Magical thinking and irrational ideas concerning health

[Grimtina]

These are really extraordinary knowledge claims.

1. How much do you know about QM? For instance, how well do you understand the mathematical framework of the Standard Model?
2. How much do you know about telepathy? Zener cards are no longer considered valid. The dream telepathy studies have not been replicated. The Ganzfeld experiments are discredited. And experimenters have refused to release key data. Magicians are able to replicate the results without psi. Project Alpha revealed how easy it is for people to fool scientists, and the whole psi field is now more preoccupied with rationalizing their failures than doing science. Where are the results? The best you have is Rupert Sheldrake, and last I heard Richard Wiseman was claiming that was bunk too.
3. How do you know that time units are largely irrelevant when it comes to thought? We've known for over 150 years that neural signals travel at a finite speed. Faster than a bird, but slower than sound.

1 I do find the subject fascinating and follow it more than I follow astrophysics nowadays. Mathematics of any kind, however, as soon as formulas get involved, are lost on me thanks to this stupid discalculia. I don't mean simple ideas like E=mC² but those large monsters of formulas usually in half the field-specific works. And I know my particles.

2. I know a lot about my experiences, obviously, and that of some other people. Research, I haven't been up to date since Prof. Bender died Who had, btw been the only one to ever take me serious and try to help.

Those Zehner cards were always laughable. I could do them almost without failure by reading some other people's eye movements. You know their eyes following the symbols on the cards. Seeing just their lids was enough. Better yet when they wore glasses and the reflections showed. I'm not aware of any other tests because I think they may be all like that.

3 Have you ever had a dream that seemed to go on for days and it was really just one hour of sleep? Or have had ideas and thoughts on different levels and be aware of it (I was told that people usually aren#t aware)? Or had a whole lot of thoughts in a split sec, over here usually called thoughtflash?

You can have so many thoughts in a split second. It is very different form having to consciously think about them or even talk them out.

I know about the "faster than a bird slower than sound" stuff, but the methods used to test "thought" seem to be so off, especially as most researchers actually test reaction time. Now most people react to thoughts a lot slower than they have them. And removed neuro tissue to test with has no thoughts anymore - all you ever get is reaction time. As someone with a delayed pain response, I can say that the ijury is there before the pain reaches the brain. Asides, it looks like there is still no agreement as to what a thought exactly is. There is a lot of electrochemical activity without thought, after all.

[Grimtina]

3. Re: collagen being a supernductor: Ok. That I need a citation for. What critical temperature are we talking about?

This maybe?

It hasn't been proven to do ANYthing. Not in a good study, not in a double-blinded randomized study which is the gold standard for a good study. If you know of such a study, well... citation needed.

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/10660922
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/7575310
http://jrs.sagepub.com/content/81/8/456.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...14488677902436
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/10086765
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...53811902911456

But I guess all these are flawed studies to you

The observer effect has nothing to do with psychokinesis, or the other New Age Choprawoo you may have heard of. Listen to real scientists, people like Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene. You do not know anything about quantum mechanics.

And you determine what a "real" scientist is?

I haven't heard about the observer effect mentioned with psychokinesis but I'll look it up. Googling it however frustrated me because there seems to be no way to google for scientific articles.

[Jormengand]

But I guess all these are flawed studies to you

Only read the first one so far, but it concludes:

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE: This study must be replicated prior to advising patients about the efficacy of acupressure for the treatment of nausea.

[Serpentine]

I haven't heard about the observer effect mentioned with psychokinesis but I'll look it up. Googling it however frustrated me because there seems to be no way to google for scientific articles.

Google Scholar is pretty much the best thing in the world.

[Grimtina]

Aaah hey! Cool. I'm not a "good googler" thanks to my visual issues so this'll help sorting stuff a lot.

[Asta Kask]

1 I do find the subject fascinating and follow it more than I follow astrophysics nowadays. Mathematics of any kind, however, as soon as formulas get involved, are lost on me thanks to this stupid discalculia. I don't mean simple ideas like E=mC² but those large monsters of formulas usually in half the field-specific works. And I know my particles.

