He did it because his brain was defective, much like a diabetic's pancreas is defective. The mind is a set of processes going on in the brain, and as a result, "mental" illness IS a physical illness. 100 years from now, people like that will be identified through neurophysiological screening tests, and they will be cured through neurosurgical procedures. They will look back on our views of the brain and human behavior with derision, mocking us in much the same way that we mock the vitalists of the 19th century today.
You could easily be right, but I don't think we have enough information to know either way. Chloroquine resistance took a really long time to develop. I don't remember how long it was, but I think it was enough years that a lot of people thought that it would never happen. During that time, we could have eradicated malaria if we had used more of it. Also, I don't know what the mechanism is of the SM1 peptide, and I'm too lazy/busy/whatever to read up on it, but it could be something that plasmodium will have a very hard time developing resistance against.
The other thing is that the effects of an 80% reduction in malaria are difficult to predict. In areas where the parasite is barely hanging on, an 80% reduction could generate a herd immunity type of effect, eradicating it. In areas where there is huge disease burden, an 80% reduction could cause people to lose their acquired immunity, actually leading to more serious disease. There are a number of papers out there where people have mathematical models that try to predict these things. It's interesting stuff. But anyway, I'm not saying that I think you're wrong, only that I don't think the answer can be predicted at this point.
You mean like how smallpox and polio developed resistance? I haven't read the PNAS article, so I don't know the mechanism of the transgene, but there's always a race between the rate of developing resistance vs. the rate of malaria going extinct. With even the earliest anti-malarial drugs, if they had saved up enough doses to give them to everyone on earth at the same time and then done it, malaria would have been eradicated. Instead, they started handing it out to some people and not others, which is like taking half of an antibiotic dose once every three days, and now we have resistance. However, I saw a genetic analysis of this, and IIRC it turns out that resistance mutations have only occurred twice on earth, ever (in plasmodium falciparum), and all drug-resistant P. falciparum is descended from those two events. Recent genetic analyses of many pathogens with drug resistance tend to support this trend, that resistance mutations occur much more rarely than what one would think, but once they do occur they spread across the globe. So it's not inevitable that resistance will develop.
Thyroid --- yup... it is possible that up to 10% of women have some amount of thyroid dysfunction. This is the metabolism center of your body... hmmm. Why so many? Might it be due to the flouride in most peoples water system that is known to damage the thyroid? It's curious that the "epidemic" began around the same time as water flouidation was introduced.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but there is simply no credible evidence to support a link between fluoridation of water and thyroid problems. If you think there is, please post a link, but please don't just make unsupported assertions like that.
The mechanism is not exactly the same, but it's close enough. However, when people think about action potentials, they have to think about how they evolved in simpler organisms, etc. Insects definitely have action potentials, and they actually are much better at tolerating differences in body temperature (not environmental temperature) than mammals are.
That's what I'm saying--they're thinking about mammals, where temperature is highly regulated. In fruit flies (for example) this is not the case, and body temp = environmental temp. But fruit flies do have action potentials, and they are viable over a wide range of temperatures.
I agree that the article is being somewhat unfairly trashed. I did a significant part of my phd thesis work on channel biophysics, and some of the things they're saying aren't as ridiculous as they initially sound. First, they say that the HH model doesn't explain everything, and I think that's probably correct. However, it doesn't claim to. It contains a number of experimentally-determined parameters about kinetics and voltage-sensitivity of gating, and it doesn't say where those parameters come from. And as of today, we can't derive those parameters from first principles and the channel structures, and there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that interaction between the channels and the lipid molecules is important. For example, membrane tension and stiffness affect voltage dependence of gating. So I guess one could say that even though the HH model doesn't explicitly take weird lipid interaction effects into account, it does so implicitly. I think that for this reason, their claim that membrane partitioning of anesthetics means that the phospholipid molecules themselves propagate the AP are highly suspect--the anesthetics could just affect the membrane properties, thereby affecting the channel properties (I haven't checked what the literature says about this, but I'm sure there's something).
The second questionable thing about their argument (as I understand it, from a cursory reading) is that it implies that membranes are constantly perched at some sort of phase transition, which is temperature dependent. Then how do they explain that invertebrate neurons fire APs over a wide range of temperatures? You can take fruit flies at 15C and move them to a 35C incubator, and they'll keep walking around just like they were before. Looking at the curves in their PNAS paper, I don't see how that's consistent with their model.
IAAN as well, and there are a couple of points. First, it's been known for years that the HH model is not always correct. There was something about voltage-dependent of Na+ channel inactivation, but I don't remember the details. Second, the HH model was originally for type II neurons, while most primate neurons are type I. However, about the point with the Naundorf et al. Nature paper--you should read the McCormick group's rebuttal. I found it very convincing.
That's true, and I absolutely agree. However, I think if you had a race between two groups of people, and one was studying the brain and trying to replicate it, and the other was just trying to replicate the brain's capabilities without studying it, the people who were studying the brain would win. The brain is the only machine that can do what it does, and there's no reason the exact dynamics couldn't be instantiated in analog VLSI chips or whatever, except at much higher speeds, and without many of the limitations. So I think the future of AI isn't just different software algorithms, but entirely different architectures, and those will probably be based on nervous systems. Then again, maybe digital processors will get so cheap and powerful that it will be easier to implement everything in software--I have no idea.
