Visualized Heartbeat Can Trigger ‘Out-of-Body Experience’
psychologicalscience.org
psychologicalscience.org
One second of delay or more would offset the flash after the next beat, and, since the heart frequency varies slightly spontaneously, it would probably prevent the phenomenon... or maybe not :-)
"We showed users this picture" -- and doesn't include the picture!!
Dentist said it might happen, and was nothing to worry about. You get used to it pretty fast.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to make up their own mind on the legitimacy and effectiveness of such practices. I think, like any practiced meditation, it is a matter of deep personal preference whether one sees through the mysticism or is stopped short by it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_plane
I don't know if I've every astrally projected, but have met many spirits, who are just people (albeit non-physical) in what I call the spirit world. I don't see it as mystical. I try to keep an open mind about what the reality is (i.e. all in my head and dead is dead, or we're part of something larger and immortal) but lean toward immortality.
I honestly wouldn't be too surprised if they were trying to replicate someone's drug-induced hallucinations...
Research on brainwave entrainment and biofeedback.
They've done similar things with EEG machines, binaural beats, electric stimulation, etc...
Next they'll claim that walking to the corner drugstore produces an out-of-relationship experience.
> I'm curious why you say this.
Because it's not science?
> And if they are able to reliably induce that sensation in people through that situation, then I think it's worth investigating why.
Yes, but psychologists never seem to get around to asking "why", only "what". There's a bit more to science than observing interesting phenomena and publishing descriptions. Psychology is in the midst of a historical upheaval because they only describe things and don't try to shape theories -- explanations -- about what they describe.
Scientists eventually get around to crafting theories about their observations -- theories that can be applied to new observations, that predict things not yet observed, and that can be falsified by new evidence. Psychologists don't do that -- over a period of decades, psychologists has given up on theory-shaping and now limit themselves to observing and reporting what they observed.
And the chickens are coming home to roost. The director of the NIMH has recently decided to phase out the DSM, psychology's "bible" and a central authority for psychological clinical work, on the ground that it's not scientific:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
A quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
In the long term, neuroscience will produce the sorts of explanations -- theories -- that psychology seems unable to produce. That time hasn't arrived, but current events suggest it's not too soon to begin to phase out psychology's failed effort to craft a theory of mind.
I think that not limiting research to the DSM makes sense. The DSM is a clinical tool. It is necessarily a symptom-based descriptions of mental disorders. Steven Novella of Science Based Medicine explains this quite well: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-...
(I actually heard this line of talk from him on the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, on which he is the host: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/)
That's false. Psycholgists and psychiatrists do not craft or test falsifiable scientific theories -- they publish descriptions without explanations.
> They are not complete ...
They're not scientific. They lack essential properties that a scientific theory most have, primarily falsifiability, but including the ability to predict observations not yet made, and the ability to produce consensus -- accepted principles -- among different workers in the same field. Psychologists and psychiatrists famously disagree on even the most basic things. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> And while there is more to science than publishing descriptions, it is still part of science.
Not without falsifiable theories. Remember that falsifiability -- a practical way to compare ideas to reality and abandon ideas that fail the test -- is essential to science.
The difference between psychology and astrology is that astrology has clearly stated theories, theories that have been tested and found wanting.
You know nothing about the current state of psychological research and should stop posting.
A productive argument. You may be surprised to learn that the current director of the NIMH shares my views and is acting on them:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
Quote: "When Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, came out swinging with his critiques of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a couple of weeks ago, longtime critics of psychiatry were shocked and gratified. Insel announced that that the D.S.M.’s diagnostic categories lacked validity, that they were not “based on any objective measures,” and that, “unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS,” which are grounded in biology, they were nothing more than constructs put together by committees of experts. America’s psychiatrist-in-chief seemed to be reiterating what many had been saying all along: that psychiatry was a pseudoscience, unworthy of inclusion in the medical kingdom."
