Sunday, June 04, 2006
Placebos and the truth about time
I'm finally starting to catch up with my backlog of Discover magazines; I was REALLY behind... my husband keeps asking me if I've gotten to the articles about fire and the wheel yet. In the April issue I've found a couple of fascinating things; the 1st one is about just how powerfully the mind affects the body:
"Placebo vs Placebo"
"Medical researcher Ted Kaptchuk pitted two types of fake medicine--sugar pills and pretend acupuncture--against each other to see which one worked better. He recruited 266 volunteers suffering from chronic arm pain, which they rated at least a 3 on a 10-point scale.
133 subjects received acupuncture with trick needles whose tips retract so they don't penetrate the skin. The other 133 subjects were prescribed blue cornstarch pills that resembled amitriptyline, an antidepressant often prescribed for repetitive strain injury.
25 percent of the acupuncture group experienced side effects from the nonexistent needle pricks, including 19 people who felt pain and 4 whose skin became red or swollen. 31 percent of the pill group experienced side effects from the make-believe drug, including dizziness, restlessness, rashes, headaches, nausea, and 4 cases of nightmares. Dry mouth and fatigue were the most common side effects, and 3 subjects withdrew from the study after reducing the dosage failed to control their symptoms. The reported side effects exactly matched those described by the doctors at the beginning of the study."
Can you BELIEVE all the symptoms some people managed to psych themselves into feeling? Even more amazing is how they somehow got their bodies to manifest PHYSICAL changes; can you imagine getting redness, swelling and rashes from NOTHING? People who insist that they get all sorts of bad reactions even from substances proven to be totally harmless, like aspartame (see my post of 7-17-05), and claim that this proves they're harmFUL, please take note; just because you experience symptoms does NOT mean that whatever you think caused them actually did anything to you.
The more familiar response to placebos happened in the study too, of course:
"After 10 weeks, subjects taking sham pills said their pain decreased an average of 1.50 points on the 10-point scale. After 8 weeks, those receiving fake acupuncture reported a drop of 2.64 points. In other words, not receiving acupuncture reduces pain more than not taking drugs."
Why didn't the 2 placebos have the same amount of success?
"Kaptchuk says that the rituals of medicine explain the difference: Performing acupuncture is more elaborate than prescribing medicine."
We all consider ourselves to be very tough-minded, but in reality we're powerfully influenced by a wide variety of things... and are unaware that the influences are taking place, which makes us certain that what we feel and think comes straight from inside us-the advertising industry depends on it. The next time someone tells you with absolute sincerity that X makes them sick and Y cures them, take it with a grain of salt if they don't have science on their side.
The REALLY mindblowing article is this one:
"The Future of Time"
"Neurobiologists are slowly coming to realize that 'real time' is just a convention foisted upon us by our brains."
How many times have *I* said that? Theoretical physicists have been making this point for a while now, but it hasn't had any trace of impact on the general public's understanding; maybe getting the same message from medical science will shake a few people up.
"To understand how fundamentally your brain bends time, try this trick: Tap your finger on the table once. Because light outraces sound, the audio tap should register a few milliseconds after the sight of it; yet your brain synchronizes the two to make them seem simultaneous. A similar process occurs when you see someone speak to you from several feet away--thankfully so, or our days would unravel like a badly dubbed movie."
This is so OBVIOUS once it's explained, but I never thought about it before; I don't know which freaks me out more, the realization that I missed something so basic in my attempts to determine what's "really real," or the realization that a huge % of what I perceive each day is made up of sight/sound combos that simply do not exist as they appear to me.
"'The brain lives just a little bit in the past,' says David Eagleman, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Houston. 'The brain collects a lot of information, waits, then it stitches a story together. "Now" actually happened a little while ago.' Or rather, our brains live in the now, and we live in the future, without even knowing it. What we call causal reality is like one of those live TV shows with a built-in time delay for the censors."
We can't even tell accurately what "now" is; the very thought makes me a little woozy.
"To be intelligible, though, even the crummiest TV show requires an editor with keen timing. The same goes for our brains. Some medical disabilities are now thought to be the result of faulty timing mechanisms. Certain brain lesions, like those in Parkinson's sufferers, are known to disrupt timing patterns essential to clear speech. Many neuroscientists suspect that dyslexia and aphasia are not language disorders but timing problems."
That's nothing short of revolutionary. And what about another horrific medical problem, insanity; do some crazy people have "timing" problems... or can having timing problems DRIVE you crazy?