Then how can you have the faintest idea what quantum mechanics is close to discovering or not? You need math to get a good grasp

2. I know a lot about my experiences, obviously, and that of some other people. Research, I haven't been up to date since Prof. Bender died Who had, btw been the only one to ever take me serious and try to help.

Hey, I tried to answer your question. Don't I get partial credit?

Look, there are several reasons scientists don't like anecdotes. 1) they are, by definition, not controlled. 2) they are recorded long after the event - take your language story, how long has it been? 10 years? We know that memories don't remain stable for that long. We reform our memories to conform with our view of life. 3) there are so very many ways we deceive ourselves. 4) turns out that inducing false memories is very simple. Memories from 10 years ago, five years ago or even six months ago, are not reliable. See Mistakes were made, but not by me for some research on this.

3 Have you ever had a dream that seemed to go on for days and it was really just one hour of sleep? Or have had ideas and thoughts on different levels and be aware of it (I was told that people usually aren#t aware)? Or had a whole lot of thoughts in a split sec, over here usually called thoughtflash?

I know about the "faster than a bird slower than sound" stuff, but the methods used to test "thought" seem to be so off, especially as most researchers actually test reaction time. Now most people react to thoughts a lot slower than they have them. And removed neuro tissue to test with has no thoughts anymore - all you ever get is reaction time. As someone with a delayed pain response, I can say that the ijury is there before the pain reaches the brain. Asides, it looks like there is still no agreement as to what a thought exactly is. There is a lot of electrochemical activity without thought, after all.

The key word in the first sentence is seemed. There's at least one brain state that corresponds to the feeling of "this has gone on for a long time". That brain state can be triggered without it being called for (it happens sometimes in epilepsy). Who cares about how long it seems that it has gone on? What's important is how long it has actually been going on.

As for thought flashes... you have to remember that working memory isn't very large - the usual limitation found is that a person can hold [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory]6 to 8 separate items at one point[/quote]. Most of what is going on in the brain is actually subconscious. So when a slur of ideas appear it's sufficient to say that the flash of thoughts was prepared by "the guys downstairs" for a long time, and their memo just reached the conscious brain. I don't know how far we have come in studying this with more abstract thought, but we've been able to measure it for motor control [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet]since the 1980s.[/quote]

Also, I want to apologize if I have seemed harsh. I read through some of my notes and thought I was unnecessarily brash. I'm sorry about that, this is something I care deeply about and I get overexcited. So, sorry if anyone took offense.

[Chen]

Not to mention those first several papers are accupressure which is more similar to massage than accupuncture (aside the locations). I didn't see any conclusions comparing the accupressure with generalized massage which in and of itself could easily be a factor in reducing nausea.

Similarly there's an electric accupuncture paper there that seems to focus more on the electrical effect than the accupuncture effect. One of pure accupuncture papers had only one high methodology study produce any results and the conclusion again was that more data was needed to determine robustness of the data.

[Serpentine]

Aaah hey! Cool. I'm not a "good googler" thanks to my visual issues so this'll help sorting stuff a lot.

Was gonna edit in... I recommend looking for meta-analyses when you're searching for stuff. My quick search for acupuncture ranges from maybe positive to almost certainly negative.

[SiuiS]

Well, when someone misuses a word, there are two ways to go about it. You can go along with whatever incorrect definition you think they meant and further confuse the issue to spare them from having to learn the definition of a word, or you can explain the definition of the word involved and maybe the next time they have this conversation they will be able to make themselves more clear. You chose the former method; I chose the latter.

The only person evolving confusion is you, though. Sure, we're all using jargon, but we all understand the point. I try to avoid technicality and pedantry nowadays because it's so easy to go down the rabbit hole and insist on a technically correct point that doesn't actually matter.

I understand the whole pet peeve thing though.

It was a sentence I used in a post that replied to you - but I clearly did not attribute it to you. Just "people" in general. I've run across this particular misunderstanding/miscommunication many times.

Oh, I'm sorry then. I read it as more pointed.

Google Scholar is pretty much the best thing in the world.

Ooh, cool!

[Jormengand]

Regarding the acupuncture/acupressure/EA studies:

The first study admits its own conclusion is unreliable, and with good cause. Rejected.

The second study reaches its conclusion without a peer-rated study. Rejected.

