5 ms·
Considering everything happening in our bodies has to have a chemical component, is it really that surprising? Sometimes medicine strikes me as "we discovered
by luckydata 8y ago
Considering everything happening in our bodies has to have a chemical component, is it really that surprising?
Sometimes medicine strikes me as "we discovered this completely obvious thing we could have gotten to from first principles but decided to ignore since our detection methods were not good enough and we were not paying attention to the signs".
Speaking like a complete outsider, please educate me further.
- saagarjha 8y agoNot every chemical component has to have outward signs, though?
- thfuran 8y agoYeah, the brain is pretty well isolated so I don't think it's totally obvious that this should be the case.
- oliveshell 8y agoExactly. Seizures represent massively synchronized electrical activity, so it’s a bit surprising that they’re associated with chemical changes big enough to be detected outside the body. We do know that this electrical activity is controlled via ion channels and other chemical mechanisms. So a neuroscientist could well have guessed that this might be the case. But we have all sorts of hypotheses about what “really happens” in the brain. It’s such a fantastically complex system, though, that they’re not too useful for extrapolation in the absence of data.
- luckydata 8y agoI find it extremely hard to believe that something like a seizure wouldn't create any changes in the hormones of a person that's about to have one. Apparently it's not that much of a foregone conclusion as I see others have replied saying for them it's just an electrical reaction in the brain (which I can't agree with in principle, that's not how the brain works, most brain activity is chemically mediated).