All the research into cortical circuitry is done in non-humans. There are definite similarities between our cortex and that of a rat, but there are also drastic differences, if there weren't then rats would be able to talk, think, and reason like we do.
First, the different cognitive abilities of rats could be due either to smaller size or different connectivity of cortical modules that were absolutely identical. I'm not saying either of these is the case, but your argument isn't exactly solid. Second, it's true, their cortex is different, but the really interesting thing about cortex is that its general layout is largely conserved even when its functional tasks are diverse. That implies that cortex (or the thalamocortical circuit) is something that evolution stumbled onto that is modular, either in the sense that it is performing the same computation (i.e. has the same dynamics) in different brain regions, or that relatively small changes to the cytoarchitecture lead to very different dynamics that underlie different computations in different brain regions or organisms. I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you or anyone else does either...and I think this is a case where rat cortex needs to be studied in order to determine whether or not it was worth studying. Personally, I think it is.
2) Intra-population Circuitry research examines very small subsets of neurons that make up a bigger populations. When studying neurons in the visual cortex for example the best anyone can do is look at the firing of about 150 neurons. When you consider that there are over 10,000,000,000 (BILLION) neurons that make up the human brain a small set of 150 neurons is almost nothing. We don't have sufficient technology to examine what each neuron in a specific population is doing.
Once again, your logic isn't quite solid. The retina is part of the brain--if you could record from 150 retinal neurons, what difference does it make how many cells there are in cortex? I work on developing new technologies for high density multisite recording, and my best guess is that 100 years from now, there will be a new level of abstraction somewhere between action potentials and fMRI, where we will describe local circuit activity in terms of attractor dynamics (something like what Walter Freeman calls the "mesoscopic" level). It's possible that even by recording 150 neurons at a time, we can piece together a sufficient description of local circuit activity so that we will not necessarily need to record the action potential of every single neuron in a given brain region to know what it's doing. This also partially addresses your issue #4.
Back in the day people who had really bad seizures would have what is called a "Corpus Callosomy"
That's what i was taught in college too, but I think most people who had their corpus callosum cut did it because of pituitary tumors. Then used to go in through the top, cutting the CC to get into the sella turcica. Now they use some sort of LaForte procedure, where they actually break your face open (!) and go in through there, which is apparently less traumatic.
Sorry to be a nay sayer but I have serious doubts whenever someone claims to have figured out how the cortex works.
So do I, but to be somewhat fair to Hawkins, his primary claim is that he knows what the cortex does, not how it does it. Of course, even if what he's saying is 100% correct, it still explains only a subset of what the brain (or cortex) does.
The community of experimental neuroscientists tends to look on work on "large scale theories of the brain" in much the same way as physicists regard philosophers who use quantum mechanical principles to explore the meaning of reality: it might be very interesting for their field, but it's of little use to us.
I'm an experimental neuroscientist, and I think that's a little harsh. I think people who work at the level that Hawkins does (not necessarily him in particular) can provide things that are useful and interesting to us. It's a lot like Hodgkin and Huxley--if there hadn't been work to show that action potentials occurred, they wouldn't have figured out what ion channels were doing. And the action potential is a lot less complicated than ion channels are, considering that the structures have just recently been solved, and rigorous biophysical models of channel function still have not been formulated. Similarly, I think what individual cortical columns or whatever are doing is going to turn out to be much less complicated than the actual neurophysiological substrate underlying it. So I think it's important to try to figure out what brains are doing, not just how they do it. Also, trying to figure out how something works is a lot easier if we have an idea of what it's supposed to do.
I agree about the library idea, but on top of that what I've always wanted to see would be a slashdot-style discussion board for every paper hosted by pubmed, where there could be discussion (anonymous or not) of every paper that comes out. People could post problems they have with the paper, the authors could respond, and anyone involved could read it. It would be a tremendous educational tool, and also I think it would expose a lot of the subtle points (good or bad) in a paper that only people in that particular sub-sub-field would know about.
If what you were saying were true, there would have been a huge upsurge in violent crime along with the use of "liberal" parenting tactics. In the 1970s (when those 60s-raised kids were in peak crime-committing years), NYC (where i live) was a lot more dangerous than it is now, and so was most of the US. Of course, there's more to that than parenting tactics, but my point is I'm not aware of any actual evidence to support your assertion. In fact, I went to a recent lecture by a pediatrician who talked about punishing children, and most of the scientific research so far suggests that physically punishing children is not more effective than other forms of punishment, and it actually makes them MORE violent. If you think about it, this makes sense.
Oh well. Right now the system has a disincentive for fast and correct diagnosis. A strong incentive for multiple unnecessary visits. No difference between fixing the problem and not.
