The right to have a healthy brain
To have a healthy and well developed brain, should be considered a fundamental human right, since to lack one brings an endless number of limitations affecting our quality of life, losing or pruning essential capacities such as:
- The aptitude to lead our own life freely by our own means (cognitive and motor abilities).
- The capacity to control our own life (intrapersonal intelligence).
- The possibility of interacting ethically with our fellowmen (interpersonal intelligence)
Damage in our brain, especially in its most evolved and sensible areas, the prefrontal lobes, lead to a partial or total loss of the executive functions that define our condition of HUMAN BEINGS.
Basically, they allow us:
- To think
- To make decisions
- To create
- To act ethically
- To understand and control our own emotional world(to feel you own emotions)
- To include ,understand and feel the emotional world of the others (reading of the mind and empathy)
Unfortunately, the first factor of incidence is the least controlled of all: Food. Then, the prefrontal lobes, being the most evolved structures of the Brain-Mind unit, are those that more undergo the protein deficiencies of non saturated fatty acids, vitamins and minerals.
The surprising thing is that this lack in feeding is not privative of the less well off classes. Although there are 2,000 million human beings who feed themselves badly because they survive with less of a dollar daily, the higher classes also have an inadequate form of feeding for the cerebral health, being their maximum exponent the denominated "junk" food, one that lacks many of the necessary nutrients, and in which noxious chemical substances appear in excess.
HUMANIDAD
The other great factor that determines the development degree that prefrontal lobes will reach is the quality and type of information they receive.
IRON DEFICIENCY And SCHOOL PERFOMANCE
The children, who undergo anaemia and iron deficiency when they are babies, have a lower school performance than those that did not suffer it. According to investigations made in Costa Rica, the 26 % of the childrenwho suffered from anaemia repeated a school year, against only a 12% of those who did not. The 21% of the first group, as well, needed tutoral support, against only 7% of the second group. The investigation included 191 children, who were observed at the age of 5, later between 11 and 14, and finally between 15 and 17 years of age.
Those who had had iron deficiencies as babies, then, grew up with a delay at the motor and mental level. At five years of age, the difference, at level of IQ, in the examinations, was of 6 points, and between 15 and 17 it reached 11 points. According to the W.H.O. between 66 and 88% of the world-wide population suffers from lack of iron and 30% are anaemic.
Each one of the prefrontal lobes (left and right), has two defined zones: the external one, specialized in the knowledge and control of the outer world, and the internal one, specialized in the knowledge and control of the inner world.
Therefore, the nutritional information , that people receive, will have to be adapted as much to the development of the internal modules as to the external ones.
Unfortunately for humanity, only a minority receives the necessary information to develop to the maximum the potentialities of the external modules of the prefrontal lobes - info-rich -, while the great majority of the people are deprived of this knowledge, reason why they can be considered info-poor men.
On the other hand, in a great portion of humanity, the nutritious and informative deficiencies are superposed, thus the effects of both, are harnessed still more.
As regards the necessary education to develop the internal modules, the problem worsens still more, because the informative deficiency affects almost all humanity, with the exception of individual efforts. For example, no country of the world has incorporated modern neuroscientific knowledge - those that help us understand our essence more - in any level of the educational programs.
Therefore, it would be possible to catalogue most of mankind as - info poor -, at level of the inner world knowledge.
There is another extremely important factor that affects the internal modules of the prefrontal lobes:
The good treatment that new brains must be given by those who take care of them.
Without this requirement, it is difficult for an individual to reach a good development of empathy and therefore of its capacity to see and understand others, essential aptitude for the completion of an ethical human being and the best antidote against violence, intolerance and discrimination.
Once again, and not by chance, children who are born in poor homes are severely hard-hit: they suffer more of child abuse, at physical as much as psychological and sexual level, because most of their parents or tutors suffer deficiencies that make them have unsuitable conducts.
Poor children are kept under:
- Nutricional Poverty
- Informative Poverty
- Emotional Poverty
Here we find the reason why such a few manage to escape from an unfortunate destiny. For most of them, a life full of the deprivations before mentioned, prepares them to accept unhealthy works and bad payments, impels them to delinquency and prison, to the creation of pathological families, the exclusion of the good things of life and to addictions.
Who could choose such an ominous destiny conscientiously?
If these people cannot escape of it, it is because their human cerebral capacities have been injured without their consent, which will never allow them neither to see, nor to elaborate a plan that leads them to a better quality of life.
