‘Cerebral climaxes’ are those moments when we experience a high, a life-changing realisation, a joyous epiphany. I have studied these brain peaks for many years, and they are associated with crises and extreme emotions. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow called them ‘peak experiences’, but the truth is that we know surprisingly little about how these climaxes come to pass – and, indeed, about how the brain itself works.

If other complex systems can do this magic trick, the brain must surely be able to do it too

Our ignorance was highlighted recently when Harvard and Google AI experts announced that they had successfully mapped one cubic millimetre of brain tissue (about one millionth of an adult human brain). The imaging and mapping exercise produced 1.4 million petabytes of data. One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion. A member of the Harvard team, Professor Jeff Lichtman, said: ‘We don’t understand these things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.’

These days, many people mistrust the brain’s ability to cope with crises, as though the most awesome object known to science were an obsolete computer unfit for purpose. Some swallow brain-modifying drugs, afraid to face the pace or pressures of work or even day-to-day problems. There’s no doubt that fear, anxiety and depression cause enormous suffering, and that some biological brain abnormalities do require medical intervention. But when poor mental health accounts for so many work-related illnesses (around 51 per cent of long-term sick leave is due to ‘stress’, depression or anxiety, according to Mental Health First Aid England), something has gone seriously wrong. This whole epidemic has been presided over by a ‘stress management’ industry. Managing what, exactly?

When my book, The Truth About Stress, was published in 2006, the New Statesman said of me: ‘Angela Patmore is widely regarded as a heartless bitch’. The reason was that I had presented 440 pages of evidence that the ‘stress’........

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