The study, which is planned for the spring, is designed to include three groups of 24 women with Stage 4 breast cancer who are in stable condition and undergoing hormonal therapy. Two groups will gather at resorts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, under the supervision of Langer and her staff. The experimental group will live for a week in surroundings that evoke 2003, a date when all the women were healthy and hopeful, living without a mortal threat hanging over them. They will be told to try to inhabit their former selves. Few clues of the present day will be visible inside the resorts or, for that matter, outside them. In the living areas, turn-of-the-millennium magazines will be lying around, as will DVDs of films like “Titanic” and “The Big Lebowski.” San Miguel de Allende, which has historically been a place known for its nearby healing mineral springs, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and many of its buildings look as they did a few hundred years ago. “The whole town is a time capsule,” Langer says. (The other group at San Miguel will have the support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third group will not experience any research intervention.)
WTF.
And what happens when you had cancer in 2003 but got cured, would it come back? Better avoid The Big Lebowski in that case.
If this is a real effect, it does not necessarily involve magic. I find it quite easy to imagine an organism evolving to subtly alter it's physical state according to the function of it's nervous system. Why is it so hard to believe that the mind controls the body at a cellular level? Even if this is a magical effect, it can still be codified and brought within the bounds of scientific discourse.
>> Why is it so hard to believe that the mind controls the body at a cellular level?
Because modern medicine (and science) does not like to believe anything that it has no explanation for. You can show not only correlations, but causative action and a lot of people will reject the finding if it is unintuitive and has no known mechanism. IMHO this has become a problem.
Even though we claim science starts with observation, people still don't believe what is in front of them unless they have something conceptual to hang it on.
An important remark, but let me remind you that scientists are used to the 90% of the times where the current models are correct but observations/experiments are erroneous, specially when things deviate so much from known models. Of course, the 10% of times the models can't explain the observation are indeed crucial to science.
It is well known that stress can alter hormone levels as well as many other negative physiological effects. That seems like the mind controlling the body. Every movement you make is the mind altering the body via the nervous system if you want to be pedantic about it.
You would think that if a person's perceptions and belief could grant a much longer life span, at least one crazy person would have provided this by living to something like 200.
> Why is it so hard to believe that the mind controls the body at a cellular level?
It does, obviously. Contracting a voluntary muscle requires work that is done at the cellular level. A signal travels from the brain and ends up translated into a chemical message at the cellular level which contracts muscle fibers.
The brain is even able to address a specific set of cells that correspond to a bundle of specific nerve fibers for that muscle.
Nervous-system signaling involves the cellular level: changing electric potentials, ions flowing across cell membranes, and and such.
Yes I had this in my mind when I wrote the above post. I was trying to draw your attention to the fact that we already believe such things. (Two different accounts, two different pcs, lost password)
First of all, "evolving" happens by selective pressures and over generations on a population level. But I see what you mean, you mean changing to accommodate to the environment. But here we are not talking about tanning to compensate for increased UV exposure, we are not even talking about changing to match our environment, we are talking about reducing an illness by evoking memories of the past by physical objects.
Unless this past environment was one that actually kills cancers cells (I don't know how the Big Lebowksi might do that) or perhaps reduces tumor growth I can't imagine any way how this can work.
What I can imagine is going on a time out, reducing stress and thus biological stress responses does have an influence on a tumor. I hope they are compensating for this effect. They should have a control group in a reduced stress environment (or something that mimics all evironmental variables of the back-in-time room but for the back-in-time aspect) perhaps with a bluray disc of Lucy.
If I assert that a man runs, I might mean that he flows under pressure, but you would probably interpret me to mean that he moves quickly on his feet. "An organism evolving" similarly tends toward one particular meaning. When you then say you mean to be "within the bounds of scientific discourse," how can you blame someone for thinking you are using the scientific definition?
When you then say you mean to be "within the bounds of scientific discourse,"
I said no such thing. I am not the person who used the word "evolve". I merely am capable of understanding that sometimes pedantry doesn't actually help anything.
Evolve means gradual change to me. For the more sophisticated amongst us, we are able to take the root meaning of the word and understand it's implication in different contexts.
"(The other group at San Miguel will have the support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third group will not experience any research intervention.)"