Maybe Insel should take your sage advice and "stop posting" as well. Or maybe you could learn a bit more about this topic.
Second, your original claim is that this research posted here today is empty, navel-gazing non-science. And still your efforts to show that this claim is true are also wanting, but not for a lack of heat and bluster.
The director isn't merely "wonder[ing] aloud", has has announced his intention to phase out the DSM entirely, replace it with a more evidence-based approach, one that tries to explain, rather than merely describe. In other words, he's saying what I say in this thread.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
Quote: "When Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, came out swinging with his critiques of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a couple of weeks ago, longtime critics of psychiatry were shocked and gratified. Insel announced that that the D.S.M.’s diagnostic categories lacked validity, that they were not “based on any objective measures,” and that, “unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS,” which are grounded in biology, they were nothing more than constructs put together by committees of experts. America’s psychiatrist-in-chief seemed to be reiterating what many had been saying all along: that psychiatry was a pseudoscience, unworthy of inclusion in the medical kingdom."
In case you're wondering how the current discussion conflates the DSM, a mere book, with psychiatry and psychology, large established fields, it's because the DSM is to psychiatry and psychology what the Standard Model is to physics -- it represents a distillation of research efforts spanning decades. Therefore to reject the DSM is to reject psychiatry and psychology as serious science.
> ... your original claim is that this research posted here today is empty, navel-gazing non-science.
I suggest that you limit yourself to things I've actually said. But, without either producing a new, empirical, testable theory, or comparing the outcome to an existing theory, the article can only describe the sort of instantly forgettable observation that plagues modern psychological research. That's what's wrong with modern psychological research -- it doesn't lead to consensus, to established principles, principles that might turn psychology into a science.
Appeal to authority does not make a valid argument. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your position here - only pointing out that repeatedly posting that the NIMH director agrees with you doesn't lend credence to your arguments.
> Appeal to authority does not make a valid argument.
Then it's a good thing I didn't make an appeal to authority. My reason for mentioning the director's position and actions is because this issue has a political dimension as well as a technical one.
By addressing the ongoing political changes, the director's comments add substance to the discussion, not to any imagined intellectual authority. If I say that psychology isn't a science, reference to the views of the director of the NIMH is hardly worthwhile. If I say that society is abandoning psychiatry and psychology, the same reference is immensely relevant.
> ... repeatedly posting that the NIMH director agrees with you doesn't lend credence to your arguments.
Only if I don't argue that psychiatry and psychology are being abandoned for cause, something I say regularly.
And finally, in a thread that includes such non-arguments as "you should stop posting", the fact that others share my views is entirely germane.
Here's the psychology English wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Clinical psychologists rely on the authority of the DSM, as do psychiatrists. The DSM is the central authority in both fields. If you are still confused, read this:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/04/dsm.aspx
Quote: "After a 14-year revision process and a lot of contentiousness, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) debuts May 22. What changes will affect psychologists?"
> They are two separate fields.
They both depend on the authority of psychology, the study of the mind. Would you argue that particle physics isn't physics on the ground that it isn't cosmology?
The APA recognizes 54 subfields within psychology. Will you now argue that each of them is a separate field? I ask because I've heard that one before -- I've heard it argued that, if any of them is scientific, then all of them are. But science doesn't work that way.
> Here's the psychology English wikipedia page ...
I'm very familiar with that page. In an article I once quoted its definition of psychology -- "the study of the mind, partly through the study of behavior". I compared that to Wikipedia's definition of neuroscience -- "the scientific study of the nervous system." Within hours of the appearance of my article, someone added "scientific" to the definition of psychology. If only science could be that simple.
Take it with a grain of salt though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296
Either way, this argument is rather orthogonal to whether-or-not the situation is actually 'worthy' of future investigation. So it could still be useful, however the relative maturity of the field limits how accurately we can assess that.
