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Rat Park

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Re: Rat Park

#41

Post by sjf »

api wrote: post #20
SapphireSun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BDSM has been shown to improve mental health in a number of ways. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12192/abstrac...

Re: Rat Park

#42

Post by stefantalpalaru »

MichaelGG wrote: post #35
ufmace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forget physical pain. Opiates make the mental pain, the pain of existence go away. Stress, business problems, finances, it's all manageable with opiates. Most people don't know just how much better human existence can be with a bit of tweaking to our chemistry. We accept we're no longer in our ancestral environment, why can't we accept that our default chemistry is suboptimal?

Suboptimal in what way? We create, develop, improve because we are unsatisfied, not because we are happy.

Re: Rat Park

#43

Post by kbenson »

bjourne wrote: post #23
kbenson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia isn't so good when it comes to drug related topics. Or rather, it is atrocious since the linked study ( http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/HOUSING.html ) arrives at the completely opposite result Wikipedia claims. It's an interesting read because it also discusses why setting up a study to fairly measure voluntary drug intake among groups of mice is very hard.

After reading portions of that study, I find it hard to make meaningful comparisons across them. The cited source's two conditions seem to be fairly close in many respects IMHO:

"The first group was housed in individual stainless steel cages (18 x 25 x 18 cm) that prevented tactile and visual contact among the rats."

"The second condition consisted of rats housed in groups of 10 in a large stainless steel cage (45 x 101 x 39 cm) that permitted social contact; these rats displayed normal play behavior, dominance struggles, and social grooming."

Okay, one rat in 450 cm^2 vs 10 rats in 4545 cm^2, both in steel cages. Compared to Rat Park, which was 8.8m^2 (close to twice the size), and was specifically not a steel cage[1]. Then again, I doubt this study was done specifically to confirm or refute the earlier experiment, but to test further hypotheses in the same area.

1: http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/14...

Re: Rat Park

#44

Post by njharman »

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…

> That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.

That is evidence for the claim that addiction has become unassailable fact. Regurgitated without critical thought.

Re: Rat Park

#45

Post by njharman »

mamer wrote: post #3

I lived in an apartment where 6 out of 8 apartments were occupied by alcoholics or drug addicts. Nearly every block on that street was the same. This was Glasgow, and the drug of choice was heroin, although everyone also smoked as much marijuana as they could afford. These people's lives weren't particularly shit on a day-by-day basis, but they had nothing but misery on the horizon. If they had kids they would lose t…

I think the basic question are "loosers" made or born. That is, does someone with a bright future try drugs and then spiral down the shitter as is commonly portrayed in media and government anti-drug propaganda. Or, does someone who is a fuck up, failure at life, find themselves in the shitter and start using drugs to avoid their looser life.

I'm sure, as in most things, the reality is a gradient between those extremes. But it sure seems majority only believe / see first extreme.

Re: Rat Park

#46

Post by api »

nvader wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See: spicy food.

I was thinking of something more systemic, but that may be an example.

Re: Rat Park

#47

Post by bjourne »

tedks wrote: post #26
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…

>the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason Actually, the original hypothesis Stanley Milgram had was that Germans were somehow predisposed to obedience as a culture or race. His studies in the United States were what's called a "pilot test" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment ) conducted to verify if everything was working as expected. Once he had some control readings for America…

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/psych-lies-and-audiotape-th...

According to Gina Perry, she has found clear evidence of cheating in one of Milgram's 23 experiment series. It's of course possible that the other experiments were carried out properly but I think one bad apple spoils the whole bunch in this case. Even if other experiments arrive at similar results it doesn't change the fact that the original may be tainted.

Re: Rat Park

#48

Post by danbruc »

te_platt wrote: post #36
tedks wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a problem. You can have any hypothesis and any test. If your test has validity it's a valid way to test the hypothesis. That's it. The scientific process is a social one, and if you feel that an experiment is constructed unfairly, you can devise another experiment to falsify it. Saying that an experiment "confirms" a hypothesis is just a rhetorical trick of the comment parent. Experiments can only ever fa…

This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia: "Wason's research on hypothesis-testing The term "confirmation bias" was coined by English psychologist P…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo

Re: Rat Park

#49

Post by vilhelm_s »

cthalupa wrote: post #25

Diacetylmorphine is still used in several European countries as a front line analgesic. Other forms of morphine are widely used for pain relief on a prescribed basis all over. If it is as simple as using morphine addicts you to morphine, why are no much wider swathes of the population addicted to it? I don't know that it's purely environment, but there's plenty of evidence out there that seems to suggest it's more th…

Really? Which countries are those?

My impression was that basically the only country that uses heroin for pain relief is the UK, and even there it is basically only used in cases where addition is not an issue, e.g. terminal cancer patients.

Re: Rat Park

#50

Post by baddox »

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…

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

Are there people who have liberal views on drugs because they don't believe that addiction is real or that drugs are often harmful? I have views about drugs which would probably be considered liberal, but they have nothing to do with whether drugs are addictive or harmful.

> That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.

Is it? I've never known anyone who has claimed to be addicted or even exposed to morphine. Having observed no actual evidence myself, why is one claim that morphine is addictive any more extraordinary than another claim that morphine isn't addictive?

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