I think it will be close to impossible to make the participants feel like it is 2003 by doing things like placing turn-of-the century magazines around etc. It sounds silly. It almost seems to be mocking their intelligence (I know that's not what they are doing). IMO, they should stick to just telling these participants to try and put themselves in the mindset they were in before they ever faced cancer.
That's the whole point of the studies, though—they made people feel younger by doing everything possible to make it feel like they had stepped back in time.
The placebo effect is more complex than, intuitively, it should be. Otherwise, all you'd need to do was explain the placebo effect to someone, and the belief in the placebo effect itself would effect the desired results (in effect, the placebo effect would be the placebo<g>). Instead, we need to do tricks—sugar pills, simulated environments—to get it to work. It really defies reason.
I'm not sure it defies reason. If you take a child and place him in a blank room and tell him to play, they will have trouble playing and will get bored. If you take that same child and place them in a room with a bunch of complex toys they will probably use those toys in pretty normal ways. But if you take a child and put them in a place where there aren't "traditional" toys (toys they're used to, objects marketed as toys) they will use their imaginations to make a block of wood a car, or a house, or something else.
So in that same sense, if you take an adult and tell them to imagine it is 2003 in a blank room it's going to be difficult. And if you do the same in a room that is filled with things from today it will also be difficult because they will be trying to force objects from post 2003 to fit into a 2003 mindset. But finally, if you put them in a room filled with things from 2003 they will be able to use their imaginations much more effectively to enter a 2003 mindset.
For the record, these are just my thoughts on the matter.
Regarding placebos, the placebo effect is not, for the most part, "people magically get better.". People do magically get better sometimes, because we're incredible self-repairing organisms, but attributing those remissions to placebo or sham treatments is a post hoc fallacy.
The placebo effect is, the most part, a measurement error when collecting subjective measurements. When coupled with objective measurements, it is normal to see people subjectively reporting feeling better when objective measurements say they are doing awful.
There is some valid disagreement about whether a subjective improvement is good enough when it is a subjective condition being treated, eg, pain or depression or anxiety. On the one hand, if a person reports feeling better, great. On the other hand, reporting feeling better is very different from feeling better, as anyone who has ever tried to lie to themselves or others about how they feel knows.
Placebo effects include biological responses that can be measured in objective ways such as heart rate and blood pressure, observable allergic reaction, immune response in blood samples, or healing of tissue. For some drugs for psychological problems, we can measure the effects of a placebo medication/procedure/ritual causing release of dopamine in specific areas of the brain - again, an objective measurement of a real effect caused by the placebo treatment.
The effect of placebo's certainly is not limited to subjective feelings of improvement, it actually causes people to not only feel better, but be better up to a certain amount. Some medicines give significantly better results than a placebo, and some medicines, well, don't - so in that case they're probably placebos in essence.
I'm not even sure if what you describe would be called a placebo effect in medical literature - if objective measurements say they're doing awful, then we count it as a failure, period, and not an expression of the placebo.
Placebo effects include biological responses that can be measured in objective ways such as heart rate and blood pressure, observable allergic reaction, immune response in blood samples, or healing of tissue.
That's a very specific claim, and I would expect it to be published in a medical journal article that we can all look up if it is true. More than that, if this claim is generally accepted, it will be found in authoritative medical textbooks used to train medical practitioners. I have resources for looking up references like that--I go to my alma mater university library just about weekly to look up facts about things I read here on Hacker News. Do you have any references for anything you have read on this topic?
Meanwhile, I am sure that if any of our friends here on Hacker News are (may it never be) injured in a car crash, they are not going to go look for placebo treatments, but for actually effective treatments. The medical researchers who look at the issue with proper study designs and statistical controls know that placebos are essentially useless, as they at most have influence just on self-reported subjective symptoms, not on any sign that affects the progression of a disease or maintenance of good health.[1] This topic keeps coming up over and over and over here on Hacker News because most participants here have heard about this issue only in popular press reports or blog posts that are mostly wrong. I encourage you and all our friends here to take some more time and effort to learn more about the actual research base before assuming that a placebo can change your heart rate over the long term, reduce allergy symptoms (I know all about those), or heal tissue. (Which tissue?)
