Hacker News Reader

Comment by lycopodiopsida | Hacker News Reader

Having done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hack on single neurons or do some fishy fMRI studies instead. But of course, our tooling today is not adequate for this task.

View on HN

> fish fMRI studies

Link for those curious about this comment:

(Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction)[https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf]

Well, I expected fishy as in dubious, not like literal fish.

As the first author of that paper, I approve of this link.

Nick checks out.

Still one of my favorite papers I was ever assigned in my cog sci grad program.

Am I reading this right: you compared fMRI studies in humans to a dead fish?

So the f in fMRI stands for fishy? :-)

I did a minor in neuro and had a very similar experience. Fascinating and useful but it was always slightly alarming when the professor would answer a question with "I don't know.. no one knows. That is far beyond the limits of our capabilities to know." A reminder that scientists really do work at the edge of ignorance!

That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people.

We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all.

Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse.

An example from the field I’m in — biology. It’s quite likely that if you worked at it you can describe a new species in your backyard. You don’t have to go to the Amazon rainforest, there’s scientific unknowns all around you all the time.

The major questions of biology have already been solved, though. The rest is filling in the details.

What? This very thread is about an article talking about the lack of accuracy in our model of the brain's mechanisms.

I suspect GP agrees with you and is making fun of what this guy[1] said to Plank.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_von_Jolly

This doesn’t seem to be true at least for the nervous and immune systems. Probably also the microbiome we host. There’s lots of important stuff yet to be learned with those systems.

I read the parent's comment in terms of how we once viewed life being mysterious, talking about the "elan vital" before we understood DNA. This is often used as an analogy to our current struggle to understand consciousness.

Famous last words of some biologist? :-P

My above comment was not ironic. What I meant is that we have already discovered the algorithm that gives rise to all biological phenomena: Evolution by Natural Selection.

We also have some grand principles that further unite the field, like the cell as the basic unit of organismal life, emergent properties of higher order systems, &c.

The remaining work is mostly 'stamp collecting' - looking at the details of the output of that algorithm. Of course those details are enormously complex. Kind of like mapping out the Mandlebrot Set after you already know the algorithm.

Well the stamp collecting is where the action is.

If you wanna cure cancer, resolve chronic diseases, conserve ecosystems under climate change, etc.

It’s cool to know that DNA exists and that life evolves by natural selection, but getting into the complex weeds of that fractal is where we discover that we know so little.

> People are happy to hack on single neurons

This is where science communication fails, the general population and even the most curious people still think that there is such a thing as "Jennifer Aniston neuron", but in reality there is "Rachel from Friends neuron" that sits at the top of hierarchy where the signalling converges and then it's highly likely it isn't the only thing it's responsible for (OR gate), but finding what is the hard question. This is speculation stated at about 20min in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ID0FQN9tg

Yet somehow Pharma can prescribe drugs that affect the brain's functions. How do they get away with that knowing so little about the brain?

They give random drugs to rats until something happens.

And then to humans

Psychiatrists are doctors who prescribe substances that have been closely studied - but their effects may be easily and specifically understood, their mechanisms may not be.

Lithium is a great example - very effective treatment for bipolar. No one really knows why. Prescribed for decades as they've tried to figure it out because tests showed it was effective and relatively safe, just no one knew exactly what it was doing in there.

It's sort of how you can be a woodworker without knowing the cellular biology of trees, and without being an electrical or mechanical engineer who can build a table saw from scratch.

The discovery of it is pretty interesting.

Lithium-rich mineral springs have historically been touted for their healing properties. It was first used for mania in the late 1800s, with Denmark leading the way, but little was published about the medication for more than half a century.

https://www.verywellmind.com/lithium-the-first-mood-stabiliz...

This is a good argument as to why we should look closely at traditional medicines of various cultures. We (1) coevolved with this stuff and (2) have gone through generations of trial and error.

I'm a believer in modern scientific medicine, but think we often have it backwards. Before reinventing the wheel we should exhaustively test what we used traditionally. Maybe the reason we don't do much of that is that it's not possible to patent, and so there's no financial incentive to do so?

There seems to be a good bit of different literature studying traditional cultural practices. Maybe it flies under the radar compared to flashy high-tech stuff. Below is a link to related articles about fermented beverages.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from...

I absolutely agree with this. We should go through the many cultures' lists of traditional medicines with the lens of modern chemistry and determine what compounds lead them to be effective pharamacologically.

You do realize what you're proposing happened and happens extensively?

I've read a decent chunk of that research, but it's often relegated to backwater low-reputation journals focused on alternative medicine and is largely ignored by mainstream science. For an example, see the research on various traditional sleep-inducing drugs.

It also doesn't make its way into mainstream practice among GPs and psychiatrists. As an example, which mainstream practitioner would ever prescribe or recommend curcurmin with piperine for any condition, aside from alternative medicine practitioners? Which psychiatrist would recommend EPA fish oil for depression? I could go on. The research that does exist is largely ignored.

Not in that way, no. Pharma, on the other hand, often looks into various remedies etc. in order to draw from and produce more distilled and controllable substances. Aspirin for example, from 'cook a tree bark and drink the solution' into a pill process. Penicillin.. etc.

I am by no means an expert in pharmaceutical studies, but I suppose they can afford a huge number of dead ends in the initial phase of research due to the massive wealth and in the end, they have to test only for two variables: efficiency and side-effects. An explanation on how it actually works, is a very nice extra, but is not required. The problem for Pharma is that at some point you require tests on human subjects, which is very expensive and dangerous.

A lot of original psych drugs were also discovered by accident, intending to address some other medical issue. For example MAOIs were found to have antidepressant effects during a trial to use them for tuberculosis. Development of SSRIs (e.g. Prozac) then came from trying to create a similar drug with less side effects.

Also, the many dead ends thing is true in general for pharma, but at some point there are too many dead ends for it to be profitable even given their bankroll. This is happening a lot lately with neuro-related drug development. In the last 10 years I know Amgen, Pfizer, Novartis, Eli Lilly have all had shut downs/lay offs in their neuroscience research divisions.

You might be interested in reading about Stuart Hammeroff who is an anesthesiologist and professor focused on studies of consciousness...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff

> fishy fMRI studies

Subtle, but I get it :D

Now is the perfect time to build models of 'how all of it works', just like Kepler did with Tycho Brahe' astronomical observations.

There is plenty, more than enough, data to work with, and many promising/proven models to build upon, need more good theorists in the field.

Saying "but we don't know much" is just being lazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com