You seem to think that a good enough doctor with the right incentives can always make a fast, correct diagnosis. That's true if it's something really easy to diagnose, but when it's not, you often need to watch how the patient changes over long periods of time. To compare an x-ray with an x-ray taken a year ago, for example. This is another reason we need better IT infrastructure in medicine. Those multiple visits you seem to think exist solely to rip you off usually have a purpose, even if you don't know what it is.
The people in health care aren't really the problem, they're victims of the system just like us patients.
This is basically the point I was trying to make. I felt that your post was unfairly blaming people in the health care field for deeper, more systematic problems, such as the lack of decent IT infrastructure. Medication errors are also a symptom of this--there should be computerized checking for those things, not reading someone's messy handwriting from a chart. I am not in any way defending the performance of the current US health care system. I think it sucks, but not for the reasons you give.
You'll do better if you try to understand. Most people don't go to hospitals a lot, so their impression of the healthcare system is from a doctor's office
I understand your perspective, but try to understand mine. I have personally witnessed serious medical errors that nearly killed people twice, and both were due to miscommunication and a lack of IT infrastructure and modern organization. Not incompetence or greed or any of the things you implied in your earlier post. Most people I know who work in medicine care sincerely and work their asses off to do the best they can for their patients. To be fair, I have seen individual people make stupid mistakes that could have turned out really bad, and we can blame them, but the fundamental problem is that medicine is too complex to be entrusted to humans. There needs to be a better computerized system of double-checking.
Why are we punishing 98% of patients by withholding beneficial meds in order to punish the 2% who are prone to abuse?
I agree absolutely, and I think it's terrible. There's also a general misconception among doctors that painkillers are much more addictive than studies show they actually are, and that's another thing that leads to underprescribing of pain meds. I never claimed you were a junkie, it's just that you seem so outraged that a doctor would suspect you of being one when that doctor probably sees that kind of thing more often than you think. But I agree with you that pain management is one part of medicine that's flawed, and not just on a structural and organizational level.
Think of all the liver damage done by overuse of acetaminophen and ibuprofen instead of using more appropriate medication. It's barbaric.
Acetaminophen can cause acute liver failure, but ibuprofen generally does not. There's no point getting into a big debate about it, but I don't think the overuse of those meds is really as barbaric as you do, and I don't think it's necessarily obvious what safer, better drugs one should use instead. Celebrex and vioxx were going to be those drugs, but you know how that turned out.
I don't know anyone who had a nontrivial chronic problem diagnosed properly within the first 3 visits. It's ridiculous.
Most chronic problems, by definition, require multiple occurrences of the problem to be classified as chronic. The doctor probably thought about the chronic problem on the first visit, but decided to wait and see if the person comes back again. It's not necessarily a reflection of incompetence, and we would all be a lot worse off if every patient who presented once with symptoms consistent with chronic disease X was subjected to a full diagnostic workup. I hate to say this and sound all pompous/know-it-all/whatever, but it's an unfortunate fact that patients generally are not qualified to judge whether a doctor is competent. You have to find a doctor you feel you can trust, and then trust them.
You hit on the one thing I think our doctors are good at: critical care. If you have a broken something or a leaking something they can fix you up amazingly. I know there are good doctors, I just think they are rare and subject to burnout. It's the little things that leave me feeling cheated. I shouldn't have to explain how the common cold works to a doctor.
This is something I partially agree with you on. In medical school, they teach you a lot about serious, life-threatening conditions (most of which laypeople have never even heard of). I don't remember a single lecture on the common cold. It's not considered important enough to learn about because it's not dangerous, and there's nothing we can do about it anyway. There is education directed toward clinically differentiating colds from more serious medical conditions that do require treatment, but I've never learned anything about the pathophysiology of the cold per se, and I think that's actually fine.
My car was basically okay, it was other people's cars. Where I come from, it can get down to -60F, but cars that aren't plugged in generally won't start below -40F (at least mine wouldn't). I think at those temperatures, there is more than just battery problems going on, though.
I don't have a problem with how much doctors make, just a problem with our entire healthcare system. This quote caught my interest, however. Doctors make mistakes all the time. Millions of serious mistakes every year. Many tens of thousands of these mistakes result in someone dying. Hundreds of thousands result in serious harm. Please don't imply that doctors have higher standards than plumbers. It's a more difficult job, but plumbing mistakes are pretty rare in comparison to medical mistakes.
Medical mistakes occur frequently (I'd like a see a source for that "millions" number), but from my experience as a med student, most of these mistakes occur because of miscommunication between the groups of doctors who work on each individual patient. If one person (i.e. a plumber) is doing a job, it's easy to make sure everything gets done right. But when there is not just one team, but multiple teams working on each patient, mistakes occur. I think the real key to reducing medical mistakes will be updating the IT infrastructure of hospitals. Basically, I agree with you that the system is the problem.
I have been fairly lucky, no major medical fuckups. I still have the impression that doctors are largely quacks. Even a simple problem takes multiple visits and the trial and error approach. I cringe for those whose life is on the line.
First of all, the term "quack" implies someone who's intentionally cheating people, and to imply that most doctors are intentionally cheating people is simply ridiculous. I've seen doctors who I thought made bad decisions, but they weren't intentionally cheating anyone. How could they do that without other doctors noticing, when everything's recorded in the chart? Is it all a big conspiracy? Second, you sound like someone whose experience is largely limited to outpatient medicine. Seriously sick people are in hospitals, and things work very differently there.
