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I can certainly believe that there is more going on than just stress, and the argument that compression waves travelling through the brain can damage it is pretty compelling. The question then is how would you block it? How would you protect yourself from a compression (blast) wave such that it went "around" your head rather than through it. Is there some material that could conduct that energy preferentially?
With a background in philosophy and neuroscience, I cringe at articles like this drawing a distinction psychological and physical. They are simply the same thing.
This is not the accepted wisdom on the subject. The accepted wisdom is: "we don't have any evidence that these things are separate, so for now, while the jury is still out, we consider psychological and physical well-being to be equivalent".
I can certainly believe that there is more going on than just stress, and the argument that compression waves travelling through the brain can damage it is pretty compelling. The question then is how would you block it? How would you protect yourself from a compression (blast) wave such that it went "around" your head rather than through it. Is there some material that could conduct that energy preferentially?
Stop sending people to war would help
A historical quibble with the article, It was first known as shell shock, then combat fatigue and finally PTSD, and in each case, it was almost universally understood as a psychic rather than a physical affliction. This underplays a pretty significant history of doctors considering it a physical condition, as the old name "shell shock" itself suggests. The article does mention one such doctor, Fredrick Mott, but ther…
I kept thinking it would be more interesting (and aligned to the headline) to look at PTSD sufferers brains when they didn't have a known physical injury to their brains.
With a background in philosophy and neuroscience, I cringe at articles like this drawing a distinction psychological and physical. They are simply the same thing.
Do you debug your code with a microscope and soldering iron? Layers of abstraction are useful, especially when we don't fully understand how the hardware works.
One day, perhaps, we will understand how all the layers interact well enough. But until then, we need the descriptive and diagnostic and prescriptive techniques provided by those abstractions.
What if not only PTSD but all psychological phenomena were, by their very nature, rooted in the physical chemistry of the brain? How bizarre would that be?
I found this article interesting but frustrating. Conflating PTSD (a mental illness that is caused by traumatic experience) with concussive traumatic brain injury isn't helpful. I kept thinking it would be more interesting (and aligned to the headline) to look at PTSD sufferers brains when they didn't have a known physical injury to their brains.
This is an additional mechanism, heretofore unidentified, causing a significantly different injury than concussion.
With a background in philosophy and neuroscience, I cringe at articles like this drawing a distinction psychological and physical. They are simply the same thing.
It's still a useful distinction. That's like saying all software is hardware because the bits and bytes are stored in magnetic moments on hard drives etc... Or that biology and chemistry are the same thing because all living things are made of chemicals. Sure, there's some overlap, but the fields are still very distinct. Not to mention that the physiology of the mind isn't very well known. Physicalism of the mind isn…
The line may be hard to draw, but we are probably better off trying to draw it so that we don't take too many unnecessary drugs or have invasive surgeries when there are other solutions...