"'Time is one of the many, many illusions that the brain bestows upon us,' says Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA. How it does that is not yet clear, he says. Researchers long believed the brain was ruled by a single clock that kept all its disparate activities in sync, like a pacemaker that sends out a regular pulse--a sort of cerebral Greenwich mean time. But scientists are learning that there is no central clock. Instead, the brain contains lots of little clocks all running at independent rates yet linked by a network."
Like every other aspect of bodily functioning, every one of those clocks can be messed up in varying ways and degrees, not to mention combinations... and what effect would that have? Is it possible that all of our clocks work exactly the same from person to person, or do we each have slightly different internal rhythms... and maybe even perceive some aspects of time a little bit differently?
Can our perception of time be deliberately altered? Brace yourselves:
"Not long ago, Eagleman became intrigued by the stories one hears of people who experience time slowing--during a car crash, say. (Eagleman himself entered slo-mo briefly as a child, when he fell off a roof.) He wondered: What's really going on? Does the experience gain added vividness only afterward, as it's being recalled? Or does a person's perception of time truly slow down enough to absorb extra information?
Eagleman designed a test. He built a small LED screen that flashed a series of numbers too quickly to comprehend.
He attached the screen to his subjects' wrists, clipped a bungee cord to their legs, and had them jump backward, one by one, off a 150-foot tower--a fairly terrifying experience for the uninitiated. To his surprise, his jumpers (all two of them; the experiment is ongoing and the results preliminary) were able to read the flashing numbers on the way down--evidence that a brain under duress can warp time. 'It's like the brain has a reserve capacity,' he says.
'But like everything, it works as slowly as it can get away with.'" (You can watch him doing this experiment, with a net instead of a bungee cord, on a program called "Time: Daytime" on the Discovery Science Channel.)
WOW!! Or should that be "OW," as in "that's so wild it's making my head hurt?" No scientist would consider 2 results to be conclusive, but if even ONE person can do that #-reading thing, that's significant; our brains, or at the very least some people's brains, can essentially give us "more time" to handle scary situations... which adds evidence to the idea that time in general is a creation of our minds.
We possess primitive senses designed to locate food and avoid danger, NOT to provide us with an accurate representation of the world/universe, and our brains are designed to filter out most of the input we DO receive and splice together the rest in a way that lets us function easily, NOT in a way that helps us understand the way things really work; as a result, our concept of reality is limited and distorted. If they ever invent a device that CAN fully perceive reality, and can send all the details of it into our minds directly while blocking the parts of the brain that mold our worldview... what do you suppose the universe will turn out to actually be like?
"Placebo vs Placebo"
"Medical researcher Ted Kaptchuk pitted two types of fake medicine--sugar pills and pretend acupuncture--against each other to see which one worked better. He recruited 266 volunteers suffering from chronic arm pain, which they rated at least a 3 on a 10-point scale.
133 subjects received acupuncture with trick needles whose tips retract so they don't penetrate the skin. The other 133 subjects were prescribed blue cornstarch pills that resembled amitriptyline, an antidepressant often prescribed for repetitive strain injury.
25 percent of the acupuncture group experienced side effects from the nonexistent needle pricks, including 19 people who felt pain and 4 whose skin became red or swollen. 31 percent of the pill group experienced side effects from the make-believe drug, including dizziness, restlessness, rashes, headaches, nausea, and 4 cases of nightmares. Dry mouth and fatigue were the most common side effects, and 3 subjects withdrew from the study after reducing the dosage failed to control their symptoms. The reported side effects exactly matched those described by the doctors at the beginning of the study."
Can you BELIEVE all the symptoms some people managed to psych themselves into feeling? Even more amazing is how they somehow got their bodies to manifest PHYSICAL changes; can you imagine getting redness, swelling and rashes from NOTHING? People who insist that they get all sorts of bad reactions even from substances proven to be totally harmless, like aspartame (see my post of 7-17-05), and claim that this proves they're harmFUL, please take note; just because you experience symptoms does NOT mean that whatever you think caused them actually did anything to you.
The more familiar response to placebos happened in the study too, of course:
"After 10 weeks, subjects taking sham pills said their pain decreased an average of 1.50 points on the 10-point scale. After 8 weeks, those receiving fake acupuncture reported a drop of 2.64 points. In other words, not receiving acupuncture reduces pain more than not taking drugs."
Why didn't the 2 placebos have the same amount of success?
"Kaptchuk says that the rituals of medicine explain the difference: Performing acupuncture is more elaborate than prescribing medicine."
We all consider ourselves to be very tough-minded, but in reality we're powerfully influenced by a wide variety of things... and are unaware that the influences are taking place, which makes us certain that what we feel and think comes straight from inside us-the advertising industry depends on it. The next time someone tells you with absolute sincerity that X makes them sick and Y cures them, take it with a grain of salt if they don't have science on their side.
