5 ms·
We've known that there had to be a brain/immune connection of some sort. We didn't know that there was a tube. Remember that most of the interesting stuff in b
by timr 11y ago
We've known that there had to be a brain/immune connection of some sort. We didn't know that there was a tube.
Remember that most of the interesting stuff in biology is invisible to the naked eye. Also, despite a few hundred years of poking around in corpses, we're still pretty crude in terms of what we can see and understand anatomically. The assumption that we have this stuff "mostly figured out" strikes me more as wishful thinking than fact.
It's interesting to find a new tube lurking around, but then, it sounds like a pretty small tube. Animals are messy on the inside. Also, dark.
- skmurphy 11y agoWe now know there is at least one tube, and perhaps much much more. In terms of mostly figured out I think we are still below 1% of what we may know in 2100 about the body. Michael Murphy wrote a very interesting book "The History of the Body" in 1993 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution/dp/0874777305 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution... curating a number of observations on the potential extent of our capabilities.
- shostack 11y agoLoved this comment as you did a great job of distilling the level of wonder that still remains to be discovered. While I'm not in any way qualified to assess this, it seems the fact that there's essentially a new piece of human anatomy that we've discovered is game changing. Potentially on the level of things that cause entire fields of medicine to re-evaluate what they thought they knew. I wonder what this means for other things we've taken for granted about neurochemistry. Any qualified individuals care to speculate on the possibilities?
- spydum 11y agoVery likely I will get downvotes for this but: I suspect we will find there was far less quackery in some of the eastern medicine practices than we thought.
- Rangi42 11y agoHow does the discovery that one culture's beliefs about medicine were less accurate than expected, make you think that a different culture's beliefs are more accurate? It's not like eastern and western medicine are binary opposites, where if one is wrong the other must be right. Especially since this inaccuracy was only discovered through careful dissection and observation: what comparable practices did historical eastern medicine use, that should make it any more accurate than the equivalent old western superstitions? If "western" medicine has missed this detail up until now, I highly doubt that "eastern" medicine somehow accounted for it.
- yanowitz 11y agoI thought the point was that this provides another channel (etiology?) for materialist explanations of "Eastern" medicine. I'm not taking a position on that question, as I haven't studied it sufficiently (though acupuncture, for example, seems more compelling that reiki).
- collyw 11y agoWestern medicine and science is often very dismissive of things that you can't observe and measure. Positive thinking for example. It is well known that negative thinking in the form of stress can have negative physiological effects. Yet there is little research into finding out if positive thinking can have a positive effect. And surprisingly little research into the placebo effect, considering that it can be as effective as prescribed drugs for some situations.
- tptacek 11y agoWhich eastern practices, and why?
- Tossrock 11y agoI assume your parent commenter is referring to the general concept of 'qi', and its manipulation in practices such as Qigong. If there really does exist a direct linkage between the brain and the immune system, the idea that through focused effort we can in fact change qualities of our health becomes much less radical. These ideas have already been partially validated in the multitude of studies showing the positive effects of mindfulness practice/meditation.
- josu 11y agoSo you are saying that this was an known unknown, what other known unknowns are there about the human body?
- timr 11y agoHeh. If you want to be cynical about it, pretty much anything anyone has a grant to research is a known unknown. We don't give money to people to look for unknown unknowns; those happen accidentally while looking for the known unknowns. CRISPR would be an example of something that we really didn't know about popping out of research into other questions. Those kinds of discoveries are the really interesting ones, IMO: you aren't even looking for it, and suddenly, you've discovered a pathway that changes your understanding of bacterial genomics, and provides a crazy new tool for molecular biology. I don't know if the authors of this set out to find a lymphatic duct connecting to the brain, but the existence of one was not completely unpredictable.
- josu 11y agoSorry if I came out as cynical, that wasn't my intention. I'm genuinely interested in knowing if there any other big mysteries to solve, like this one or the neurons found in the gastrointestinal system.
- timr 11y agoYou didn't. I was the one being a little cynical -- there's obviously more "known unknowns" in the world of science than those that get funding, and science does occasionally go after blue-sky research. ;-)
- vlasev 11y agoWhat boggled my mind is that in this day and age there could still be tubes within the human body that we don't know about! How is this possible?
- irascible 11y agoSo what you're saying is that the human body is like a series of tubes?
- webnrrd2k 11y agoIn Vagina: An Autobiography, Naomi Wolf explains how the clitoris wasn't fully mapped out until (IIRC) the 70's. There is a lot of internal structure that was missed for a long time... I find it amazing that this could have happened, and it doesn't surprise me that there are still important features of human anatomy to be discovered. BTW, I don't think I agree with everything she writes, but It's a really interesting book.