The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
This paper offers a clue into just such a connection. Immuno-psychiatry might be the next big thing.
Personally I think it is obvious why the connection between stress and 'subsystems' is there. Stress puts the body into survival mode. Heavy breathing is an example. But when the stress holds on for too long it exhausts your body causing all kinds of trouble. The most extreme example is a burnout.
In the Netherlands it was estimated that a lockdown would save 150000 life years but would cost 650000. This takes into account a huge number of factors. For example health, but also job safety, happiness, and so on.
A lockdown causes stress for a lot of people. It seems you are not one of them.
I think because I'm not stressed about it I'm definitely in a position of privilege. There are people who could not work during lockdowns - and I can completely understand why such people would be stressed. Not being able to make a living, and not knowing what's to come.
I can't imagine life in the distant past being less stressful.
The modern world has the ability to stress you out over things you can do nothing about (or at least, not very directly and quickly), for long periods of time. Sit down and watch three hours a day for a week of whichever news channel pisses you off the most if you want to see. Some of you reading this already do that, so you may not even notice how pointlessly stressed that makes you because that's how you live. It also has a bunch of other humans who find it advantageous to stress you out that way and bend a lot of time and effort to the task of continually stressing you out, because they prefer that you not be able to carefully think about things but that you react less thoughtfully. You spend more money that way, among other effects.
Past life would spike the stress levels more often, sure, but it generally lacks the low-grade continual stress you can't do anything about. The exceptions that leap to mind (sieges! famine!) would generally be exactly that, exceptions. And in those cases... I'm sure the continual stress of sieges and famines wouldn't be good for them, either!
If your village is raided and you escape harm (quite the assumption), why would you generally return to "baseline"? What if the raiders took all your food and you can't feed your family? What if your family was murdered or raped? What if your village was destroyed and you're now a vagrant?
As I said, when constant persistent stress was occurring, I'm sure it wasn't any better for them than for us. But those were the exceptions. History writes about the famines and the sieges precisely because they're the interesting exceptions. Most people, most of the time, were not in a siege or a famine or under any particular threat from a neighbor.
Today, millions upon millions experience this mid-level persistent stress all the time, for decades. In the 21st century first world, it is the norm, rather than the exception. I don't think that's how it used to be. It especially didn't used to be that way when the danger of famine or siege is as low as it is now, making the stress response even more mal-adaptive.
It was a great summer, can confirm.
Hindsight is 20/20. Back then we didn't even know well how it transmitted, or the exact percent of deaths/long term effects if you got it.
However flawed or not the antivaxxer's reasoning, imagine the stress of having to choose between yours and your children's livelihood or being forced to inject a substance you consider risky into yours or your child's body.
It's more stressful to be sick two weeks and struggling to breathe because you got COVID, and I'm saying that as an asthmatic who is not scared of mild difficulty to breathe.
There is no sensible posture to rationalize antivaxing, but every country has a percent of the population who hesitates about vaccination, and a percent that not only refuses it, but stubbornly refuses to practice hygienic measures. This should be taken into account when designing future health programs.
Is that similar to psychoneuroimmunology, or did you imagine a different thing?
So they infected a mouse, monitored the mouse’s neurons to see which ones are active during inflammation, then waited a while, then hit those neurons again and observed inflammation even though there’s no disease the second time.
If they hit the “same” neurons in a mouse that never had the disease in its lifetime, wouldn’t they observe inflammation without memory? (I don’t think they tried it)
This research seems to indicate that not only are specific immune responses stored in some area of the brain, the brain can trigger such a response by itself.
(I'm not a biologist or MD, though)
It’s also probably hard to target those same specific neurons without first triggering the immune response since that’s part of their method for finding them.
https://physicsworld.com/a/why-free-will-is-beyond-physics/
https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wron...
Since when is superdeterminism a done deal?
Conway had a few interesting words on this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
There is no largely accepted obvious place where free will emerges from, while at the same time superdeterminism is not proven as you say.
So it's fair for some to say that physics as we know it doesn't allow free will, while at the same time it's fair for others to say that obviously they have free will thus it must exist.
How?
They have been injecting viruses into animal brains and doing gain of function edits on viruses for understanding fear responses in mammals and making them more infectious to mice and apes to study their brains after viral infection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568141/
>The use of viral vector technology to deliver short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) to cells of the nervous system of many model organisms has been widely utilized by neuroscientists to study the influence of genes on behavior. However, there have been numerous reports that delivering shRNAs to the nervous system can lead to neurotoxicity. Here we report the results of a series of experiments where adeno-associated viruses (AAV), that were engineered to express shRNAs designed to target known plasticity associated genes (i.e. Arc, Egr1 and GluN2A) or control shRNAs that were designed not to target any rat gene product for depletion, were delivered to the rat basal and lateral nuclei of the amygdala (BLA), and auditory Pavlovian fear conditioning was examined.
If anyone doubts the effects of infection on the brain and just says its just a mouse experiment consider the effect of mental effects of untreated syphilis. Its been observed throughout history. They only do experiments on rodents but many have been "humanized" like giving them genetic diseases like making rats that are genetically prone to depression, obesity or having fatty liver disease. They have even used human stem cells to transplant human livers into rats. https://www.upmcphysicianresources.com/news/060220-mini-live...
Paul Garner has described how worry about covid helped to maintain his long-covid / ME/CFS symptoms, and he was finally able to recover after addressing those fears:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/25/paul-garner-on-his-reco...
I managed to fully recover from ME/CFS myself 20 years ago with a similar route (with no symptoms since). In my case I don't think there was any significant worry about the illness itself, it was more pre-existing life stressors that I had to deal with, with the viral infection being the final straw for my body.