Findings on placebo effects by researchers who have considered the issue carefully include
"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."[2]
"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."[3]
Is this really true? My understanding was that most of the reason the placebo effect is so interesting is that it does result in concrete objective improvements in people's conditions.
tokenadult has a lot of nice links; the individual study that sticks in my mind as a great exemplar was an asthma study which involved a subjective measurement ("how do you feel?") and an objective measurement of lung function (eg, blowing into a tube). Subjects receiving the real treatment would report feeling better and show significantly improved lung function. Subjects receiving the placebo treatment would also report feeling better, but show no improvement in their lung function.
I'm not sure the placebo effect is really interesting so much as it has a great PR guy. It's like the Kardashians of science.
I don't have the exact studies and I'm too lazy to look for them now, but I recall seeing a controlled trial on placebo effect showing that people who are (a) informed about placebo effect as such (IIRC that group was all medical professionals) and (b) informed that the pills they're taking definitely are just a placebo with no active substance, they still showed a placebo response. It was lower than for "normal people" who were told that the sugar pill is a medicine for testing, but still significant.
Huh, interesting. Because for the longest time I've been going "I can cause the placebo effect on myself by believing that it works" whenever I feel bad, but I've never been able to find any studies that'd confirm the effectiveness. I guess that if the placebo effect sticks around when you tell people they're taking sugar pills, though, it should work with just the self-referential invocation.
But the sample size planned for this study is tiny, and the study won't really have the statistical power to demonstrate a true effect, even if the groups differ in outcomes (which I rather doubt they will).
AFTER EDIT: I see a downvote, presumably indicating disagreement, has come in. It would be a courtesy to onlookers here (and to me, for that matter) to explain what part of my comment you disagree with, if you please. To be clear, I genuinely think, based on much reading of medical research, that the effect the investigators are looking for will not be found as a replicable effect, even if their preliminary low-n study shows a difference in outcomes among the different study groups. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to claim that tricking people into thinking they live at an earlier time will reverse the disease progression of cancer is to make an extraordinary claim (which is why I think this claim may be within the scope of the James Randi paranormal challenge).
P.S. Has any onlooker calculated how large a difference in outcomes would have to be observed in a study with only 24 participants in each group to convincingly show that the treatment effect is genuine? Statistical power is an issue that is often neglected in published preliminary research.
Is this the sort of thing that's in the scope of JREF's challenge? It says "psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability". If this experiment does show a result from manipulating mental age with a throwback environment, we wouldn't assume that result derived from a paranormal cause. It would be a new psychosomatic effect where the mind can affect the body, but it would be through normal biological and chemical means, not the supernatural evidence JREF is looking for.
I don't think the JREF would accept them as an applicant. The JREF specializes on much smaller scale tests where they can stop shenanigans and allow for very low p-values. For example, they'll task a dowser with determining which of ten boxes filled with sand contains a gold nugget and repeat that six or more times so they can hit a p-value of 0.000001 or lower. Requiring a medical study to achieve that kind of p-value would cost more than the prize, because there's so many more variables in play.
Also, they'll probably simply disagree that totally changing someone's environment counts as a paranormal way to influence cancer outcomes.
As I age, I've found that I have to expend constant effort to repel the "wisdom" of my cohort as they become cynical, loveless, self-limiting, and as they give up on their dreams. I do think it's a mindset -- a mindset called "aging" which gives us a sense that it is somehow an inevitable byproduct of the biological process that goes by the same name.
Barring something amazing out of SENS research, I can't do anything about the biological process. But I can do something about that.
I've found little things that help. I occasionally do an experiment where I restrict my music collection to nothing more than five years old. I'll sometimes admit older things only if I was not listening to them when I was a teenager or early-20-something... if they are new to me. It's curiously effective, since central to the ideology of aging is that everything is getting worse than it was "back in my day." If you try this and find your collection sparse, go and find more. Music is a very condensed form of human expression. It carries a lot with it.
Other things that work include avoiding excessive and routine alcohol consumption, changing your setting, getting rid of old things, and learning pretty much anything new.
> As I age, I've found that I have to expend constant effort to repel the "wisdom" of my cohort as they become cynical, loveless, self-limiting, and as they give up on their dreams.
I actually consider it a function of "lack of positive reinforcement for adult learning."
