The brain is part of our body. "It is a physical organ like any other, and we have to learn to interact with it as part of a whole." Camilla Nord (Paris, 1989) has been researching for years in her laboratory "how something physical and biological, like our brain, can translate into something as abstract as our thoughts." Her lifelong curiosity led her to study at the University of Oxford in the fields related to neuronal processes: Physiology, Psychology, and Philosophy, which she later complemented with advanced studies in Neuroscience at University College London.
With all the tools acquired in her training and over 10 years of experience in the field, she has been able to develop a new scientific perspective that provides answers to the questions arising from the mystery of our command center: "For many people, it is counterintuitive that such personal things as emotions and our sense of self come from a physical organ that we all share."
Based on this statement, Nord has propelled her professional career as a neuroscientist in a constant quest to reconnect mental and physical health. "There is a disconnection that we must repair," she argues. In an interview with The New Stateman, she confessed that she would have liked to live in the time of the Florentine Renaissance. Perhaps she lives in that 21st-century renaissance that science is experiencing in the quest for answers about the brain.
She leads the Mental Health Neuroscience research program at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), focusing on three clear axes: discovering neuroscientific experiments that investigate important cognitive and physiological mechanisms for maintaining mental health; clinical trials in patient populations, such as individuals with major depressive disorder, to investigate the brain and behavioral differences that occur as a result of mental illness; and translational studies to test new ways to treat mental disorders (such as brain stimulation and psychological therapy).
For example, regarding the first axis, in which she is particularly interested in body-brain interactions, including metabolic and gastric mechanisms, she highlights research demonstrating the role of stomach rhythm in disgust avoidance. The work, published in Current Biology in 2021, focuses on how this gastric disturbance can be controlled from the brain by administering domperidone (a drug used to treat nausea) or a placebo to healthy volunteers to normalize gastric rhythm. It was observed that this compound reduced oculomotor disgust avoidance after exposure intervention. In other words, the physical discomfort caused by seeing an unpleasant object. Therefore, they concluded that gastric rhythm plays a causal role in disgust avoidance.
Nord's work aims to recover the biological aspect of the brain to address the questions raised in her laboratory: "What changes in our brain during periods of poor mental health? How does the way our brain processes the world, including the physical body, make us susceptible to developing a mental health disorder? And finally, how can we leverage Neuroscience tools (brain imaging, brain stimulation, computational modeling, among others) to improve our ability to treat mental disorders?"
Through the screen, the neuroscientist tells Papel that these are important challenges. "But I am excited to try. That's why I chose Neuroscience." The concepts she develops about mental health, psychiatry, have revolutionized their approach. Or at least, that's the intention.
Through The Balanced Brain (Paidós), she traces a path through those scientific advances that she considers to have a beneficial impact on mental health, showing why and how events and treatments can affect people in such different ways. This work, published by Nord in 2023 and now translated into Spanish, brings to light everything that Neuroscience has revealed about the functioning of mental health alongside the vast history of humanity to improve it.
"I had realized that there was a disconnect between how I saw mental health and how society was dealing with the increasing rates of mental health problems."
X-ray of mental health
In recent years, mental health has come out of the closet. There are fewer prejudices in expressing these conditions. The need to visit a specialist has become normalized. In our country, 19% of the population has needed mental health care this year, according to the Health Barometer. And that demand for help "may be part of the rise in cases."
The figures are part of this X-ray: one in four people will experience some type of mental health problem each year in England, Nord points out; one in six people reports having experienced a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression), as recorded by the British NGO, Mind. In our country, up to 17% of the population reports having depression, one of the highest rates in Europe, and another 16% anxiety, phobias, or post-traumatic stress, according to data from the latest International Study by the AXA Group on Health and Mental Well-being. Globally, 9% of the population has some type of mental health problem, and 25% will experience it at some point in their lives, according to the WHO.
When Nord talks about mental health, she does so on a large scale, including everything from mental disorders to neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, other dementias, depression, and anxiety, among others. And in all of them, she analyzes the physiological traces: "We must find out the processes that are disrupted in our brain, in our cognition, and then how a treatment could target them."
A practical example that the neuroscientist gives is cardiovascular health. When someone has heart problems, such as hypertension, "it does not mean they are predetermined to have a stroke and die. No," she asserts, while explaining that there are tools and knowledge to address the issue. "It could be medication, surgical interventions, exercise... And that's where I believe we need to go with mental health."