I've had doctors force antibiotics on me for a cold, withhold pain medication with a back injury, suggest expensive and meaningless tests, and so forth. A few minutes on google before my visit and I generally know more about my condition, related tests, accepted treatment than my doctor does. The only reason I go to the doctor is the prescription pad.
Why are you so sure your cold had no bacterial component? Did you know that back pain can not be verified by any physiological test, and is therefore a typical line used by junkies seeking painkillers? Did it ever occur to you that those expensive tests were run to rule out unlikely but life-threatening conditions? Google, webmd, etc. are great and all, but more than anything else they provide patients with the illusion that they know more about management of their condition than their doctors do. Trust me, this is generally not the case. I probably know more about pathophysiology and medicine than you do (having done a PhD and most of an MD), and I have online access to thousands of medical journals and expensive medical web sites, but I can read all I want and still not have the practical skills or knowledge of a good doctor with 10+ years of experience. If your doctor sucks that much, find another one.
You obviously don't live in a very cold climate. When I was growing up, I had to use jumper cables routinely in the winter. I agree with your basic point, but I think that car batteries could still stand some improvement.
I'm not defending Rumsfeld, but Tamiflu is not an experimental drug, and it has been shown to work against the H5N1 virus in humans. I think the real questions surrounding the efficacy of Tamiflu will not be related to the drug itself, but the question of whether it can be distributed quickly enough, etc.
Unfortunately, I only have time for a brief response. I understand your argument, and I never argued against the utility of that shortcut (as opposed to an approximation, which is different), but the reason I argue that it's simply incorrect to measure force in kilograms is because kilograms are SI units and the SI defines kilograms as units of mass, not force. It's not technically incorrect to use non-SI units, but if you're going to use SI units, you have to use them according to their definition. This might sound like some sort of lawyerly argument, but the whole point of any units is that they have a common definition that everyone adheres to.
Sorry for the delay, but with the start of the real work week, this will unfortunately have to be my last post. I have to say, you've presented as coherent and well-argued a defense of the us/british system as I've ever seen. Nevertheless, I suspect that even you don't believe everything you say 100%. Anyway, it's been fun.
Once you start throwing in a hodge-podge mix of units, whose use persists solely to fill in gaps left by the current SI prefix structure, there is little left to reccomend the system over USCS units. You insist that metric is "more elegant" and "simpler," but metric (SI or otherwise) still does not have a monopolization on decimalization or even on the prefixes. Your constant example of converting between units of the same dimension is a red herring, because that is something that never arrises in day-to-day measurement, in any unit system.
If you're proposing to start using standard SI prefixes and power-of-ten scaling with US units, then you're right, the metric system has very little technical advantage. But what you're doing there is simply metric-izing the US system. Same thing with including moles or amps (which are SI) and deriving "US-compatible" analogs of SI units. That stuff is not part of the US system traditionally, and it represents a different way of doing things than the way things have been done traditionally. For example, 1.25 inches is not really correct, it would be 1 1/4 inches in traditional use. Based on fractions and etc. One mile and two rods, etc. I disagree that the presence of centimeters and angstroms really removes all of the advantages, and I have also pointed out a few other advantages. At the end of the day, the real reason why I support metrication has less to do with technical superiority, and more to do with conforming to standards, but obviously I do think the metric system is superior. To address your last point, I do calculations involving conversion of units of the same dimension every single day. If I have to add X microliters of a stock solution to Y liters of saline, that requires those conversions. But I agree, chemical dilutions are the most common case I can think of. I rarely need to know how many nanometers are in a kilometer.
Never claimed they should.
I never said that you did. I was just pointing out that choice of units for trade is not a matter of personal freedom.
Kilograms of force are what are measured by your spring-loaded bathroom and kitchen scales. This is one of the reasons why "(mass unit) of force" has persisted in fields where knowing how much force is needed to move X mass is needed without the need to refer to g.
It's only "incorrect" in the same way the Angstrom is "incorrect:" it's not SI.
No, bathroom scales measure force, then internally convert it to mass under the assumption of a given strength of gravity. What you're referring to is a shortcut that may be widespread in certain fields of engineering, but is simply incorrect usage in a technical sense. Angstroms are simply tenths of a nanometer (and I know they're not SI--I've been using them, along with cm, as an example of a useful non-SI unit).
I don't think that any popular sports drinks are isotonic. If something has a high enough salt concentration to be isotonic, it tastes disgusting. Pedialyte is approximately isotonic, IIRC, and I think it has about twice the salt concentration of gatorade.
You can still get hyponatremia (decreased blood sodium levels) from drinking gatorade, so that's not the reason it was invented. Gatorade and drinks like that are a byproduct of the invention of oral rehydration salts, which I think were invented to combat cholera (which kills you by dehydration through diarrhea). The salt in Gatorade allows it to travel from the intestine to the bloodstream faster.