The third study contains the line "Troublesome sickness was significantly less in both the genuine (23/119) and dummy (41/112) pressure groups as compared with the control series (67/119)." Placebo affect strikes again. Rejected.

The fourth, sadly, I cannot access in its entirety, only the first-page preview which tells me nothing, and can therefore be safely, you guessed it, rejected, until such time as the evidence is available for public viewing.

The fifth concludes: CONCLUSIONS: The limited amount of high-quality evidence suggests that real acupuncture is more effective than sham acupuncture for improving symptoms of patients with FMS. However, because this conclusion is based on a single high-quality study, further high-quality randomized trials are needed to provide more robust data on effectiveness. So we can reject that too.

The sixth seems to be telling me what it concluded without telling me how, or who else verified the experiment. Rejected.

These sources do not conform to the scientific method, and these scientists had better get their ducks in a row if they want to be taken seriously.

(Also, seventeen, sixty-four... what the hell? That's not enough for anyone to conclude anything! Sample size seventeen, my backside.)

That said, the idea that sticking needles in people has some health benefit would not be entirely surprising if it were proven by something slightly better. I mean, as was pointed out, massages certainly have psychological benefit, so I don't see why, in principle, acupuncture shouldn't, it's just that all the "Evidence" to prove it is sample-size-seventeen, non-peer-reviewed uncontrolled non-stratified unsubstantiated rubbish.

[Asta Kask]

Was gonna edit in... I recommend looking for meta-analyses when you're searching for stuff. My quick search for acupuncture ranges from maybe positive to almost certainly negative.

Just a word of caution - you need to look carefully at a meta-analysis and what choices they made before you can accept it. If they include a lot of small, poorly done studies that can sway the result easily. They are not very predictive of real well-done trials. Read them for the overview of the literature - that's often very good - but be wary of taking them as indicative of the literature ten or twenty years later.

Personally, I would take a well-put together, well-controlled, randomized and blinded study over all the meta-analyses in the world. But, as a said, useful to get a feel for the literature.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

As you should have gathere dby now (but i have the feeling you deliberately misunderstand me) Yes, it has provided me with such. That's why I keep telling you that there si no other possible explatnation, duh!

I'm not deliberately misunderstanding anything. You believe that this experience has provided you with meaningful grounds to claim telepathy, but from an outside, more objective perspective, it's no more conclusive than the déjà vu scenario

I never said anything about vague. It is anything but. I never said it has to be short, just that it usually is. And yeah, there can be a lot of context. And it can be very meaningful. Just as you can have 1000s of headlines in the news everyday but most things just don't really matter.

And what determines what "really matters"? If there are some articles on improved thorium reactors, the latest release of FreeBSD, or a new advance in true random number generation, for me those are exciting headlines that really matter because I'm heavily into physics and computing. To you? Basically noise, I'm guessing.

The only meaning inherent to the phenomena you experience is that which you subjectively attach to it.

I haven't heard about the observer effect mentioned with psychokinesis but I'll look it up.

The two have nothing to do with one another, as Asta already pointed out.

A major impediment in these sorts of discussions is that the simplified sound-bite pop-culture version of quantum mechanics (or any complex scientific field, really) often gives a skewed (if not outright incorrect) picture of the actual science. Everyone can tell you that E=mc² and that "Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead!"; not everyone can explain (or understand) Lorentz contraction or that the cat-in-a-box thing was intended as a reductio ad absurdum rather than an actual experiment.

The same is true in this case, where the observer effect has nothing to do with literal visual observation or conscious minds but it is conflated with psychokinesis because the pop-culture version of QM says that "looking a system changes the result" which is a drastic simplification in some ways and downright wrong in others.

Again as Asta said, if you don't have a grasp on the math, you don't have a grasp on QM. Taking the Discworld or Deepak Chopra route and declaring that things work "because quantum" just doesn't cut it.

[Asta Kask]

In the end we have to follow Hume's dictum and reject the greater miracle. What's more probable - that a person misremembers something which happened a long time ago* or that we need to re-write the laws of physics? The laws of physics will be re-written, of course, and if they allow for telepathy... so be it. It's not up to me to decide how the universe works (and that's a good thing!). But we need something more than anecdotes.

