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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5398 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When should we privilege the phenomenological over the pharmacological?

There are herbal remedies that people swear induce some certain desired state. Scientists attempt to discover the underlying chemical structures that induce the state, but they don’t always get it right. I’ve come across some interesting cases of this. There’s valerian root, which only recently was found to interact with adenosine (having previously been discarded as an insomnia treatment). There’s California Poppy, which was only recently discovered to contain Reticuline, which in turn was only recently discovered to induce an opioid response in the brain. There are all sorts of things going on with cannabis which are not related to THC but instead implicate a THC/CBD synergy and plausibly the addition of chemical structures known as terpenes. There are the essential oil studies that clearly indicate certain odors induce alertness (bitter lemon) or relaxation (lavender). Then there’s the science of things like serotonin which are hardly understood at all — only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier, and only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).

Essentially, if a person asserts “the aerial parts of the Phenomena Logicila plant make me happy”, and a scientist looking at a paper finds no clear mechanism for this to occur… what do we say? The science is never conclusive or half-finished, and maybe the person has a unique physiological or genetic profile that corresponds to the feeling. What should a reasonable person do?

Empirical results > logic and theoretical mechanisms. The most clear demonstration of this is general anaesthesia, which continues to lack an agreed-upon theoretical mechanism, makes no logical sense, and yet very clearly works. Anything less than taking empirical results above neat theories ceases to be science.

Is there a relatively simple explanation somewhere about why anesthesia makes no sense? I keep hearing this without anyone ever going into details, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would find very amusing.

So there's this way to get a human, and knock them out, that's safe! And not only that, but while they've lost consciousness, they have no memory of this happening. And they don't feel pain. And then, once the anaesthesia wears off, they wake up, almost entirely side-effect free! When the closest alternative is to whack someone in the head hard enough that they fall unconscious, which is significant more dangerous, it sure awfully convenient. The sum effects are equivalent to a coma or severe brain damage, but entirely reversible! Like it is some specific procedure that exists purely for the purpose of enabling surgery. How nonsensical it is for the body to have the ability to do this, given there would be no possible use for this back when we wandered the savanna 100,000 years ago? And yet, we do have this ability. A hidden off switch that can be controllably flicked with a few relatively easy to acquire gases.

Aliens?

More seriously, is it that we don't understand how it works, or why it evolved?

There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.

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