Behavioral Biology in Medicine

Abstract

The continuing emergence of a clinically helpful behavioral biology is a basic scientific trend in contemporary psychiatry and medicine. Much of this new knowledge describes the genetic, maturational and learned developmental structure and physiology of the behaving brain and body. The dichotomy between the depersonalized body and the disembodied person is no longer very productive either for pragmatic or for heuristic purposes.

The growing science of behavioral genetics indicates that man is never an “empty” or a “standard” organism. Specific motivational and capacity factors are genetically conditioned. Since medicine deals largely with the phenotypic individual, ordinary clinical assessment of symptoms and behavior may entirely miss the genotypic differences between persons who are labelled with the same but genetically non-differentiating diagnosis of schizophrenia, epilepsy and other diseases.

The increasing knowledge of molecular biology coupled with the genetic study of animal behavior has given us an increasing awareness of our own evolved behavior. Some of this behavior originally “bred in” as adaptive to environments now remote in time, space and culture has now become maladaptive to the contemporary changing world. Animal research becomes, among other objectives, another method for studying our own behavioral past.

Particularly useful to the clinician are the accumulating efforts of the central neurophysiologists in demonstrating the interrelationships among arousal, emotional and cognitive, information-processing behavioral states. Emotions are the labels for the resultant effects of many variables. What makes emotions “abnormal” are not “abnormal” causes but the differences in the frequency, intensity or duration of emotional responses. “Hung-up” emotional states may be modified by a person-centered reappraisal of the stimulus, by an actual environmental alteration, by a person-centered reappraisal of himself in the situation, by a change in the availability or content of the environmental resources for problem-seeing and solving, or by a pharmacologic, physiologic or structural alteration of appropriate regional or integrative brain anatomy and process.

Clinically relevant advances are being made in the study of the operant learning of the autonomic nervous system in body-organ adaptation to the internal milieu. Increased clinical modification of psychosomatic distress can now be based upon the current investigations of biofeedback sensation and the learning of sensory discrimination and of sensory awareness from “inside the skin.”