Also, miracles are more common than you think. If we define a miracle as "something which happens once in a billion years", then we have some 5-10 miracles happening on the planet every year.

*and people misremember things that happen a long time ago, even if the memory is a pivotal event for them

[Grimtina]

Then how can you have the faintest idea what quantum mechanics is close to discovering or not? You need math to get a good grasp

Stephen Hawking and develops most of his ideas visually, only using maths to show it to others. Everything we write down is just an expression of thought.

Hey, I tried to answer your question. Don't I get partial credit?

Hehe yeah

My dad says he still must have "the weird letter" from school about it somewhere, but of course he has no clue where exactly. 50 years of putting everything in binders and still...

Look, there are several reasons scientists don't like anecdotes. 1) they are, by definition, not controlled. 2) they are recorded long after the event - take your language story, how long has it been? 10 years? We know that memories don't remain stable for that long. We reform our memories to conform with our view of life. 3) there are so very many ways we deceive ourselves. 4) turns out that inducing false memories is very simple. Memories from 10 years ago, five years ago or even six months ago, are not reliable. See Mistakes were made, but not by me for some research on this.

If someone likes anecdotes or not is of very little consequence for people living the unexplainable/unprovable. And the most exhasperating part really is when those it doesn't happen to play it down or disregard it altogether. As with the pain example, you know it's happening. And even when you have witnesses, it#s the called mass hysteria, or false memory. It's the scientists who make what is going on fit with their world view as much as anyone else.

Not everyone forms false memories. What's very often called false memories refers to associations. Like when you show someone the words water, glass and toothbrush and later ask if thoothpaste has also been there, roughly half the people will agree it was. If you ask them if the word sheep was there, very few do. That makes a lot of sense because it is necessary for us to expect groups of things to appear together. Helps to avoid some dangers, too (road, traffic light - car). What's called interference is also part of this, we try to fit past experiences together with new ones. And lastly, in some cases, people do not actually misremember, they just conform. Sometimes without knowing. If a group of people claims to have seen or heard something when another was supposedly present, the 6th guy might agree just to not seen as stupid or to avid confrontation. Same about those tests where people are asked to confirm events from their childhood. When a relative of mine flat out asked his study objects if they just pretended to remember those false events to not admit bad memory, quite a few of them admitted to it. Suggesting to someone they have not seen something as they have (done a lot in criminal trials, unfortunately) also makes some people believe they are wrong about something when they aren't. Sometimes, a patronizing voice is enough to suggest to people what they claim can't possibly be true. Planting false memories is especially easy when there are already some correlating memories available. If you've played a lot in the forest as a child,you will have been alone often enough to have memories of it. Telling you you once were lost in the woods will be a lot more effective than claiming the same for a city kid which hardly ever saw a tree. The more important and memorable an event is, the less likely it seems to fall for it. Exception, if false memories are added by people who shared the same event and stay close to each other.

A good indicator about a memory being false or not seems to be how much it recalled when asked to write it down or describe it in their own words. False memories prodced fewer descriptions, because it was mostly a repeat and recolor of what people had been told. There are a few exceptions, some people just make up additional stuff, and it's not always clear if they do it to not admit having no own memories or because their brains run away with association.

The majority of people is able to distinguish the deliberately implanted memories from their true ones once they have been asked to describe it in their own words.

The key word in the first sentence is seemed. There's at least one brain state that corresponds to the feeling of "this has gone on for a long time". That brain state can be triggered without it being called for (it happens sometimes in epilepsy). Who cares about how long it seems that it has gone on? What's important is how long it has actually been going on.

That is exactly my point.

As for thought flashes... you have to remember that working memory isn't very large - the usual limitation found is that a person can hold [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory]6 to 8 separate items at one point

. Most of what is going on in the brain is actually subconscious. So when a slur of ideas appear it's sufficient to say that the flash of thoughts was prepared by "the guys downstairs" for a long time, and their memo just reached the conscious brain. I don't know how far we have come in studying this with more abstract thought, but we've been able to measure it for motor control [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet]since the 1980s.[/quote]

Yes, don't think my flashes are ever more than a handful of concepts to begin with, but it is more than I can conciously think about. The point is that "time" in regards to how long a telepathic contact may be and how much information might be transfered doesn't follow a flow chart.

