline - if he gets to do it - gives the specialist key information about how his brain works and, most importantly, if something is wrong.

Martínez-Horta, who practices at the Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, ​​scrutinizes the gestures, words and behavior of his patients with extreme detail.

Any movement can be a clue to break apart brain processes that are twisted or unmask hidden neurological diseases, such as those she recounts in her book

(Kailas, 2022).

This compilation of clinical cases, which evokes the emblematic

, by neurologist Oliver Sacks, arose from the "curiosity" and "repercussion" generated by his Twitter threads, recounting paradigmatic examples that he saw in the consultation.

“It seems to me that it is fascinating for everyone to know what happens when a brain breaks down,” reflects Martínez-Horta, who already has nearly 40,000 followers on the social network.

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Ask.

How far can the brain go when it breaks down?

Response.

To everything that anyone can imagine.

The day I realized that brain diseases could possibly explain everything that someone can imagine happening to a human being, from the most normal to the most bizarre, I said: this is fascinating.

Q.

Can broken brains be fixed?

A.

Some.

When a brain stops working as it should, it's not always the result of an inevitably progressive disease.

It can also be due to poisoning, cancer-related diseases, metabolic ailments... And if you reach a diagnosis, discover what is there and treat it, you manage to repair it.

That's why it's important not to take everything for granted and get to the bottom of it, because some broken brains can be fixed.

Q.

You explain that memory can play tricks because it is "an active encoding process," a transformation of information that was once an experience.

With 23-F, for example, he says that people remember seeing it live on television, but in reality, the iconic images of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero storming Congress were never seen live;

the live broadcast was on the radio.

Is memory a lie?

R.

But what is lie or truth?

We do not have any element that shows us that the reality we live, the one you live and the one I live, is the same.

We know that the reality that you perceive is the one that, according to the way your brain thinks, is most probable, the most plausible.

The brain is constantly anticipating, it is interpreting a world, it is not analyzing it because it would be saturated: it uses prior knowledge to anticipate it.

For this reason, when we store memories, we don't do it like a photo, which I keep in a drawer and one day I take it out.

It is not like this.

The brain transforms the experience into a code and it is distributed in different areas of the brain;

when we try to retrieve the information in the act of recollection, that information has to be put together again and the brain uses probabilities,

what is most plausible to it, and that results in the information being transformed.

These transformations are normal.

Although people have a hard time accepting it, most of our memories are not exactly what we experienced.

And that's normal.

What happens is that in certain diseases, this becomes something extraordinarily pathological, completely transformed, although it is experienced as real.

This is what we call collusion.

Q.

Why are some things remembered and others not?

R.

The brain tends to prioritize some things.

When it comes to memory and memory formation, there is a central element that is attention: the depth with which you elaborate the information to which you pay attention correlates with the quality of the memory.

A very typical complaint is: "I forget everything lately."

It's not that you forget, it's that you don't learn it because you don't pay attention because you're overwhelmed, tired... On the other hand, there are also elements in the context that, due to how memory works, make it easier for this information to be learned and remembered with ease: the classic example is emotional information, because the brain prioritizes everything it associates with signals that are useful for survival.

The classic example is that everyone remembers what they were doing the day the Twin Towers fell:

There are many mental health disorders related to the expression of fear in a context where nothing is happening.

It is typical of anxiety disorders

Q.

In the book you make a plea against the normalization of memory loss and other cognitive deficits due to aging.

But aging brings cognitive decline.

How is it distinguished?

R.

There is an idea, which is that of senile dementia, which implies it.

But that is a mistake.

Senile dementia does not exist.

Aging does not imply dementia.

Dementia is a syndrome where cognitive impairment is of such magnitude that the person could no longer survive alone.

Someone who has dementia when they get older, has an associated degenerative disease or some other process.

Indeed, aging implies a loss of skills that we have been acquiring and developing and also has an impact on how we function at a cognitive level.

But this follows a slope, a curve within a normality.

Is it normal to stumble more when we get older?

I guess so.

Is it normal to constantly fall to the ground?

No. Is it normal to be slower and not as agile on a cognitive level?

Yes.

Is it normal that you repeatedly forget things and have trouble finding words?

No. When we don't normalize these problems, what we do is seek help.

We should have a bit of that intuition without falling into hypochondria.

Q. You

also say that the brain gives priority to fear when it appears.

Why is that?

A.

Fear is a very primitive emotion and it is aimed at making us survive.

In the brain, when the systems that govern fear are turned on, they shut down the expression of all other processes.

The way in which the brain is organized means, for example, that when these structures that govern fear are activated, areas that are much more modern from an evolutionary point of view, such as those we use for abstract reasoning or language, work much less .