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He did it because his brain was defective, much like a diabetic's pancreas is defective. The mind is a set of processes going on in the brain, and as a result, "mental" illness IS a physical illness. 100 years from now, people like that will be identified through neurophysiological screening tests, and they will be cured through neurosurgical procedures. They will look back on our views of the brain and human behavior with derision, mocking us in much the same way that we mock the vitalists of the 19th century today.
You could easily be right, but I don't think we have enough information to know either way. Chloroquine resistance took a really long time to develop. I don't remember how long it was, but I think it was enough years that a lot of people thought that it would never happen. During that time, we could have eradicated malaria if we had used more of it. Also, I don't know what the mechanism is of the SM1 peptide, and I'm too lazy/busy/whatever to read up on it, but it could be something that plasmodium will have a very hard time developing resistance against.
The other thing is that the effects of an 80% reduction in malaria are difficult to predict. In areas where the parasite is barely hanging on, an 80% reduction could generate a herd immunity type of effect, eradicating it. In areas where there is huge disease burden, an 80% reduction could cause people to lose their acquired immunity, actually leading to more serious disease. There are a number of papers out there where people have mathematical models that try to predict these things. It's interesting stuff. But anyway, I'm not saying that I think you're wrong, only that I don't think the answer can be predicted at this point.
You mean like how smallpox and polio developed resistance? I haven't read the PNAS article, so I don't know the mechanism of the transgene, but there's always a race between the rate of developing resistance vs. the rate of malaria going extinct. With even the earliest anti-malarial drugs, if they had saved up enough doses to give them to everyone on earth at the same time and then done it, malaria would have been eradicated. Instead, they started handing it out to some people and not others, which is like taking half of an antibiotic dose once every three days, and now we have resistance. However, I saw a genetic analysis of this, and IIRC it turns out that resistance mutations have only occurred twice on earth, ever (in plasmodium falciparum), and all drug-resistant P. falciparum is descended from those two events. Recent genetic analyses of many pathogens with drug resistance tend to support this trend, that resistance mutations occur much more rarely than what one would think, but once they do occur they spread across the globe. So it's not inevitable that resistance will develop.
Thyroid --- yup... it is possible that up to 10% of women have some amount of thyroid dysfunction. This is the metabolism center of your body... hmmm. Why so many? Might it be due to the flouride in most peoples water system that is known to damage the thyroid? It's curious that the "epidemic" began around the same time as water flouidation was introduced.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but there is simply no credible evidence to support a link between fluoridation of water and thyroid problems. If you think there is, please post a link, but please don't just make unsupported assertions like that.
The mechanism is not exactly the same, but it's close enough. However, when people think about action potentials, they have to think about how they evolved in simpler organisms, etc. Insects definitely have action potentials, and they actually are much better at tolerating differences in body temperature (not environmental temperature) than mammals are.
That's what I'm saying--they're thinking about mammals, where temperature is highly regulated. In fruit flies (for example) this is not the case, and body temp = environmental temp. But fruit flies do have action potentials, and they are viable over a wide range of temperatures.
I agree that the article is being somewhat unfairly trashed. I did a significant part of my phd thesis work on channel biophysics, and some of the things they're saying aren't as ridiculous as they initially sound. First, they say that the HH model doesn't explain everything, and I think that's probably correct. However, it doesn't claim to. It contains a number of experimentally-determined parameters about kinetics and voltage-sensitivity of gating, and it doesn't say where those parameters come from. And as of today, we can't derive those parameters from first principles and the channel structures, and there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that interaction between the channels and the lipid molecules is important. For example, membrane tension and stiffness affect voltage dependence of gating. So I guess one could say that even though the HH model doesn't explicitly take weird lipid interaction effects into account, it does so implicitly. I think that for this reason, their claim that membrane partitioning of anesthetics means that the phospholipid molecules themselves propagate the AP are highly suspect--the anesthetics could just affect the membrane properties, thereby affecting the channel properties (I haven't checked what the literature says about this, but I'm sure there's something).
The second questionable thing about their argument (as I understand it, from a cursory reading) is that it implies that membranes are constantly perched at some sort of phase transition, which is temperature dependent. Then how do they explain that invertebrate neurons fire APs over a wide range of temperatures? You can take fruit flies at 15C and move them to a 35C incubator, and they'll keep walking around just like they were before. Looking at the curves in their PNAS paper, I don't see how that's consistent with their model.
IAAN as well, and there are a couple of points. First, it's been known for years that the HH model is not always correct. There was something about voltage-dependent of Na+ channel inactivation, but I don't remember the details. Second, the HH model was originally for type II neurons, while most primate neurons are type I. However, about the point with the Naundorf et al. Nature paper--you should read the McCormick group's rebuttal. I found it very convincing.
That's true, and I absolutely agree. However, I think if you had a race between two groups of people, and one was studying the brain and trying to replicate it, and the other was just trying to replicate the brain's capabilities without studying it, the people who were studying the brain would win. The brain is the only machine that can do what it does, and there's no reason the exact dynamics couldn't be instantiated in analog VLSI chips or whatever, except at much higher speeds, and without many of the limitations. So I think the future of AI isn't just different software algorithms, but entirely different architectures, and those will probably be based on nervous systems. Then again, maybe digital processors will get so cheap and powerful that it will be easier to implement everything in software--I have no idea.
