I would argue it certainly does — heat/cold is comfort vs injury. Pressure is massage vs. crush injury. Trauma, I suppose, is definitionally bad. Repetitive motion is muscle mass and strength increase vs RSI. Exertion is cardiovascular health vs exhaustion. Posture, I'll give you — I don't think there's such a thing as posture that is /too/ good as long as you're staying mobile/stretching/taking breaks.
Perhaps a more intuitive way of stating it is, "Some classically bad things can be good in small or optimized doses. Some classically good things can be bad when taken to excess."
Well, that's not entirely correct — amphetamines even for people without ADHD are still going to cause stimulation, euphoria, etc. Albuterol (Ventolin) is still a beta 2 agonist whether or not you have asthma, and exercise-induced bronchoconstriction is still going to benefit from that.
> Stimulants don't have the same effect on a brain that is not dopamine deficient
Well yeah you're right, it tends to produce euphoria, stimulation, and improved mood, which is why it's such a massively abused drug.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the article but saying that therapeutic drugs have zero or only negative effect on people without their targeted pathologies is just plain wrong. I know a lot of athletes do things for "superstition" but when competing at the highest levels, I would wager that pharmaceuticals are probably pretty carefully evaluated for risk/reward.
While this paper is perhaps is a bit of an overfitting of the concept of generative weights, another fun take is Evo-Devo[0], an acapella overview of evolutionary developmental biology.
I think the commenter's point was that a model for detecting events caused by advanced tech before we even get our space exploration training wheels off would be a funny irony.
Pyramids, writing, and agriculture with irrigation developed independently in at least two completely separate places on Earth within just the last 3000 years.
This is survival bias. As of 1000 years ago, the answer was an entire hemisphere. So as long as barriers like oceans or space between stars slow the propagation of technology, technology will develop on its own.
> As of 1000 years ago, the answer was an entire hemisphere.
You honestly believe that there was just one culture across the entire geographical and historical extent of the Americas, despite not believing the same thing about the Old World?
No, I mean irrelevant, as is your newest argument. The functional capabilities of technology between planets is irrelevant to the observation that disparate groups develop similar levels of technology independently.
> The functional capabilities of technology between planets is irrelevant to the observation that disparate groups develop similar levels of technology independently.
No, it's not. The observation that agriculture developed independently along the Tigris/Euphrates, the Yangtzee, the Indus, Sub-Saharan Africa, Mesoamerica, Peru, and several other places is indisputable and proven by the human-influenced domestication of local plants over thousands of years and the lack of any evidence of communication between those cultures when domestication began. If you're simply trying to make the case that no culture which develops a technology matters besides whichever culture ended up most dominant, it's an absurd point because all of them influenced each other bilaterally (that means both ways) when they came into contact. Corn and tomatoes were domesticated in Mesoamerica and wheat was domesticated from a grass in Mesopotamia. All are now worldwide staples. Without agriculture having developed independently in numerous places and NOT being wiped out by other technologies, one or the other of those would not exist. Have you had a Kung Pao chicken satined with corn flour? Or a corn tortilla around steak? Or spaghetti with marinara sauce? None of those combinations was possible a mere 524 years ago.
Not the OP, but my library management is 90% tagging, format conversion, metadata fetch and editing, and format tune-up (font subsetting or stripping fonts, fixing covers, etc.). Virtual libraries keep me organized based on tags.
This study would certainly seem to indicate that this is at least true in some form — the study shows that parts of the brain that are typically very well correlated with each other (one fires then the other fires, or they fire together) come uncoupled from each other under the influence of psilocybin.
I'm not sure it could be correctly stated in the gross sense as "jumbling it up and making it re-build," but there certainly is a shift in how the brain's components work together for the duration of the drug's effects, per this study.
This concerns Functional Connectivity[0], which is basically a measure of how temporally correlated regions are; those that fire in sync or in a strongly correlated pattern are functionally connected.
Essentially, the TL;DR of this study is that psilocybin's 5-HT2A agonism seems to reduce synchronized FC activity not just in neurons but the whole brain: psilocybin makes parts of the brain overall that otherwise work together (in a time-correlated sense) stop displaying time-correlation. These results were seen most in the Default Mode[1] network, which is more or less the brain system in operation when you are inside your head — daydreaming, thinking, remembering, etc. — as opposed to processing visual cues or observing the physical world.
I think the fact that nobody knows how to deal with negative correlations in functional connectivity takes away from the validity of the whole concept. People literally throw out negatively correlated voxels/ROI's. This, on top of the fact that functional connectivity is only related to physical connectivity in the abstract. (it's about the correlated time series activity in pixels over time, and isn't bound by any cellular connectivity). I just struggle to discern any meaning from the concept.
I second the question below. The phase, magnitude, and polarity are all used. Yes, sure, you can focus on sub-systems with positive correlation under the presumption that joint increases in signal signify joint increases in O2 use and neuronal activity. Functional connectivity is functional more relevant than mere axonal connectivity. Only a small fraction of an axonal arbor — its collection of presynaptic terminals—-is functionally and reliably coupled to postsynaptic targets.
It’s commonly done in fMRI studies and I always got the impression it was less about not being able to understand negative relationships (e.g., it’s well understood that things like the default mode network is inversely related to active processing) and it’s more about not being clear how to use negative values as edge weights in graph theoretic analysis of networks
Yeah, this is super interesting. The obvious follow up for me is what implication this desynchronization has on cognition. People who have done a lot of psilocybin tend to be quite a bit 'different' at least in my experience—they tend to be more reserved, maybe a bit more thoughtful, slower, introspective, etc.
But what causes this change in personality? People who have done a lot of psilocybin seem to be a lot less worried, a lot less neurotic, and a lot less wrapped up in the ego than those who haven't. After all, who wants to be wrapped up and ruminating based on the content of their thoughts? I've always thought of this behavior by those who have used psilocybin to be a feature, not a bug—as if they're enlightened.
But if, say, this newfound personality is the result of a loss in functional connectivity—what does that tell us about how other markers of cognitive function have changed? Is strong FC a prerequisite for strong executive function or other measures of intelligence? The paper seems to suggest that the changes in FC are associated with the default mode network and maybe not other states of brain focus.
But will a macro dose of psilocybin, say—make someone better at their job? Maybe we don't know yet, and maybe there won't be a clear answer; there is a lot of heterogeneity in the way people think, and how they exploit their own cognitive abilities to provide value in the world—so maybe a loss in FC will mean different things to different individauls. But given the suggestion from this paper that the effects of psilocybin may be somewhat permanent, the answer to this question will be a very useful for those looking to benefit from this therapeutic.
The study uses cool methods but they are still at very crude global level and the temporal resolution is poor. Functional synchrony (or para-synchrony) is more of an initial pointer to the much faster synaptic processing we really would love to understand better. the ither limit is that fMRI studies focus on relatively large chunks of cortex, but lots of critical changes are sub-cortical. I’d love to see a focus on thalamo-cortico and cortico-thalamic modulation. I suspect these connections are just as important as cortico-cortical and cortico-hippocampal connections.
Finally, there will be a great deal of individual differences. One story will not fit all of us.
Perhaps a more intuitive way of stating it is, "Some classically bad things can be good in small or optimized doses. Some classically good things can be bad when taken to excess."