Going to the other extreme, another alteration of the prefrontal lobes is the epidemic of the so called “attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity" A.D.D.H, that affects children mainly, with great incidence in the U.S.A. The symptoms that these children present are that they are unable to remain quiet, nor to concentrate themselves, they have difficulty with adapting to any situation, they tend to over react before the stimuli and to have unpredictable, impulsive, and frequently destructive behaviour.
Children affected by this disorder, so characteristic of the first world, are prescribed metilfenidato (ritanil), a stimulant of the nervous system that has a paradoxical effect: instead of animating them, it narcotizes them, leaving them in a calmed and drowsy state.
In some schools, the rate of prescription of this medicine is high, getting to a 20% in the students of fifth degree - something without precedents -, which represents 10 % of the total of the pupils.
Among the most important causes of the syndrome, those of nutritional order have been invoked - zinc diminution, lack of essential fatty acids, lack of vitamins of group B, shorter playing hours, shorter hours of sleep, the poisoning with lead, mercury or aluminium and the lack of contact with parents.
These causes can be included in educational, emotional or nutritious deficiency, what indicates that this increasing problem could be prevented.
Then, to improve the health of humanity, it would be necessary to get down to work and to implement a world-wide plan of cerebral health, in order to become mentally healthier individuals, oriented to the construction of a better world, instead of helping to its conscious or unconscious destruction, as it happens nowadays.
This plan should start in the developed countries to migrate later towards the underdeveloped ones. Each new brain that arrives in the Earth, would have to be considered world heritage , and therefore protected, to avoid the deprivations mentioned before (nutritional, informative or emotional) in order to preserve its prefrontal lobes so that they can develop their possibilities to the maximum. And soon, those, mentally healthful individuals, would be able to expand those conditions of life, within the rest of the humanity, and to reproduce them in the next generations.
The capital asstes to carry out such project, in available already, if it is considered that, according to recent studies, the hunger in the world could be solved, investing between 80,000 and 120,000 million dollars to the year, an insignificant figure compared to the trillion annual dollars that the investigation and construction of new arms costs, without considering the damages that they produce, nor the costs of the later repairs. And to give an example of investments for irrelevant aims, only in the U.S.A., 232,000 million dollars to the year are spent, to renew the autumn and spring wardrobe.
In addition, the improvement of mental health of the world-wide population, would reduce the expenses produced today to put at stake so many uncontrolled brains: hospitals, military forces, police, jails, insurances, trials, etc. This way, the plan of mental health would tend to accelerate itself, since the gradual liberation of this enormous cost, would feedback the project positively.
To consider that this plan is utopian, is just a demonstration of the damage in the prefrontal lobes on world-wide scale, because although it seems a monumental venture, it is not so much so, taking into account that the solution to the problem will not be implemented in a single generation, but it will be a joint operation that will imply the effort of several generations and very many people.
“Difficult” it does not imply “impossible”, and although the effort in time and money will be huge, the compensation will be even greater, because the best company created by humanity as a whole throughout all its history will de carried out.
From the point of view of Neurosciences, it is clear that human beings are evolutionarily prepared to do pro-transcendence actions (conducts that go beyond their own interests). This statement arises from the investigations done by Dr. Gregory Berns of the University Emory, Atlanta, on the brain area of reward, he demonstrated that it activates to the maximum, when we carry out altruistic behaviours, producing a great pleasure to us.
Altruism is probably the maximum expression of a healthy prefrontal lobe, and as it is so rewarding as soon as healthy brains start to feel the benefit a greater amount of individuals will be ready to add themselves to this great world-wide initiative, what would cause it to be remarkably accelerated.
ILLITERATE AT WORLD-WIDE LEVEL
The data included in the extensive report of education for all in the world, in 2005, presented in Brasilia, by the U.N.E.S.C.O. chairman, Koichiro Matsuura, is not very encouraging.
It indicates that there are103 million and a half children left without access to education, of which 43% are men and 57% women. And something similar happens with adults, because there still are 800 million of illiterate, 36% men and 64% women. 70% of them live in countries to the south of the Sahara desert in Africa, and in southern and western Asia. The most serious problems of these countries, are the precarious training of teachers, political conflicts, epidemics and poverty, - determining, all of them, of a cerebral sub feeding -, that implies very serious obstacles for the advance of the world-wide education in this aspect.