All the research into cortical circuitry is done in non-humans. There are definite similarities between our cortex and that of a rat, but there are also drastic differences, if there weren't then rats would be able to talk, think, and reason like we do.
First, the different cognitive abilities of rats could be due either to smaller size or different connectivity of cortical modules that were absolutely identical. I'm not saying either of these is the case, but your argument isn't exactly solid. Second, it's true, their cortex is different, but the really interesting thing about cortex is that its general layout is largely conserved even when its functional tasks are diverse. That implies that cortex (or the thalamocortical circuit) is something that evolution stumbled onto that is modular, either in the sense that it is performing the same computation (i.e. has the same dynamics) in different brain regions, or that relatively small changes to the cytoarchitecture lead to very different dynamics that underlie different computations in different brain regions or organisms. I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you or anyone else does either...and I think this is a case where rat cortex needs to be studied in order to determine whether or not it was worth studying. Personally, I think it is.
2) Intra-population Circuitry research examines very small subsets of neurons that make up a bigger populations. When studying neurons in the visual cortex for example the best anyone can do is look at the firing of about 150 neurons. When you consider that there are over 10,000,000,000 (BILLION) neurons that make up the human brain a small set of 150 neurons is almost nothing. We don't have sufficient technology to examine what each neuron in a specific population is doing.
Once again, your logic isn't quite solid. The retina is part of the brain--if you could record from 150 retinal neurons, what difference does it make how many cells there are in cortex? I work on developing new technologies for high density multisite recording, and my best guess is that 100 years from now, there will be a new level of abstraction somewhere between action potentials and fMRI, where we will describe local circuit activity in terms of attractor dynamics (something like what Walter Freeman calls the "mesoscopic" level). It's possible that even by recording 150 neurons at a time, we can piece together a sufficient description of local circuit activity so that we will not necessarily need to record the action potential of every single neuron in a given brain region to know what it's doing. This also partially addresses your issue #4.
Back in the day people who had really bad seizures would have what is called a "Corpus Callosomy"
That's what i was taught in college too, but I think most people who had their corpus callosum cut did it because of pituitary tumors. Then used to go in through the top, cutting the CC to get into the sella turcica. Now they use some sort of LaForte procedure, where they actually break your face open (!) and go in through there, which is apparently less traumatic.
Sorry to be a nay sayer but I have serious doubts whenever someone claims to have figured out how the cortex works.
So do I, but to be somewhat fair to Hawkins, his primary claim is that he knows what the cortex does, not how it does it. Of course, even if what he's saying is 100% correct, it still explains only a subset of what the brain (or cortex) does.
The community of experimental neuroscientists tends to look on work on "large scale theories of the brain" in much the same way as physicists regard philosophers who use quantum mechanical principles to explore the meaning of reality: it might be very interesting for their field, but it's of little use to us.
I'm an experimental neuroscientist, and I think that's a little harsh. I think people who work at the level that Hawkins does (not necessarily him in particular) can provide things that are useful and interesting to us. It's a lot like Hodgkin and Huxley--if there hadn't been work to show that action potentials occurred, they wouldn't have figured out what ion channels were doing. And the action potential is a lot less complicated than ion channels are, considering that the structures have just recently been solved, and rigorous biophysical models of channel function still have not been formulated. Similarly, I think what individual cortical columns or whatever are doing is going to turn out to be much less complicated than the actual neurophysiological substrate underlying it. So I think it's important to try to figure out what brains are doing, not just how they do it. Also, trying to figure out how something works is a lot easier if we have an idea of what it's supposed to do.
I agree about the library idea, but on top of that what I've always wanted to see would be a slashdot-style discussion board for every paper hosted by pubmed, where there could be discussion (anonymous or not) of every paper that comes out. People could post problems they have with the paper, the authors could respond, and anyone involved could read it. It would be a tremendous educational tool, and also I think it would expose a lot of the subtle points (good or bad) in a paper that only people in that particular sub-sub-field would know about.
If what you were saying were true, there would have been a huge upsurge in violent crime along with the use of "liberal" parenting tactics. In the 1970s (when those 60s-raised kids were in peak crime-committing years), NYC (where i live) was a lot more dangerous than it is now, and so was most of the US. Of course, there's more to that than parenting tactics, but my point is I'm not aware of any actual evidence to support your assertion. In fact, I went to a recent lecture by a pediatrician who talked about punishing children, and most of the scientific research so far suggests that physically punishing children is not more effective than other forms of punishment, and it actually makes them MORE violent. If you think about it, this makes sense.
Oh well. Right now the system has a disincentive for fast and correct diagnosis. A strong incentive for multiple unnecessary visits. No difference between fixing the problem and not.
You seem to think that a good enough doctor with the right incentives can always make a fast, correct diagnosis. That's true if it's something really easy to diagnose, but when it's not, you often need to watch how the patient changes over long periods of time. To compare an x-ray with an x-ray taken a year ago, for example. This is another reason we need better IT infrastructure in medicine. Those multiple visits you seem to think exist solely to rip you off usually have a purpose, even if you don't know what it is.
