13 things that do not make sense
19 March 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Brooks
http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600

1 The placebo effectDON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain
with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace...

Interesting. Just going to respond to the first one:
could the morphine inhibitor inhibit the body's own pain reducers?
More interesting to me would be a placebo training program. Where you
train people to increase their ability to produce placebo effects,
perhaps by interspersing placebos amongst 'real' drugs, at times
telling recipients that now they are going to get a really big dose -
then give them the placebo. In other words see if you can stimulate
very large biochemical reactions in people's bodies. And increase this
over time. I would also be interested to see what what would happen if
you tried to train their minds afterwards. In other words show them
the results, be as professional as possible and try to convince them
that this experiment proves they can do this on their own. Very few
people believe that they can minimize their symptoms and even diseases
through their own power. But if the scientific community focused on
certain individuals who showed strong results, they might be able to
affect belief, both individually and on a societal level. Get a lever
in there and start shifting beliefs about what we can change in
ourselves.
Sir Frederick wrote:

Rupert Sheldrake has suggested that some constants may change over
time. (this, in response to number 2)
Sir Frederick wrote:

I'll respond to four and call it day. Very interesting batch.
I think scientists have trouble with causal interaction they can't
track given the current understanding of causal actions. This leads to
overconfidence when denying the possibility of phenomena that seem to
have other kinds of causal interactions. As anectdotal evidence, let
me tell you about when I took the wrong homeopathic remedy once. I had
the flu and a friend gave me a homeopathic remedy they had, that they
were sure was for symptoms like mine, that they had received when they
had the flu. Unfortunately they were wrong. I felt panicked, sicker,
but now with aches in new places and a sore throat. If you have
symptoms the like against like creates a paradoxical reaction -
according to homeopaths - and they symptoms disappear. But if you
don't have symptoms then you experience the symptoms the remedies
caused in volunteers homeopaths tested the various solutions on. And
these, they claim, repeat in most testees. I later checked the remedy
my friend had given me, looked it up in a homeopathic book, and lo and
behold I had symptoms that fit the picture of that remedy. I could not
have known what these symptoms were - well, I guess I could have read
an article and forgotten it - nevertheless I got them. And my flu
symptoms did not go away. ...

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 02:49:36 -0800, Sir Frederick
fuzzysys.com> wrote:

And scientists know that pain is caused by apprehension. Remove the
apprehension and the pain goes away. Eric Berne, the author of pop
psychology books in the 1970s said that he could overcome dental pain
by employing sexual fantasies.

The Big Bang is not a theory - it is an hypothesis that is subject to
being debunked with string theory. Our little universe is the result
of an outpocketing of the Universe (totality of the material world).

That's only true in a field-free space. Gravitation warps space - that
is not uniform.

Enough of this nonsense.

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Sammybaby wrote:

Sir Frederick wrote:

[snip]