Psychopathology and New Neuroscience Approaches to Our Mind

One of the first aims of neuroscience studies applied to the psychopathological field is to describe the cognitive processes underlying mental disorders. For years, thanks to the use of neuroimaging techniques, scholars have identified some neurobiological components responsible for the hypo/hyperactivation of brain areas and believed to be responsible for behavior (abnormal or altered in psychopathologies). However, this remains a reductive description of brain network activations and psychopathology. On the other hand, in recent years, neuroscience is increasingly abandoning a purely descriptive approach to mental illness, to focus on a clinical-therapeutic approach. The aim of this paper is therefore to clarify how and to what extent current developments in neuroscience contribute to the understanding of psychopathologies. To do this, we will briefly discuss the evolution that neuroscientific methods have undergone recently, since the entry of neuroscience into the panorama of cognitive sciences. In particular, we will see how the neuroscientific explanation of mental illness has loosened due to the difficulty of identifying the true explanatory value of the data collected through brain imaging techniques. We will then examine some of the possible contributions of neuroscience to psychopathology and then describe the specific case of autistic syndrome. Studies on this syndrome, indeed, are helping the epistemological paradigm within neuroscience to overcome the mind/body dualism. In conclusion, we argue that this «Replication crisis», as defined by Strack, does not necessarily imply the default of the neuroscientific perspective, but obliges a revision of the epistemological approach towards the so-called translational neuroscience, i.e. a perspective that integrates neuroimaging with the eco-social dimension in which the patient acts and constructs his representation of reality.