The people in health care aren't really the problem, they're victims of the system just like us patients.
This is basically the point I was trying to make. I felt that your post was unfairly blaming people in the health care field for deeper, more systematic problems, such as the lack of decent IT infrastructure. Medication errors are also a symptom of this--there should be computerized checking for those things, not reading someone's messy handwriting from a chart. I am not in any way defending the performance of the current US health care system. I think it sucks, but not for the reasons you give.
You'll do better if you try to understand. Most people don't go to hospitals a lot, so their impression of the healthcare system is from a doctor's office
I understand your perspective, but try to understand mine. I have personally witnessed serious medical errors that nearly killed people twice, and both were due to miscommunication and a lack of IT infrastructure and modern organization. Not incompetence or greed or any of the things you implied in your earlier post. Most people I know who work in medicine care sincerely and work their asses off to do the best they can for their patients. To be fair, I have seen individual people make stupid mistakes that could have turned out really bad, and we can blame them, but the fundamental problem is that medicine is too complex to be entrusted to humans. There needs to be a better computerized system of double-checking.
Why are we punishing 98% of patients by withholding beneficial meds in order to punish the 2% who are prone to abuse?
I agree absolutely, and I think it's terrible. There's also a general misconception among doctors that painkillers are much more addictive than studies show they actually are, and that's another thing that leads to underprescribing of pain meds. I never claimed you were a junkie, it's just that you seem so outraged that a doctor would suspect you of being one when that doctor probably sees that kind of thing more often than you think. But I agree with you that pain management is one part of medicine that's flawed, and not just on a structural and organizational level.
Think of all the liver damage done by overuse of acetaminophen and ibuprofen instead of using more appropriate medication. It's barbaric.
Acetaminophen can cause acute liver failure, but ibuprofen generally does not. There's no point getting into a big debate about it, but I don't think the overuse of those meds is really as barbaric as you do, and I don't think it's necessarily obvious what safer, better drugs one should use instead. Celebrex and vioxx were going to be those drugs, but you know how that turned out.
I don't know anyone who had a nontrivial chronic problem diagnosed properly within the first 3 visits. It's ridiculous.
Most chronic problems, by definition, require multiple occurrences of the problem to be classified as chronic. The doctor probably thought about the chronic problem on the first visit, but decided to wait and see if the person comes back again. It's not necessarily a reflection of incompetence, and we would all be a lot worse off if every patient who presented once with symptoms consistent with chronic disease X was subjected to a full diagnostic workup. I hate to say this and sound all pompous/know-it-all/whatever, but it's an unfortunate fact that patients generally are not qualified to judge whether a doctor is competent. You have to find a doctor you feel you can trust, and then trust them.
You hit on the one thing I think our doctors are good at: critical care. If you have a broken something or a leaking something they can fix you up amazingly. I know there are good doctors, I just think they are rare and subject to burnout. It's the little things that leave me feeling cheated. I shouldn't have to explain how the common cold works to a doctor.
This is something I partially agree with you on. In medical school, they teach you a lot about serious, life-threatening conditions (most of which laypeople have never even heard of). I don't remember a single lecture on the common cold. It's not considered important enough to learn about because it's not dangerous, and there's nothing we can do about it anyway. There is education directed toward clinically differentiating colds from more serious medical conditions that do require treatment, but I've never learned anything about the pathophysiology of the cold per se, and I think that's actually fine.
My car was basically okay, it was other people's cars. Where I come from, it can get down to -60F, but cars that aren't plugged in generally won't start below -40F (at least mine wouldn't). I think at those temperatures, there is more than just battery problems going on, though.
I actually meant that during the cold months, I would often help out other people. My battery was usually fine.
I don't have a problem with how much doctors make, just a problem with our entire healthcare system. This quote caught my interest, however. Doctors make mistakes all the time. Millions of serious mistakes every year. Many tens of thousands of these mistakes result in someone dying. Hundreds of thousands result in serious harm. Please don't imply that doctors have higher standards than plumbers. It's a more difficult job, but plumbing mistakes are pretty rare in comparison to medical mistakes.
Medical mistakes occur frequently (I'd like a see a source for that "millions" number), but from my experience as a med student, most of these mistakes occur because of miscommunication between the groups of doctors who work on each individual patient. If one person (i.e. a plumber) is doing a job, it's easy to make sure everything gets done right. But when there is not just one team, but multiple teams working on each patient, mistakes occur. I think the real key to reducing medical mistakes will be updating the IT infrastructure of hospitals. Basically, I agree with you that the system is the problem.
I have been fairly lucky, no major medical fuckups. I still have the impression that doctors are largely quacks. Even a simple problem takes multiple visits and the trial and error approach. I cringe for those whose life is on the line.