Also, I want to apologize if I have seemed harsh. I read through some of my notes and thought I was unnecessarily brash. I'm sorry about that, this is something I care deeply about and I get overexcited. So, sorry if anyone took offense.

I care very deeply about it, too. I just wish everyone would experience something not explainable by curent science, so this denial would end. I also wish the whole host of new age chaos would disappear from the face of the earth because the yahoos inventing new world views all the time are much to blame for the dismissal of real experiences.

[Brother Oni]

Really glad to be in Europe then. Much better regulation here.

Although people tend to overdose on vitamins, and by a lot. All that stuff can be bought in supermarkets which I think should not be allowed. I take my vitamins and minerals due to deficiencies and even then I have regular level checks.

Depends on the product type. Actual pharmaceuticals (ie stuff that you have to get from a doctor or a pharmacy) are better regulated in the US. As for vitamin overdoses, depends very much on the vitamin - anything water soluble are generally harmless (eg. Vitamin C) while fat soluble stuff (eg Vitamin A) are more problematic.

That said vitamin supplements tend to have fairly low bio-availability anyway.

That said, the idea that sticking needles in people has some health benefit would not be entirely surprising if it were proven by something slightly better. I mean, as was pointed out, massages certainly have psychological benefit, so I don't see why, in principle, acupuncture shouldn't, it's just that all the "Evidence" to prove it is sample-size-seventeen, non-peer-reviewed uncontrolled non-stratified unsubstantiated rubbish.

First in Man clinical trials usually have even less numbers and that information is used to approve further and larger trials. I'm not contesting the rest of it, just that a small sample size isn't inherently bad for a study depending on what information you want out of it.

I concede that n=17 isn't great for proving or dis-proving the effectiveness of acupuncture though.

[Gnomvid]

As for thought flashes... you have to remember that working memory isn't very large - the usual limitation found is that a person can hold [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory]6 to 8 separate items at one point

. Most of what is going on in the brain is actually subconscious. So when a slur of ideas appear it's sufficient to say that the flash of thoughts was prepared by "the guys downstairs" for a long time, and their memo just reached the conscious brain. I don't know how far we have come in studying this with more abstract thought, but we've been able to measure it for motor control [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet]since the 1980s.[/quote]

Wikipedia is not a reliable source of facts as anybody with a keyboard can edit it at any time, so if you really need to prove something don't quote wikipedia it does not hold up in court.

[Asta Kask]

Wikipedia is accessible to everyone. But if you prefer, I can dig out Gazzaniga's The New Cognitive Neurosciences and recommend that you read the chapters on Consciousness.

I can also recommend d'Amasio's The Feeling of what happens for a more popular-science approach.

I have read them both. Have you?

[Grimtina]

I'm not deliberately misunderstanding anything. You believe that this experience has provided you with meaningful grounds to claim telepathy, but from an outside, more objective perspective, it's no more conclusive than the déjà vu scenario

And what determines what "really matters"? If there are some articles on improved thorium reactors, the latest release of FreeBSD, or a new advance in true random number generation, for me those are exciting headlines that really matter because I'm heavily into physics and computing. To you? Basically noise, I'm guessing.

The only meaning inherent to the phenomena you experience is that which you subjectively attach to it.

How do you not deliberately misunderstand me when you ignore my Japan example? OK, maybe you aren't able to transfer from one example to another. So here's an abstract.

A suddenly has the image of a panicked B stuck somewhere in mind. The image doesn't go away, so A goes to where B is shown stuck more to stop the image than anything else and finds B indeed stuck.

A while later, A sees the same image just with a blurred face, goes there again and finds someone else stuck in the same place.

The day B dies, A and C get an image of an envelope behind a painting A didn't even know B had. Checking it out, the envelope is really there.


There's just nothing else to explain this. Nothing is vague about it. It doesn't even only involve only 2 people. Yet of course, it is ignored because it isn't anything you can reproduce. You can't reproduce the crash of the Malaysian airliner either and yet is has happened.

