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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices. In the absense of any evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the "100% BS" option.

If you click through to the actual PDF, it's not a medical paper. It's a collection of anecdotes without evidence, of lower quality than the light medical anecdotes in Discover magazine. This is neither science nor medicine.

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> or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices

A variant of this appears in the abstract: that some speculated she was somehow unconsciously aware of the tumor or "not feeling right" and that perhaps she had internalized more knowledge of the locations of hospitals than she was aware, so this surfaced as the hallucinations telling her to go to the place she knew (without knowing) could fix it.

That's not the easiest explanation, it's just more convenient for you. Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you. If they learned new information with no prior visits to any one capable of diagnosing them then the easiest explanation is their experience was real, especially give that this phenomena has been observed in other historical cases. Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.

I would be careful of playing hardcore skeptic when it comes to the brain.

You can heal someone by giving them sugar pills, that makes no sense (said a straw-man i just built) - yet placebo effect is a reality. As a matter of fact placebo take place even if you tell patient that they are given a sugar pill that has no effect on them (though effect is lower).

We are not master of our brain.

There are a lot of things happening inside that we are not aware of or only vaguely. Like split brain patients show symptoms of possibly two entities with separate choices on given questions.

Also consider tuplas, which are created entities that are separate from yourself living gin your brain. Those I believe were first described by Buddhist monks.

And the whole multiple personality disorder. I remember reading article about a person that was blind when one personality was in charge. Theirs pupils would not respond to light like a blind persons.

Sure there is no definitive answer here, but saying everything is fake and you need hard evidence is not getting us any closer to the truth.

This is the exact opposite of how burden of proof works. An extraordinary claim is being made. The burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim. The claim is not only extraordinary, but the anecdote does not include any information indicating research into the origin of the "voices". I don't have to prove anything. I'm saying I don't believe it. The full article contains zero citations, zero clinical records, zero anything. It's a story. Maybe it's entertaining, but again, it's not science or medicine.

> his is the exact opposite of how burden of proof works. An extraordinary claim is being made.

Person suffering hallucinations is concerned they have a brain tumor, experiences said concern in the form of hallucination, turns out to have brain tumor, isn't an extraordinary claim. Person with symptom X consistent with disease Z worries they might have disease Z, expressed through symptom X, and finds out they have disease Z is ... not extraordinary at all. It's the particulars that make it an interesting anecdote, but the overall phenomenon isn't. Imagine we changed it just slightly:

Patient with spastic paralysis of their lower limbs thinks they have a brain tumor. Attributes that thought to themselves. Calls the nearest big medical center - because that's what people worried about cancer do - and gets seen by onco. Onco finds a brain tumor. Unsurprising, because central neuro symptoms.

The story changes only insofar as "symptom was a cognitive effect that made it an interesting anecdote."

The claim is not particularly extraordinary. Gravity wave observations are extraordinary. True information from internal mental dialog is quite ordinary. The variety of that dialog is remarkably wide, and not well analyzed for distribution, making every instance effectively unique.

It's not extraordinary though. Literally every culture has stories of communication with "voices".

> Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you.

No, burden of proof is on the person making the interesting claim. If I claim that I went to Mars, and you claim I'm lying, the burden is on me to prove I went to Mars, because humans lying is boring, and humans going to Mars is interesting.

This is what people are trying to get at with the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" copypasta: It's so easy for humans to make shit up that the evidence is on the person who told the story, especially if it's an interesting story you want to believe.

> Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.

Bulverism is saying "Of course you believe/don't believe that because of some trait you have!" It's irrelevant, in that it doesn't disprove the belief. It doesn't matter if they believe something because it's blue on Tuesday and today is Odin's favorite month. If it's true, it's true, and if it's false, you only find out if it's false by examining the belief and its logical consequences, not the traits of the person who proposed it, positive or negative.

You have obviously not actually read the article and are railing against a strawman.

The third of your ‘easiest explanations’ is pretty much the third explanation offered in the article. The article is an object level description of what happened, with little to no speculation, apart from three tentative explanations, and does not endorse any remarkable claims about how the world operates.

You have invented that ‘implication’; nothing in the article even hints at that being the obvious implication and it’s entirely unclear what you “don’t believe” to people that have actually read the full article.

The article also mildly makes fun of the people who believe it to be a supernatural phenomenon.

> or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices.

The paper suggests this as one possibility too.

What I take from this is simply that we shouldn't be so dismissive of what "crazy" people are telling us, but should pay attention to it. Regardless of what caused it (assuming the story is true and not simply fabricated), this was a case that paying attention to what the 'crazy' person was saying, instead of just dismissing it as crazy, resulted in a succesful medical outcome.

> The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient

The implication of the actual article, if you read it to the end, is the exact opposite.

This is my understanding.

It's also what I argued in a thread about Mr. Robot (a show where the protagonist perceives an individual who doesn't exist) sometime back.

Someone was asking how Elliot could be on a computer while Mr. Robot is scanning a bookshelf. My proposal was that Elliot memorized the bookshelf as he walked past it.

Either it happened or it didn't. If it did, it constitutes important differential information, and publication is important. Saying that it is not medicine or science implies that medicine and science disregard facts, which is an implication I reject.

you successfully restore your worldview and advance to the next stage. achievement unlocked. 10 points

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