In fact, a person with fear speaks badly.

And that happens because it is possibly much more useful in the face of danger not to think and act than to think and waste time making decisions.

P.

When you're afraid you don't come to your senses.

A.

Exactly.

And there are many mental health disorders related to the expression of fear in a context where nothing is happening.

It is typical of anxiety disorders: the person experiences an excruciating fear of a situation in which, a priori, there is no danger and they are not able to cognitively manage that.

The brain is experiencing that moment as a brutal danger.

Martínez-Horta, during the interview. MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

Q.

Can emotions be lost?

A.

Yes. Like any other process.

We are a consequence of what a brain does and when its parts fail, anything that depends on it can fail.

We have multiple situations where, sometimes, the initial symptom of a disease is that the way the person experiences emotions is completely transformed.

Q.

In the book, you put names and surnames to supposed apparitions, ghosts or supernatural events.

Can all these paranormal phenomena be explained by a broken brain?

A.

To this day, I have not found any of these phenomena that cannot be explained by a broken brain.

One of the things that captivated me the most about the world of neuropsychology, about brain damage, when I was a kid, was that it could explain paranormal phenomena.

You ask me how many paranormal experiences I have lived with my patients and I would tell you that I think I have lived all the ones that we have described in the books.

The phenomenon that emanates from a brain that goes bad gives rise to a series of sensations that have the appearance of what has been described as paranormal.

Q.

In your book, when describing the phenomenon of pareidolias, you dismantle the famous faces of Bélmez, for example.

A.

Totally.

Pareidolias is seeing familiar shapes, especially faces, in objects where there are none.

The human brain has a region called the facial spindle gyrus, which is at the bottom of the temporal lobe, which is an area that strictly evolved in humans for processing faces.

Pareidolia occurs when, due to how certain visual stimuli are configured, the fusiform gyrus is activated and this triggers, without your being able to control it, the perception of a face.

This process has a peculiarity: you can provoke them by giving them information and then you can't go back;

that is to say, if I tell you that there is a face here on the ground and I show it to you, you will no longer be able to stop seeing the face.

The faces of Bélmez or the apparitions of the Virgin in a toast are this.

Q.

And

, the feeling of having experienced something that is happening right now, does it have a neuroscientific explanation?

R.

It has to do with memory updating, which has a temporal gradient: memories implicitly carry a position in time, I know that my memories of today are from today and not from yesterday.

In

, for some reason, there seems to be a lack of synchronization with this updating process and the instantaneous experience that you are living is as if it were labeled from another temporary moment.

Q.

Is there something that neuroscience cannot explain or does not understand?

R.

There are things that we still do not fully understand how they happen, but we must not go to the paranormal.

For example, consciousness: it is a property that emanates from the functioning brain, but how that organ and that biochemistry give rise to a phenomenon that allows you and me to be conscious right now, we have not solved it.

This seems much more complex to me than trying to explain a paranormal phenomenon of any kind, because I insist, we can clearly explain all paranormal phenomena and I would tell you that even cause from neurobiology or, as we understand the brain, they give us a model theory to understand why this happens.

Q.

In the book, you tell how a man came to try to kill his wife.

In that case, he had a neurological problem, but how do you explain evil or violence?

R.

Violence and evil are multifactorial, there are many variables that come into play to explain acts of profound evil or violence.

However, in certain disease contexts, extreme or highly disturbed violence is a central element of the disease.

One of the main functions of the frontal lobe is self-regulation: there is a capacity for self-government and for adapting our behavior to the needs or demands of an environment;

In addition, we nurture how we behave from the impression of what the other feels, we have empathy.

In diseases where certain regions of the frontal lobe are dysfunctional, persistent or occasional behaviors of extreme violence may appear.

As a neuropsychologist I believe that, although we cannot ignore the fact that evil exists as something inherent to some people,

exploring in depth the origins of violence and evil when we have it before us is worth it.

It is not about exonerating someone or looking for a coherent explanation, but about bringing to the level of any human behavior what we know about the brain.

Q.

But can it always be explained by a neurological problem?

R.

From my position, typical of a neuropsychologist and with a background of behavior biologist, and without denying the crucial effect of the context in all this, it is very difficult for me not to conceptualize the acts of extreme violence or extreme evil that we all see in the news, like there, in an instant of time, something has happened that is dysfunctional.

That person is not sick, but something has gone wrong.

That is, according to our models of how a human mind works and how it is translated into behavior, there is something in that moment that is not working as it should in the mind

Although that does not mean that it is not something punishable.

faith of errors

In the initial version of this text, it was erroneously stated that the lieutenant colonel of the coup Antonio Tejero was a general.

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