Scientific American has a little article on suicide. Some quotations: “I’m not saying that suicide is purely biological, but it starts with having an underlying biological risk.” What’s the biological risk? “At a conference of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2001, Arango reported that the brains of people who were depressed and died by suicide contained fewer neurons in the orbital prefrontal cortex, a patch of brain just above each eye. What is more, in suicide brains, that area had one third the number of presynaptic serotonin transporters that control brains had but roughly 30 percent more postsynaptic serotonin receptors.”
As we discover more about brain architecture, we’ll be seeing more discussions on the chemical basis for emotions and intelligence. Of course, the chemistry is controlled to a large degree by genetics…
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