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Myths about how the brain works

nautil.us

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Re: Myths about how the brain works

#91

Post by hntrader »

adolph wrote: post #75
devindotcom wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychiatrists are doctors who prescribe substances that have been closely studied - but their effects may be easily and specifically understood, their mechanisms may not be. Lithium is a great example - very effective treatment for bipolar. No one really knows why. Prescribed for decades as they've tried to figure it out because tests showed it was effective and relatively safe, just no one knew exactly what it was d…

The discovery of it is pretty interesting. Lithium-rich mineral springs have historically been touted for their healing properties. It was first used for mania in the late 1800s, with Denmark leading the way, but little was published about the medication for more than half a century. https://www.verywellmind.com/lithium-the-first-mood-stabiliz...

This is a good argument as to why we should look closely at traditional medicines of various cultures. We (1) coevolved with this stuff and (2) have gone through generations of trial and error.

I'm a believer in modern scientific medicine, but think we often have it backwards. Before reinventing the wheel we should exhaustively test what we used traditionally. Maybe the reason we don't do much of that is that it's not possible to patent, and so there's no financial incentive to do so?

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#92

Post by carabiner »

teucris wrote: post #90

The central thesis is excellent, but this really caught my eye: > Depression is usually catalogued as a mental illness, but it’s as much a metabolic illness as cardiovascular disease, which itself has significant mood-related symptoms. These two diseases occur together so often that some medical researchers believe that one may cause the other. That perspective is steeped in Cartesian dualism. Both depression and car…

I wish this to be true. I'm in excellent cardiovascular health - low BP, 60 bpm resting heart rate, extensive cardio/endurance activity 4-5 days per week. Utterly miserable every waking hour.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#93

Post by lukas099 »

OrbitRock wrote: post #88
devindotcom wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a minor in neuro and had a very similar experience. Fascinating and useful but it was always slightly alarming when the professor would answer a question with "I don't know.. no one knows. That is far beyond the limits of our capabilities to know." A reminder that scientists really do work at the edge of ignorance!

That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people. We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all. Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse. An example from the field I’m in — biology…

The major questions of biology have already been solved, though. The rest is filling in the details.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#94

Post by lukas099 »

pessimizer wrote: post #37
steverb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would further add that those oversimplified concepts of how the brain works have hung around because they are useful for us as an abstraction to think about how our brain works. They may be bad abstractions at a lower level of detail, but for general purposes they seem to be useful enough.

What are they useful for, though? The usefulness of wrong models, and why they hang around so long, mainly seems to be to provide income to people selling solutions. Solutions offered based on bad simple metaphorical models have the benefit of being intuitive, so they stick around. Theory-theory is the Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to common sense.

They are useful as a standard way to talk about the brain. If I say I am 'right-brained' in casual conversation, most people in my culture know what I mean.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#95

Post by lukas099 »

carabiner wrote: post #92
teucris wrote: post #90

The central thesis is excellent, but this really caught my eye: > Depression is usually catalogued as a mental illness, but it’s as much a metabolic illness as cardiovascular disease, which itself has significant mood-related symptoms. These two diseases occur together so often that some medical researchers believe that one may cause the other. That perspective is steeped in Cartesian dualism. Both depression and car…

I wish this to be true. I'm in excellent cardiovascular health - low BP, 60 bpm resting heart rate, extensive cardio/endurance activity 4-5 days per week. Utterly miserable every waking hour.

I am so sorry to hear that and I hope you are able to get any help that you need.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

lukas099 wrote: post #93
OrbitRock wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people. We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all. Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse. An example from the field I’m in — biology…

The major questions of biology have already been solved, though. The rest is filling in the details.

What? This very thread is about an article talking about the lack of accuracy in our model of the brain's mechanisms.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#97

Post by goatlover »

lukas099 wrote: post #93
OrbitRock wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people. We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all. Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse. An example from the field I’m in — biology…

The major questions of biology have already been solved, though. The rest is filling in the details.

This doesn’t seem to be true at least for the nervous and immune systems. Probably also the microbiome we host. There’s lots of important stuff yet to be learned with those systems.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#98

Post by pattt »

I'm not somebody well informed about neuroscience hence apologies if I'm implying something that's against the common knowledge in your domain. One impression upon reading articles like these seems to be that there's a lot of research and curiosity about the way brain works together but the core model of "brain is composed of communicating neurons" seems to be generally accepted. Does that suggest that we already understand how a single neuron behaves in isolation? I'm mainly interested in the microscale model from the perspective of simulation, for example in the Wiki page of the Human Brain Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project) among the obstacles it's mentioned that "detailed neuron representations are very computationally expensive", does it mean that we already cracked the microscale, i.e., defined exactly how a neuron behaves in a computational (mathematical) model? Perhaps the substantial intricacies of the brain can also arise in the microscale level depending on cellular mechanisms, nutrition and other side effects?

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#99

Post by itronitron »

hn_asker wrote: post #61
lycopodiopsida wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hac…

Yet somehow Pharma can prescribe drugs that affect the brain's functions. How do they get away with that knowing so little about the brain?

You might be interested in reading about Stuart Hammeroff who is an anesthesiologist and professor focused on studies of consciousness...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#100

Post by pvarangot »

vlunkr wrote: post #66
hn_asker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet somehow Pharma can prescribe drugs that affect the brain's functions. How do they get away with that knowing so little about the brain?

They give random drugs to rats until something happens.

And then to humans
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