Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing.
And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whether the ADHD subjects are medicated. Often the studies literally measure the effect of the medication and nothing else. (It's a cruel irony for schizophrenics, who are put on antipsychotics that shrivel the cerebral cortex, only to find their shrivelled cerebral cortex brandished as evidence of their supposed dysfunction.)
Also, note that fMRI does not and cannot indicate structural abnormalities in the brain. It just measures current brain activity, as revealed by the flow of magnetically-charged oxygenated blood through the brain. It tells us these people's brains are currently behaving differently from control subjects' brains. Which, it seems to me, is stating the bleeding obvious.
It's a shame that every time someone (e.g. upthread) mentions how even just MRIs are very expensive, often as an excuse for not using such tools, I think of all the times I've heard that other places like India make them quite cheap. Well, it's just one part of a giant pile of problems.
Thanks for the reminder about schizophrenics. Even though I've known about the effect (and especially the effect with use of lithium, which is thankfully not so commonly used), I've sort of forgotten about it as a factor in my thinking about the recent struggles of someone in my personal life. It's probably not forgotten by those working in the system, and wouldn't surprise me if it contributes to the incentives of the system encouraging people to be shut-ins and never challenge anything.
Yeah, I am very troubled by it. I had a friend staying with me last year who I hadn't realised was schizophrenic (a hopelessly vague diagnosis but he undoubtedly had parted company with reality) and off his meds. It was horribly sad. He killed himself a few months later. My mum is a psychiatrist and insists that third-generation antipsychotics are not a 'chemical cosh', which I find doubtful, seeing as so many schizophrenics seem to consider them a worse prospect than unmedicated schizophrenia or death.
We're now giving these drugs to autistics, I gather, and low-dose olanzapine is even being trialled for kids with Asperger's. Compared with lobotomy I suppose it requires less cleaning up.
Since you mention India, I should add that India and other poor countries manage to treat schizophrenia with better remission rates than the UK and US: https://www.nature.com/articles/508S14a
It also continues to farm human beings. Tens of thousands of human beings each year are murdered to order (or, more accurately, they have their organs cut out and then are left to die) for Western transplant tourists who will pay upwards of $100k for the prime cuts.
They and their medical systems and governments know full well that a heart transplant scheduled on a particular date three months in advance admits of no pleasant explanations. But nobody cares.
What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (and likely competent) to read the facts and others' thoughts about them.
I think the point about 'multiple accusers' is fair. People will come out of the woodwork, especially when there's money at stake (from the press or from legal action). Michael Jackson is a good example: undoubtedly he did rape some of those kids, but not all of them. Still, I don't see why this provides an argument against forming an opinion, rather than one for forming opinions judiciously.
Also, look up Jesse Washington if you want to understand what lynching means.
So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality.
Your comment doesn’t really seem to be trying to substantiate your claim, so much as it’s trying to paint a picture of how depressing his description of reality is. From that, I’m pretty confident you’re trying to define some ideal definition of love – which, if he’s correct, would not be ‘wrong’ but would simply not be common in the real world – while he’s trying to factually describe the motivations for human relationships in the real world.
(I’m not sure I quite agree with his gloomy picture, but I don’t think you are even coming at it with the same intent.)
It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.
Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised. To my infinite horror I actually tried a dose of what came back, at the same time as he took his dose, and in the recommended (high!) dosage of what I think was a decent chunk of a gramme. Luckily it worked. I can well see how someone could have the confidence to try something as mild as ibuprofen.
[0] Or pseudo-opioid, I'm not sure. He's a biologist and I'm not a natural scientist at all. All I recall is that it was a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor, which, by and large, may as well be Greek to me.
Pseudo-opioid sounds right to me. Typically opioids are agonists at MOR, i.e activate the receptor on their own. Whereas a PAM binds to a separate binding site, and increases the effect of binding by the endogenous neurotransmitter(hence it positively modulates it).
How the increased effect actually happens depends on the receptor and can get pretty complicated so I won't go into it since I'd have to google quite a bit.
In the same vein, I was discussing police responses to mass shootings on Twitter, and was quite surprised to find Wikipedia took me to a disambiguation page when looking up “[random small town] shooting”: https://twitter.com/samziz/status/1544460684829904896
The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightmarish even in its blankly factual wording):
> Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[67] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[8] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[68]
And some slightly overlapping details in an article from which it quotes:
> The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.
Not to mention Damien Hirst (and I suppose Warhol's 'factory' was the real pioneer). I don't understand it. My friend has a bunch of 'his' paintings - high six figures a pop at the very least - which look like things you could buy at IKEA (e.g. this one: https://imgur.com/a/TfPci2c).
And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whether the ADHD subjects are medicated. Often the studies literally measure the effect of the medication and nothing else. (It's a cruel irony for schizophrenics, who are put on antipsychotics that shrivel the cerebral cortex, only to find their shrivelled cerebral cortex brandished as evidence of their supposed dysfunction.)
Also, note that fMRI does not and cannot indicate structural abnormalities in the brain. It just measures current brain activity, as revealed by the flow of magnetically-charged oxygenated blood through the brain. It tells us these people's brains are currently behaving differently from control subjects' brains. Which, it seems to me, is stating the bleeding obvious.