6 ms·

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative stress connecting to the more serious mental illnesses.

adammunich 10y ago
I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  There is a long medical history of treating things in isolation in order to understand fundamental aspects of biology and such. While the rest of science has more or less moved on from this mindset, the medical field hasn't fully yet.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kordless 10y ago
    It's called measuring things. It's what we do, after all.
    - MarkPNeyer 10y ago
      Measurement is great. I'm all for it. But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account. It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods. Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers. It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.
      - kordless 10y ago
        The problem you are referring to is known, although I'm not sure how widely spread. You can't measure the measurer, so there's a gap in our perception. There's a RI talk on this, where the color purple is discussed. There's really no color purple, for example. It's your eye picking up the absence of green when seeing blue and red light together. In other words, perhaps purple is a program in your head. Perhaps our ability to understand the nature of a measurement is an absence of something we yet to integrate into our knowledge base? My vote is for a momentary access to the global consciousness. Like an API with a "search" timer on it. It serves efficient queries faster. It does this in a fixed timeframe using a hierarchical form of evaluation. It knows everything it knows so far. In other words, perhaps causality in this reality is based on some type of immutable programmable storage. Perhaps that' why it's hard to change things here too.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Mind-body duality have been a strong force in human society. Heck, swap mind with soul and you may trace it as far back as we have "documented" history. We have this strong resistance against seeing our thoughts, feelings and such as signal activity between a massive bundle of cells.
- DanBC 10y ago
  It's not that rare - it's made it to UK government national strategy advice over five years ago in "No Health Without Mental Health" which talks about the importance of improving physical health for people with mental illness[1] and improving mental health for people with physical illness. [1] for a variety of reasons people with severe mental illness die about 20 years earlier than the general population.
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  The more complex a theory is, the harder it is to draw useful conclusions that people can actually apply.
tudorw 10y ago
Quantum Biology looks interesting, I'm in no way qualified to opine, yet I am fairly confident we're still a long way from a complete understanding of body and mind!
PeterisP 10y ago
It's not so simple - while it is obvious that physical damage to the brain can cause psychological damage to the mind (e.g. lobotomy), it's not clear (at least to me) if purely psychological damage (e.g. horrific emotional events, war situations with no physical effect to you) can disrupt the physical functioning of the brain. Change in balance of some neurotransmitters can cause symptoms of mental illness - but can purely psychological events (i.e. what you observe and contemplate) cause permanent alterations to that chemical balance, cellular dysfunction, structural damage in the brain, etc?
- rntz 10y ago
  If a permanent change in your psychology did not correspond with some permanent change in your physical person, then what would there be that was causing the change in your psychology? Some non-physical "soul" or "mind"? All psychological facts have physical correlates (in philosophy of mind, this is called "supervenience"). The only limit is our ability to measure things. As our ability to measure our own brains and bodies increases, we should expect to uncover more and more physical correlates of psychological conditions.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    As I said, the question (answered by others) is about structural changes. Any memory is formed by changing something in the brain, but forming this memory doesn't cause any meaningful changes to the general physical functioning of the brain; forming memories and having preferences (and changing them!) is what the brain does; perhaps the quantity of memories affects the structure of the brain or alters its functioning/learning, but generally the content of memories will not. Psychological facts having physical correlates isn't the answer - to use a wrong-but-useful analogy; it's clear that hardware can inappropriately alter/damage software in many different ways, but in what ways software can/cannot damage or alter the normal functioning of the hardware? The other answers give some examples where this can happen - are there more direct ways?
    - DougWebb 10y ago
      forming this memory doesn't cause any meaningful changes to the general physical functioning of the brain Maybe not any that we are currently able to measure, but something's got to be changing. As an analogy, consider your computer: you could open it up, look inside, and feel that temperatures of different parts change over time, but you can't tell what it's doing or how well it is working just by looking at it. Even with fancy electrical equipment you'd have a hard time determining what's going on, beyond detecting that there's a lot of signal activity flowing around. To really see what's happening you need access through the software, and we just don't have that kind of access to the human mind.
rntz 10y ago
Although this is true, learning that there is a specific physical sign in the brains of those who have suffered blasts at close range, and that this sign is not present in those who have suffered other forms of stress, is a significant breakthrough! The article presents this as an issue of physical vs. psychological, but even stripped of that misconception it's still an interesting article.
bcarlyle 10y ago
The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head. Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomfort as mental health problems. I'm a clinical psychologist and I don't think I've had a patient in therapy who had 1. Sleep 2. Exercise 3. Stress 4. Food Figured out. What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly.
- dunmalg 10y ago
  "What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly." Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. I think that is an important construct. It allows us to abstract the notion of an individual and make it something well above a bag of bones and meat. By "above" I mean something superior, trancendant, more important. A lot of religions have the concept of a soul, and due to Abrahahim religions, the West that concept persisted. Even if people don't believe in a soul there is still a concept of a mind as separate from the body. In computer terms (because it is hacker news), there is a tempting analogy of software and hardware. The mind / self / personality / soul is the software. The body is the hardware. Of course, we know that software is stored by altering some parts of the hardware (electric charges, etc)). So there is a connection obviously, but we still talk about it as separate things.
  - nikdaheratik 10y ago
    It's not just religious traditions that continue this idea. Ancient Greek philosophy kicked this off as well. To be fair, this separation makes alot of thought easier/possible. But considering how much we don't know about the brain or how consciousness works, it may not be the best way to promote mental and physical health.

adammunich 10y ago

I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.