First of all, the term "quack" implies someone who's intentionally cheating people, and to imply that most doctors are intentionally cheating people is simply ridiculous. I've seen doctors who I thought made bad decisions, but they weren't intentionally cheating anyone. How could they do that without other doctors noticing, when everything's recorded in the chart? Is it all a big conspiracy? Second, you sound like someone whose experience is largely limited to outpatient medicine. Seriously sick people are in hospitals, and things work very differently there.
I've had doctors force antibiotics on me for a cold, withhold pain medication with a back injury, suggest expensive and meaningless tests, and so forth. A few minutes on google before my visit and I generally know more about my condition, related tests, accepted treatment than my doctor does. The only reason I go to the doctor is the prescription pad.
Why are you so sure your cold had no bacterial component? Did you know that back pain can not be verified by any physiological test, and is therefore a typical line used by junkies seeking painkillers? Did it ever occur to you that those expensive tests were run to rule out unlikely but life-threatening conditions? Google, webmd, etc. are great and all, but more than anything else they provide patients with the illusion that they know more about management of their condition than their doctors do. Trust me, this is generally not the case. I probably know more about pathophysiology and medicine than you do (having done a PhD and most of an MD), and I have online access to thousands of medical journals and expensive medical web sites, but I can read all I want and still not have the practical skills or knowledge of a good doctor with 10+ years of experience. If your doctor sucks that much, find another one.
You obviously don't live in a very cold climate. When I was growing up, I had to use jumper cables routinely in the winter. I agree with your basic point, but I think that car batteries could still stand some improvement.
I'm not defending Rumsfeld, but Tamiflu is not an experimental drug, and it has been shown to work against the H5N1 virus in humans. I think the real questions surrounding the efficacy of Tamiflu will not be related to the drug itself, but the question of whether it can be distributed quickly enough, etc.
Unfortunately, I only have time for a brief response. I understand your argument, and I never argued against the utility of that shortcut (as opposed to an approximation, which is different), but the reason I argue that it's simply incorrect to measure force in kilograms is because kilograms are SI units and the SI defines kilograms as units of mass, not force. It's not technically incorrect to use non-SI units, but if you're going to use SI units, you have to use them according to their definition. This might sound like some sort of lawyerly argument, but the whole point of any units is that they have a common definition that everyone adheres to.
Sorry for the delay, but with the start of the real work week, this will unfortunately have to be my last post. I have to say, you've presented as coherent and well-argued a defense of the us/british system as I've ever seen. Nevertheless, I suspect that even you don't believe everything you say 100%. Anyway, it's been fun.
Once you start throwing in a hodge-podge mix of units, whose use persists solely to fill in gaps left by the current SI prefix structure, there is little left to reccomend the system over USCS units. You insist that metric is "more elegant" and "simpler," but metric (SI or otherwise) still does not have a monopolization on decimalization or even on the prefixes. Your constant example of converting between units of the same dimension is a red herring, because that is something that never arrises in day-to-day measurement, in any unit system.
If you're proposing to start using standard SI prefixes and power-of-ten scaling with US units, then you're right, the metric system has very little technical advantage. But what you're doing there is simply metric-izing the US system. Same thing with including moles or amps (which are SI) and deriving "US-compatible" analogs of SI units. That stuff is not part of the US system traditionally, and it represents a different way of doing things than the way things have been done traditionally. For example, 1.25 inches is not really correct, it would be 1 1/4 inches in traditional use. Based on fractions and etc. One mile and two rods, etc. I disagree that the presence of centimeters and angstroms really removes all of the advantages, and I have also pointed out a few other advantages. At the end of the day, the real reason why I support metrication has less to do with technical superiority, and more to do with conforming to standards, but obviously I do think the metric system is superior. To address your last point, I do calculations involving conversion of units of the same dimension every single day. If I have to add X microliters of a stock solution to Y liters of saline, that requires those conversions. But I agree, chemical dilutions are the most common case I can think of. I rarely need to know how many nanometers are in a kilometer.
Never claimed they should.
I never said that you did. I was just pointing out that choice of units for trade is not a matter of personal freedom.
Kilograms of force are what are measured by your spring-loaded bathroom and kitchen scales. This is one of the reasons why "(mass unit) of force" has persisted in fields where knowing how much force is needed to move X mass is needed without the need to refer to g. It's only "incorrect" in the same way the Angstrom is "incorrect:" it's not SI.
No, bathroom scales measure force, then internally convert it to mass under the assumption of a given strength of gravity. What you're referring to is a shortcut that may be widespread in certain fields of engineering, but is simply incorrect usage in a technical sense. Angstroms are simply tenths of a nanometer (and I know they're not SI--I've been using them, along with cm, as an example of a useful non-SI unit).
I don't think that any popular sports drinks are isotonic. If something has a high enough salt concentration to be isotonic, it tastes disgusting. Pedialyte is approximately isotonic, IIRC, and I think it has about twice the salt concentration of gatorade.
You can still get hyponatremia (decreased blood sodium levels) from drinking gatorade, so that's not the reason it was invented. Gatorade and drinks like that are a byproduct of the invention of oral rehydration salts, which I think were invented to combat cholera (which kills you by dehydration through diarrhea). The salt in Gatorade allows it to travel from the intestine to the bloodstream faster.