The REALLY mindblowing article is this one:
"The Future of Time"
"Neurobiologists are slowly coming to realize that 'real time' is just a convention foisted upon us by our brains."
How many times have *I* said that? Theoretical physicists have been making this point for a while now, but it hasn't had any trace of impact on the general public's understanding; maybe getting the same message from medical science will shake a few people up.
"To understand how fundamentally your brain bends time, try this trick: Tap your finger on the table once. Because light outraces sound, the audio tap should register a few milliseconds after the sight of it; yet your brain synchronizes the two to make them seem simultaneous. A similar process occurs when you see someone speak to you from several feet away--thankfully so, or our days would unravel like a badly dubbed movie."
This is so OBVIOUS once it's explained, but I never thought about it before; I don't know which freaks me out more, the realization that I missed something so basic in my attempts to determine what's "really real," or the realization that a huge % of what I perceive each day is made up of sight/sound combos that simply do not exist as they appear to me.
"'The brain lives just a little bit in the past,' says David Eagleman, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Houston. 'The brain collects a lot of information, waits, then it stitches a story together. "Now" actually happened a little while ago.' Or rather, our brains live in the now, and we live in the future, without even knowing it. What we call causal reality is like one of those live TV shows with a built-in time delay for the censors."
We can't even tell accurately what "now" is; the very thought makes me a little woozy.
"To be intelligible, though, even the crummiest TV show requires an editor with keen timing. The same goes for our brains. Some medical disabilities are now thought to be the result of faulty timing mechanisms. Certain brain lesions, like those in Parkinson's sufferers, are known to disrupt timing patterns essential to clear speech. Many neuroscientists suspect that dyslexia and aphasia are not language disorders but timing problems."
That's nothing short of revolutionary. And what about another horrific medical problem, insanity; do some crazy people have "timing" problems... or can having timing problems DRIVE you crazy?
"'Time is one of the many, many illusions that the brain bestows upon us,' says Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA. How it does that is not yet clear, he says. Researchers long believed the brain was ruled by a single clock that kept all its disparate activities in sync, like a pacemaker that sends out a regular pulse--a sort of cerebral Greenwich mean time. But scientists are learning that there is no central clock. Instead, the brain contains lots of little clocks all running at independent rates yet linked by a network."
Like every other aspect of bodily functioning, every one of those clocks can be messed up in varying ways and degrees, not to mention combinations... and what effect would that have? Is it possible that all of our clocks work exactly the same from person to person, or do we each have slightly different internal rhythms... and maybe even perceive some aspects of time a little bit differently?
Can our perception of time be deliberately altered? Brace yourselves:
"Not long ago, Eagleman became intrigued by the stories one hears of people who experience time slowing--during a car crash, say. (Eagleman himself entered slo-mo briefly as a child, when he fell off a roof.) He wondered: What's really going on? Does the experience gain added vividness only afterward, as it's being recalled? Or does a person's perception of time truly slow down enough to absorb extra information?
Eagleman designed a test. He built a small LED screen that flashed a series of numbers too quickly to comprehend.
He attached the screen to his subjects' wrists, clipped a bungee cord to their legs, and had them jump backward, one by one, off a 150-foot tower--a fairly terrifying experience for the uninitiated. To his surprise, his jumpers (all two of them; the experiment is ongoing and the results preliminary) were able to read the flashing numbers on the way down--evidence that a brain under duress can warp time. 'It's like the brain has a reserve capacity,' he says.
'But like everything, it works as slowly as it can get away with.'" (You can watch him doing this experiment, with a net instead of a bungee cord, on a program called "Time: Daytime" on the Discovery Science Channel.)
WOW!! Or should that be "OW," as in "that's so wild it's making my head hurt?" No scientist would consider 2 results to be conclusive, but if even ONE person can do that #-reading thing, that's significant; our brains, or at the very least some people's brains, can essentially give us "more time" to handle scary situations... which adds evidence to the idea that time in general is a creation of our minds.
We possess primitive senses designed to locate food and avoid danger, NOT to provide us with an accurate representation of the world/universe, and our brains are designed to filter out most of the input we DO receive and splice together the rest in a way that lets us function easily, NOT in a way that helps us understand the way things really work; as a result, our concept of reality is limited and distorted. If they ever invent a device that CAN fully perceive reality, and can send all the details of it into our minds directly while blocking the parts of the brain that mold our worldview... what do you suppose the universe will turn out to actually be like?