One thing I also found out during this pandemic is people generally don't get sick which was surprising to me since I have 2 kids and have generally been sick with a cold every 2 to 3 months for a decade. Maybe that's why Covid wasn't that bad for me? Although it did put me on my ass for 2 days.
It feels like there's this enormous, sophisticated scientific edifice that can draw pictures of proteins and explain how they interact, and in the centre of it all is a giant rotating question mark that everyone by convention ignores and pretends isn't there.
>> "This effect is so real, large and standard that it's mandated by law to take it into account yet we understand basically nothing about it"
What would you prefer doctors do? Not use life-saving and life-improving treatments that are proven more effective than placebo after rigorous trials just because they don't understand it 100%?
Doctors will outright suggest you are mentally ill and need to see a therapist if your life is on the line, you aren't satisfied with their course of treatment and you question what they are doing and/or express concerns that this could kill you. Once they more or less declare you crazy for questioning them, you lose even more control over your body, your health, your life and your right to actively make decisions for yourself.
There is definitely room for improvement in our current process.
It would be like someone writing off Newtonian physics before quantum mechanics was a thing because a lot more of the how wasn't yet understood. The practice of medicine has moved past the "if she floats, she's made of wood, and that means she's a witch" phase even if it still sees anyone other than cishet white dudes as witches.
I think my comment says essentially the same thing theirs did.
I mean we're in an environment where the US President is forcing an entire nation to take an experimental medical treatment on the back of (failed!) trials, simply because politician's faith in "science" and the medical establishment is 100% unshakeable. Largely because scientists themselves hardly seem to admit to the true levels of uncertainty in their own work (replication crisis etc). There's a huge mismatch between people's perception of study rigor and "sometimes people think themselves better lol magic innit", which is basically the state of our understanding of the placebo effect.
Could you please elaborate on that?
I do skateboarding and had multiple ankle sprains. What happens every single time is that the wound heals, physiotherapy proceeds and strengthens the whole joint system, and then I'm left with an ankle that is still in pain when it should not physically be anymore since it has fully recovered.
That is, until I literally "decide" the remaining pain is a construct of my mind, and then the pain vanishes overnight, and the ankle that I felt brittle and was scared to use to its full extend suddenly feels as strong and stable as ever, if not more.
In a nutshell, the idea that there's a straightforward causal link between something being physically broken in your body and you feeling pain is simply wrong. Sometimes people feel pain in various body parts without any detectable physical changes and sometimes classical training injuries, like herniated spinal disks, can be found by medical imaging without the person feeling any pain at all. Also the common advice to rest until the pain subsides is often - but no always - wrong; there are plenty of anecdotes of people with completely fucked up knees or ankles or back starting heavy powerlifting program and suddenly healing from their injuries or at least learning to use their body in such a way that the injuries don't bother them anymore.
I participated in a chronic pain study where I personally learned that there are times, much more often than not, that one should not second-guess their joint that is having a flare-up and continue to walk a similar amount each day. I can't overstate how empowering it is to not be in a thought loop on a case by case basis and trust the learned system.
Increased blood flow, released endorphins, usage of muscle, flexing of connective tissues and operation of joints often addresses the issue (if it is not an acute injury that really does need our body's regenerative abilities). We evolved to walk.
I have a serious medical condition. I sometimes go for a short walk when I feel awful because I know from long experience that doing so frequently makes me feel better and I've gotten good at telling when I feel awful in a way that will likely be helped by taking a walk.
Gonna give that a try as there isn’t anything that shows up on scans etc
People going through withdrawal tend to be sugar fiends.
So I'm a bit skeptical of the assumption that "placebos do absolutely nothing, medically speaking" to begin with.
(Not dismissing your suggestion here.)
The pain-killing effect has nothing to do with sugar.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo
Not to say Wikipedia is infallible. I'm sure it's not. Just checking how clueless I am and the internet suggests my understanding is "common knowledge."
Perhaps you can share more of your knowledge about what placebo pills typically contain and enlighten us? (Citations welcome should you choose to share.)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whats-placebo-idUSTRE69H5...
> The benefit of using an actual vaccine as the placebo control is that it will cause a similar reaction at the site of the injection as the COVID-19 vaccine, such as muscle pain and soreness. This prevents patients from knowing whether they are getting the placebo or the real treatment.
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-vaccine-why-its-impo...
Using a Rife machine. He knows it doesn’t work but still thinks it works.
" . . . forceful respiration results in increased sympathetic innervation and glucose consumption in intercostal muscle, generating heat that dissipates to lung tissue and warms circulating blood in the pulmonary capillaries. Our results provide compelling evidence for the primacy of the brain (CNS) rather than the body (peripheral mechanisms) in mediating the Iceman's [Wim Hof's] responses to cold exposure.[28]"
By hyperventillating you are just flexing your intercostal muscle and that's warming your body. If you sat there flexing your quads or your core over and over you would probably get a similar sensation.
"It was shown that this individual was able to voluntarily activate the sympathetic nervous system through a self-developed method involving meditation, exposure to cold, and breathing techniques. This resulted in increased catecholamine and cortisol release and a remarkably mild innate immune response during experimental endotoxemia compared with more than 100 subjects who previously underwent experimental endotoxemia."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034215/
Perhaps it is bunk science? I'm not qualified to say. I personally did find the methods have been helpful.
can you recommend terms to google to learn more about what mental exercises yogis do and can achieve immunologically?
Though the article does seem to suggest that focusing your thoughts in a particular way could be involved as well. Pretty cool!
When you breath like Wim Hof CO2 levels in your blood change and this will have an effect on your pain response. CO2 lowers and the pH raises.
^^ same author as well
What’s really interesting, thymus involution becomes more or less clinically relevant just around the time cognitive performance begins to decline.