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Rat Park

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Re: Rat Park

#11

Post by chrisBob »

api wrote: post #8
nemothekid wrote: post #5

Reminds me of reddit comment I once read of someone's experience with heroin - http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...

I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by...

My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."

Re: Rat Park

#13

Post by hiringthrowaway »

nemothekid wrote: post #5

Reminds me of reddit comment I once read of someone's experience with heroin - http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...

As a corollary, I remember trying opium whilst on a nice long career break overseas, and being frankly pretty underwhelmed.... and then considering whether I might have thought otherwise if I'd had any source of stress or dissatisfaction in my life whatsoever at the time.

[of course the alternate hypothesis is that what I was being supplied with wasn't opium, but I prefer the first one...]

Re: Rat Park

#14

Post by b_emery »

From near the bottom: "Some further studies failed to reproduce the original experiment's results, but in at least one of these studies[12] both caged and "park" rats showed a decreased preference for morphine, suggesting a genetic difference"

Still, it's an intriguing result. The reviewer comments from science and nature would make interesting reading - too bad they are not public.

Re: Rat Park

#15

Post by kbenson »

b_emery wrote: post #14

From near the bottom: "Some further studies failed to reproduce the original experiment's results, but in at least one of these studies[12] both caged and "park" rats showed a decreased preference for morphine, suggesting a genetic difference" Still, it's an intriguing result. The reviewer comments from science and nature would make interesting reading - too bad they are not public.

But also, from the immediately preceding paragraph: "Several later studies did appear to confirm its findings — for example, Bozarth, Murray and Wise in 1989, also published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior — but nothing came of those either."

That paints a confusing picture, so without looking at the specifics of the later studies for possible differences, I think it's hard to come to a conclusion.

Re: Rat Park

#16

Post by bjourne »

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089

It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views?

The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results and found that they confirmed his hypothesis. It's not a good way to do research. The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason. Because their results were tainted by their designer.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.

Re: Rat Park

#17

Post by ufmace »

api wrote: post #8
nemothekid wrote: post #5

Reminds me of reddit comment I once read of someone's experience with heroin - http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...

I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by...

I remember talking to somebody in the medical industry once. I don't remember exactly what his job was, but he told me that he had done some work with opiate addicts. Supposedly, their brains themselves can get so powerfully addicted to the drugs that it actually generates phantom pain in order to force the user to get more opiates to make it go away. Every test they can run shows that the addict is actually feeling real pain, but there is absolutely nothing physically wrong to cause it. The idea that the brain can work on that level, actually causing artificial sensations to trick our conscious mind, is both amazing and scary.

Re: Rat Park

#18

Post by SapphireSun »

chrisBob wrote: post #11
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by...

My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."

That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I've never heard of this particular effect before though it sounds plausible to me.

Re: Rat Park

#19

Post by shutupalready »

bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089 It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views? The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experimen…

> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results

That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out:

"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions." -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign, but that's a separate matter.)

Re: Rat Park

#20

Post by api »

SapphireSun wrote: post #18
chrisBob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."

That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I'…

I wondered a while back if (theoretically) taking some kind of non-harmful but pain stimulating compound might not make you feel awesome the rest of the time, and might even be good for you by recalibrating your inflammatory response and such.
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