Learning anything as a child gets a continuous stream of "oh, isn't that wonderful" no matter how bad the child sucks.
As an adult, try learning a foreign language or a musical instrument. You have to be damn near native fluency or rock star proficiency before you will get a positive word from other adults.
When learning something new as an adult, you have to have an amazing amount of fortitude to continue plowing through a new task.
People seem to call it aging... or rather it seems to happen to people as they "age." But yes, it involves a fair amount of assholery.
Another observation:
I have children, and I have not given up on my dreams. I find many people who say you can't pursue your dreams with kids. IMHO those people have given up on their dreams for other reasons and are blaming their children for that. It's a shitty thing to do-- your kids want you to have dreams, since it will inspire them.
Agreed. One of the most important duties of a parent is to serve a positive example by living how you would want your children to live. I know too many whining self-martyrs that believe the quality of parenting is proportional to the amount of misery they are in. I don't believe that is true and these parents are not only failing themselves, but their families as well.
Age is a mindset in the same way suffocating is. You may feel as if you're suffocating when you are not, but if you are suffocating, you are suffocating even if you don't realize it.
The way you put it is the closest I've found to my opinion. I mean, it's definitely not just a mindset when you realize you can't run as you did when you were 20 and played football, but maybe you haven't even noticed cause you haven't played football since your 20s. If it is a mindset, it's one that heavily depends on the moment.
I'm 52. I still play football. But now I cover the slowest opposing player, not the fastest.
My approach has been that I'll keep doing things until my body proves to me that I can't. It has started doing so. You can ignore age longer than many people think, but not forever...
If my body responds like yours, I still have a good three decades of activity. I can live with that. But yeah, as long as you keep a strong mind I suppose you can get over the limitations, that's until your body collapses.
Keep using it. You can't just wake up in three decades and decide that you should still be able to be active. You have to keep using it week after week, year after year.
Find something you like to do. Do it regularly. You can keep getting better (more skilled even if not faster) for a long time.
Sometimes you'll get an injury. Rehab it, and get back to doing whatever it was that you enjoyed. It may take a year to get back to where you were. It may hurt. Do it anyway. Do what you don't want to have to do for a year (if it takes that long), so that you can do what you want for several decades.
That all said, know your limits. If you try to crash through them, bad things happen. (I still remember the lecture from that one physical therapist...)
There's probably something to this. I've been a miserable old man since the age of about 19, and I'm now 31, with arthritis, gall stones and kidney stones.
I think it was Seneca who said something along the lines of "When I think as an old man, I have become an old man.". This isn't new knowledge, but something that we seem to have to keep reminding ourselves of.
When I was 27 I took a white water guide course up here in the Yukon. The instructor was doing backflips out of the raft in class 3 rapids, swimming for fun in water that was a few degrees above freezing, hauling more than his share of the raft, flipping it and righting it again in the middle of the river, etc. etc.
The instructor was 68 years old, and he's one of many people up here more than twice my age that can out-do me, and I'm no slouch.
This topic has come up a few times in the last few days with friends. I'm 41, but most people think I'm in my early 30s. I'm from Whistler, BC, where most people look and act significantly younger than city-folk of the same age.
I'd like to see a study like this one where rather than having people reminisce and pretend time hasn't passed, they spend more time around a younger crowd. I suspect that has an equal effect.
A few winters ago, I took a 20-year-old car into a shop. The guy who ran it diagnosed and fixed a problem the dealership had missed. I asked him about the status of the car. Well, he said, cars are like people. You can be in good shape for your age at 70, but that's not like being in good shape for your age at 30.
The noteworthy distinction is we can rebuild a car from scratch - a great many human "parts" are irreplaceable.
I hope we're really considering the effect of widespread longer life might have instead of barreling toward longevity - people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but we should be really thinking about how we'd mitigate that impact.
Maybe we could stop freaking out about keeping birth rates high? "Devastating" carries a negative connotation. If the quality of life for that additional 10 years is good, I'd call it a positive. If it's 10 years hooked up to machines where your brain's working at half capacity, then yeah, that's a negative.
Well, if it turns out to be such a big problem, then we can just kill everyone at a specific age.
That's sarcasm, of course, but IMHO saying that we shouldn't prolong life because of possible consequence X is morally exactly equal to saying that we should kill old people to avoid that consequence X.