The neuroscientist does not resign herself to statements that repeat "my brain is broken, there is nothing I can do about it." For her, this should not define mental health. And that is where her work begins: "By understanding the brain, we can identify what process goes wrong in that person and how we can treat it better."
We know this is not easy because nowadays the lines separating mental health from psychological well-being are "blurry, complicated, and delicate," leading us to consider that they have "different therapeutic approaches." Therefore, Nord warns that "we must be very careful and ask ourselves if people have more problems now or if, on the contrary, they can get help for the problems they have always had." This is where resilience comes into play. In the book, she describes it as the brain's immune system and emphasizes its training just as we exercise physical health in a gym. "People often only think about the negative part," she emphasizes. "They do not consider that there would actually be a way to improve that recovery capacity."
The importance of resilience
Nord particularly emphasizes the improvement properties of resilience as a critical tool "because even if you think about the really obvious causes of mental health problems, let's say a horrible trauma or a personal loss, not everyone who experiences it will develop a negative psychological episode. So we really need to understand what happens in the brains of people who do not experience it."
-What does resilience offer in these processes?
-We will explain it with an example. One could think of a situation where the brain is insulted, and yet there is no negative response. This is having good resilience, a great tool to cope with pain, which could even be physical or a cognitive framework to confront a negative abstract situation that impacts us.
-So, is resilience a positive tool on a physical level?
-Absolutely. That's how I see it because it not only applies to psychological pain but also has great potential for the physical aspect. We are not very good at breaking down the causes of chronic pain, understanding its etiology. In this sense, let's say we have two people with exactly the same injury, for example, degeneration in the spine, who have radically different experiences. One will go to their doctor over and over because nothing will work for them (medications, rehabilitation...) and the other individual will simply continue with their life as usual.
- How do we see the involvement of the brain?
- We would only know by getting a magnetic resonance imaging. This means that there are truly critical brain processes that change the way we respond to our physical body, in terms of concepts like pain. So, we have to understand it and enhance it in people who do not have that resistance naturally.
The neuroscientist knows what she is talking about. Over 16 years ago, an accident was responsible for her osteoarthritis in one foot, which makes her live with intermittent bouts of chronic pain. A first-hand experience that allows her to empathize with the mental burden of dealing with this situation.
With all these arguments, Nord allows herself to open the debate to build an argument around how physical and mental health overlap and how she rejects the dichotomy that as a neuroscientist she does not accept. "Mental health may seem abstract, but it is tangible and, because it is tangible, scientists must better understand what it is and how to treat it."
While they undertake this task, she advises others that "one of the best things you can do for your own health is probably to realize how intertwined these two things are." Because she asserts that, for example, "sometimes our brain can affect your perception of the body and alter your behavior and the way you interact with the environment. It may change the people you see, the things you do, and those things will change the symptoms you experience, both mental and physical."
She trusts that everyone will reach the path of knowledge that will reveal how everything happens in this century. "We have to discover the mysteries that the brain hides", as until now Medicine and Science have focused "on the organic physiology of systems that have been repaired." Let's take transplants as a clear example.
Nord is betting on this. "Today we have a whole new technology that will allow us to make the greatest advances in the brain in the next 20 years." And in this challenge, she reveals that the first steps are already being taken to change the activity of neurons through brain stimulation. "Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a way to change a small region in the brain. We are also using ultrasound stimulation."
Each of these techniques is tailored to the patient's needs. "It is very exciting because it means that it could not be more personalized." And this is one of the mantras that Nord also pursues: mental health is individual, and not everyone reaches it in the same way.
"It depends on multiple neurological processes, from those involved in pleasure and pain to those that facilitate motivation and learning," she states at the beginning of the book. "The brain's biology and its close relationship with the body create the mental state, maintain it, and protect it."
All of this is "non-transferable", because interventions to improve mental health work according to each person's brain and body processes. And it is due to very different causes, "both from within the body and from the outside." Because, as Nord affirms, although it may be "pejorative," "mental health disorders are physical, given the undeniable influence that some key social factors exert, which end up affecting the biology of all systems, including the brain."
- How do we achieve a balanced brain?
- In reality, we all have a balanced brain in the sense that it has a kind of natural homeostatic imbalance. We may be facing a complicated process, but that does not mean we are developing a pathology. We are just readjusting.
Beyond the response that generates new questions, Nord points out that there are small gestures within everyone's reach in lifestyle habits: physical activity and nighttime rest. "Exercise is not usually thought of as something that works the brain, but it is just like psychological therapy."