So, I know what I know. You can't accept it, that's obvious. It doesn't make it any less real.

[Grimtina]

As for vitamin overdoses, depends very much on the vitamin - anything water soluble are generally harmless (eg. Vitamin C) while fat soluble stuff (eg Vitamin A) are more problematic.

That said vitamin supplements tend to have fairly low bio-availability anyway.

I used to think that. Until I learned that vitamin C overdoses can cause kidney stones.

[Gnomvid]

Wikipedia is accessible to everyone. But if you prefer, I can dig out Gazzaniga's The New Cognitive Neurosciences and recommend that you read the chapters on Consciousness.

I can also recommend d'Amasio's The Feeling of what happens for a more popular-science approach.

I have read them both. Have you?

Please do as that at least is reliable, wikipedia is good for getting an overview but you cannot take it at it's face value due to everyone being able to access and edit it, so even if there's a quote on wikipedia there's no way to guarantee that quote is what was actually said/written by the quoted.

And no I have no as I have no interest in it.

[Asta Kask]

Hey, at least I give citations. Has anyone else?

[Gnomvid]

Well yes Grimtina has unfortunately also wikipedia though

[Asta Kask]

Well yes Grimtina has unfortunately also wikipedia though

Still, Wikipedia is fairly good.

[Grimtina]

There is a very large difference between unexplained and unexplainable. The fact that a given phenomenon doesn't have a definite explanation doesn't mean we should resort to the supernatural by default.



I can think of one very good explanation for all of these hypotheticals: coincidence. Yes, really. Let's say a given coincidence was so unlikely that it only had a one-in-seven-billion chance of happening to a given individual on a given day. On average, such a coincidence will occur somewhere in the world every day (to reiterate, on average, not like clockwork). How unlikely does something have to be before someone starts to think it's spooky? One-in-one-hundred-thousand for a given day? Seventy-thousand occurances around the world per day on average. And let's not get into how often any given person will have random thoughts and daydreams that don't come true. We assign retroactive significance to the coincidences that happen to be meanignful to us, whilst completely forgetting about all of the random weird thoughts, feelings of premonition, strange images that pop into our head etc. that don't connect to anything that happens or lead anywhere.

As everything is part of nature, again, nothing can be supernatural.

Ah yes, the infinite monkeys. *facepalm*

"Coincidence" is the unlikely last resort to make things fit into one's worldview. You could as well say it is coincidence someone's pregnant after doing the deed. Could have happened anyhow.

I don't know about daydreams, I don't think I have any (not sure about the definition) but there is a clear difference in regards of a random thought and a clear image coming out of nowhere.

[Eldan]

The difference is the provable causal link between sex and pregnancy. We can look at every step in between, make hypotheses and test them. We can not do that, so far, with telepathy.

[Gnomvid]

Still, Wikipedia is fairly good.

Yes but not good enough to use as a base for any academic work, at least when I recently took some UNI courses here we were highly discouraged to use it as a base for any work we did as even 86% is not reliable enough.

[Asta Kask]

I'm not sure we can call posting here academic work, though.

Anyway, Grimtina, something odd happened today. I was going to have a friend over and it was raining really hard. When I spoke to her I said "I just hope the weather clears up." And she agreed. And it did, fifteen minutes or so before she was coming over. So, was that a coincidence or can I control the weather with my mind? And how can we distinguish between these two cases?

(I hate this the Secret crap about how you can get everything if you just wish hard enough because observer effect quantum vibrations. The implications are just detestable.)

[Grimtina]

There is a lot of weather in the world that keeps clearing up. Why would that be strange? There is only one person who died, leaving only one envelope beind one specific picture. Big, big difference.

Now if everyone who died would leave an envelope behind a picture then yeah, coincidence is possible. But that's not going on. Nor do people keep getting stuck in that drain all the time.

[Grimtina]

I find scenario one as unlikely.

[Brother Oni]

I used to think that. Until I learned that vitamin C overdoses can cause kidney stones.

Only because ascorbic acid can potentially acidify urine, which is true for overdoses of any acid and not Vitamin C specifically.

I'm surprised you're not saying Vitamin C can cause death (70kg human would need ~833g in a single dose) and using that against me.