For every X, either X really is so bad that it's worth killing people for it; or X shouldn't be considered as a valid argument against longevity.
Could you give an example of how to be proactive as such? I agree that being prepared is good, but I don't personally know enough about old-age care / geriatrics / Social Security to really be in favor of or against any particular policy changes.
> people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things.
Could you say a bit more about what problems you foresee? Are you talking about over-population, because I don't think we are at all close to that point. Other than medical costs and systems built around an expected retirement age I don't see any problems.
For a related tangential idea to "mindset you can't change willfully", think of a continuum along two axis, one of addiction/habit vs mere temporal coincidence and the other axis of fix it yourself vs professional intervention. Maybe a third axis of success rate! And a fourth axis of success of introspection/interpretation something like (reality) - (the victims observation).
Another fun related tangent is the article examples were very pedestrian and conventional, I wonder what the article readers would think about old dudes at a SCA event or a civil war re-enactor event. Or a star trek convention. Or a Renaissance Faire.
In the sense that the participants in the first study had their whole surroundings changed and molded in order for them to live in the past; yeah, most of us can't really use that as a viable strategy for feeling younger.
As far as a mindset in itself though, is changing your mindset something that is impossible? Most of us don't even really make an effort at all, so I tend to think of it as a largely uninvestigated area (as far as most people are concerned).
When I was young, 'all' of what I learned was unique. As I aged, the newness waned as I recognized patterns and deemed repackaged ideas as innovative applications. Now well into my 40's, I can still find 'new' when I leave the daily repetitive habit of life and deliberately search outside my comfort zone, but most events now seem stale & tired. The accumulation of knowledge and experience has changed the aspect in which I see and participate within my immediate environment. That is not to say I am or I feel old, it is only that my perspective of life has changed, my aspirations beyond my abilities have been quashed and I am no longer gullible enough to believe the ungrounded, optimistic concepts public education, media marketing and sociopath bosses/users/scammers try to feed me every day. Frankly, despite chronic aches from accumulated injuries and evolving sensations of fatigue, I only feel young when young people remind me I'm not young. YMMV.
Edit: Didn't read the mc-article who's sole purpose is to sell advertising...another 'old' thing I've picked up over the years.
When online ad networks know your age, they show you 'age-appropriate' advertising (that can be quite depressing). So be sure to tell advertisers and online sites only the age you want subconsciously-reinforced!
Of course age, especially old age, is nothing but a mindset. As we all know from StarTrek, we're only getting old and die because the cells in our bodies get irredeemably bored (hinting to the possibility that some cells have better tastes than the individual they're forming). And the situation isn't improved by the nocebo effect of incessant rumours about human mortality. So, don't believe anything you hear...
"we're only getting old and die because the cells in our bodies get irredeemably bored (hinting to the possibility that some cells have better tastes than the individual they're forming)."
That bit about half-speed and double speed clocks is intriguing. For those that don't play Starcraft, all games run at ~1.4 times normal time.[1] A lot of players usually have the in-game clock, which is running fast, showing during gameplay. I wonder what effect that has had.
As corny as "The Secret" is, this is exactly the same principle at work. Establishing the correct mindset is the fertile ground for achieving any purpose.
It's amazing the stuff that gets funded in the research community in place of, you know, actually addressing the physical, biochemical causes of aging.
This isn't "in place of" any research: This is different and honestly, it is hard to tell if this will wind up being important or not. This is research that is testing how to make people feel better as they age. I mean, if someone could feel just a little better and that little bit of feeling and performing better means they are able to move more and be healthier and stuff? Besides, this is looking at the mind-body connection in aging. Maybe this leads to research on different ways neurotransmitters react and the result of aging on the chemicals - and on and on. Maybe this research will inspire others. Research can lead to more research, when allowed.
So as we know the older brain gets, the more things it learns. The more things it learns, the less "space" there is left to learn new things. The less "space" there is left, the more difficult it is to absorb new information and learn new concepts. In order to overcome that, brain must unlearn old things. Unlearning is not easy process and requires much more energy than simple learning in young age.
So in a way it is mindset, but not in a meaningful way.
WTF. And what happens when you had cancer in 2003 but got cured, would it come back? Better avoid The Big Lebowski in that case.