SolaceQuantum 10y ago
There is a long medical history of treating things in isolation in order to understand fundamental aspects of biology and such. While the rest of science has more or less moved on from this mindset, the medical field hasn't fully yet.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kordless 10y ago
  It's called measuring things. It's what we do, after all.
  - MarkPNeyer 10y ago
    Measurement is great. I'm all for it. But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account. It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods. Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers. It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.
    - kordless 10y ago
      The problem you are referring to is known, although I'm not sure how widely spread. You can't measure the measurer, so there's a gap in our perception. There's a RI talk on this, where the color purple is discussed. There's really no color purple, for example. It's your eye picking up the absence of green when seeing blue and red light together. In other words, perhaps purple is a program in your head. Perhaps our ability to understand the nature of a measurement is an absence of something we yet to integrate into our knowledge base? My vote is for a momentary access to the global consciousness. Like an API with a "search" timer on it. It serves efficient queries faster. It does this in a fixed timeframe using a hierarchical form of evaluation. It knows everything it knows so far. In other words, perhaps causality in this reality is based on some type of immutable programmable storage. Perhaps that' why it's hard to change things here too.
digi_owl 10y ago
Mind-body duality have been a strong force in human society. Heck, swap mind with soul and you may trace it as far back as we have "documented" history. We have this strong resistance against seeing our thoughts, feelings and such as signal activity between a massive bundle of cells.
DanBC 10y ago
It's not that rare - it's made it to UK government national strategy advice over five years ago in "No Health Without Mental Health" which talks about the importance of improving physical health for people with mental illness[1] and improving mental health for people with physical illness. [1] for a variety of reasons people with severe mental illness die about 20 years earlier than the general population.
jeffdavis 10y ago
The more complex a theory is, the harder it is to draw useful conclusions that people can actually apply.

tudorw 10y ago

Quantum Biology looks interesting, I'm in no way qualified to opine, yet I am fairly confident we're still a long way from a complete understanding of body and mind!

PeterisP 10y ago

It's not so simple - while it is obvious that physical damage to the brain can cause psychological damage to the mind (e.g. lobotomy), it's not clear (at least to me) if purely psychological damage (e.g. horrific emotional events, war situations with no physical effect to you) can disrupt the physical functioning of the brain. Change in balance of some neurotransmitters can cause symptoms of mental illness - but can purely psychological events (i.e. what you observe and contemplate) cause permanent alterations to that chemical balance, cellular dysfunction, structural damage in the brain, etc?

rntz 10y ago
If a permanent change in your psychology did not correspond with some permanent change in your physical person, then what would there be that was causing the change in your psychology? Some non-physical "soul" or "mind"? All psychological facts have physical correlates (in philosophy of mind, this is called "supervenience"). The only limit is our ability to measure things. As our ability to measure our own brains and bodies increases, we should expect to uncover more and more physical correlates of psychological conditions.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  As I said, the question (answered by others) is about structural changes. Any memory is formed by changing something in the brain, but forming this memory doesn't cause any meaningful changes to the general physical functioning of the brain; forming memories and having preferences (and changing them!) is what the brain does; perhaps the quantity of memories affects the structure of the brain or alters its functioning/learning, but generally the content of memories will not. Psychological facts having physical correlates isn't the answer - to use a wrong-but-useful analogy; it's clear that hardware can inappropriately alter/damage software in many different ways, but in what ways software can/cannot damage or alter the normal functioning of the hardware? The other answers give some examples where this can happen - are there more direct ways?
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    forming this memory doesn't cause any meaningful changes to the general physical functioning of the brain Maybe not any that we are currently able to measure, but something's got to be changing. As an analogy, consider your computer: you could open it up, look inside, and feel that temperatures of different parts change over time, but you can't tell what it's doing or how well it is working just by looking at it. Even with fancy electrical equipment you'd have a hard time determining what's going on, beyond detecting that there's a lot of signal activity flowing around. To really see what's happening you need access through the software, and we just don't have that kind of access to the human mind.

rntz 10y ago

Although this is true, learning that there is a specific physical sign in the brains of those who have suffered blasts at close range, and that this sign is not present in those who have suffered other forms of stress, is a significant breakthrough! The article presents this as an issue of physical vs. psychological, but even stripped of that misconception it's still an interesting article.

bcarlyle 10y ago

The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head. Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomfort as mental health problems. I'm a clinical psychologist and I don't think I've had a patient in therapy who had 1. Sleep 2. Exercise 3. Stress 4. Food Figured out. What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly.

dunmalg 10y ago
"What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly." Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.
rdtsc 10y ago
> The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. I think that is an important construct. It allows us to abstract the notion of an individual and make it something well above a bag of bones and meat. By "above" I mean something superior, trancendant, more important. A lot of religions have the concept of a soul, and due to Abrahahim religions, the West that concept persisted. Even if people don't believe in a soul there is still a concept of a mind as separate from the body. In computer terms (because it is hacker news), there is a tempting analogy of software and hardware. The mind / self / personality / soul is the software. The body is the hardware. Of course, we know that software is stored by altering some parts of the hardware (electric charges, etc)). So there is a connection obviously, but we still talk about it as separate things.
- nikdaheratik 10y ago
  It's not just religious traditions that continue this idea. Ancient Greek philosophy kicked this off as well. To be fair, this separation makes alot of thought easier/possible. But considering how much we don't know about the brain or how consciousness works, it may not be the best way to promote mental and physical health.