Ivan Bogachev

In the fields of psychiatry and psychology, we have a lot of problems right now. Causes of major diseases are not really determined. Symptoms are vague and hard to differentiate. Treatment often looks like an alchemy. Maybe it will work. Maybe not. Who knows. Maybe another will work. Or not. Psychological theories allow some very loose interpretations, where chemical processes behind the processes in the psyche should be very precise. In neurochemistry, we have a lot of scattered pieces of information, but they don't explain how all these things work together.

We definitely need some fresh eyes. So I started a project that is supposed to bring new approaches, new ways to interpret collected information, to the world of psychiatry. I use ideas from completely different fields, from ancient philosophy to modern computer science and engineering, to shake things up a bit.

The first part of the project was published as the evolutionary theory of behavior. This is a theory that connects parts of the psyche, basic impulses, observable patterns of behavior, diseases, and effects in social groups, attaching everything to one purely mechanical model.

The second part of the project is a search for this model, or a similar one, in the field of neurochemistry. Instead of trying to explain every little fact on its own, I look for a similar graph of connections between things. My main hypothesis is that if we can connect things from the outside, a similar graph of connections should be somewhere on the inside. If we find it, it will show us the exact places where the diseases begin.

This is a long shot. I know. But it is worth trying.