It's more substantial than semantics -- without theory shaping and testing, an activity is not science. But let's test this idea scientifically -- let's say this isn't true, that an activity that only describes, that doesn't make an effort to explain, counts as science. Let's see where this takes us. Here we go:
Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
Also, have you read the paper in question, or are you judging it from a press release and/or journalist's summary?
False, I am very familiar with the current state of psychological research, and it would be more productive for you to address the topic.
> Just the idea that there is no room in science for making, repeating and reporting observations is wrong.
Yes, and therefore it's a good thing that I never said this anywhere, only you did. What I do say is that observations can only be a preliminary to science. Science requires us to propose a theory about those observations, a theory that can be empirically tested and potentially falsified, a theory that can produce consensus between different workers in the field.
If we instead limit ourselves to observations and never try to craft a theory, we can accept any correlation as significant and call it science -- for example, I can shake a dried gourd over a cold sufferer and the cold will eventually go away. Have I cured the cold? Is that science?
Much of modern psychological research is on a par with shaking a dried gourd over a cold sufferer and calling the outcome significant. For example, recent meta-analyses show that talk therapies are indistinguishable from each other and from the placebo effect. Based on current studies, no one can say that talk therapy is an example of the placebo effect, only that it's indistinguishable from it.
Here is the conclusion of a recent psychology scandal:
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
> Also, have you read the paper in question ...
Of course. No theory, no science. Are you prepared to judge astrology to be a pseudoscience without reading every paper that's been published on the topic?
Can this not be empirically tested? Can it not be falsified or generate consensus?
I would think it more direct to criticize theories like this for their qualial basis. Still, how is the statistical nature of a sufficiently large sample of humans providing qualial data different from that of a sufficiently large number of H20 molecules providing neutrino collision data?
But that's not a theory, that's an observation. A theory would explain what had been observed, generalize it, make predictions about things not observed, and be falsifiable by new evidence. You know, like in science.
> Can this not be empirically tested?
Observations can only be collected, the term "test" isn't meaningful. Theories can be tested because they presume to explain what's been observed, and there can be any number of possible explanations for a given observation.
Here's an example. If I say, "the night sky is filled with little points of light," I have made an observation, for which the term "test" doesn't apply -- everyone will make the same observation about the night sky. But if I say, "those points are actually thermonuclear furnaces like our sun but at much greater distances," that theory can be tested and potentially falsified -- it meets the requirements for science.
> Can it not be falsified or generate consensus?
Not unless the observation leads to a testable theory, and won't produce consensus unless that theory is confirmed. For example, in some neuroscientific work I was involved in many years ago, we established that people could tell which direction a sound was coming from even if the volume in each ear was artificially changed, meaning the sense of direction of the sound wasn't dependent on it being louder in one ear than the other -- something else was involved.
That's an observation, not very important and certainly not falsifiable. But then neuroscientists crafted a theory that people identified the direction of a sound based on its arrival time, not its volume. Now we had a testable theory, one that we confirmed using signal generators that presented sounds that had been time-delayed but that were exactly the same volume, by way of headphones, and asked subjects to identify the apparent direction of the sound. That study in turn led to a reassessment of how the human hearing system works, and its ability to distinguish arrival times in the millisecond regime, something that at the time was rather controversial.
Put simply, observing things can only lead to science (is not itself science), because (among other things) science requires a basis for falsification, and observations cannot be falsified -- everyone who goes out after dark sees a sky filled with points of light. But the claim that people directionalized sound based on its arrival time was simultaneously testable and initially very questionable because of the time discrimination ability it implied. It turned out to be true, and it was certainly science.
Psychologists famously do not craft theories or establish general principles that might unite their field or produce consensus among different workers, as a result of which psychology drifts from one fad to another and breaks apart into more and more splinter groups over time (psychiatry and clinical psychology are only the best-known of 54 subfields presently recognized within the field).
Symptomatic of psychology's way of doing "science" was the fact that all the new mental illnesses included in the new DSM, recently published, were included based on -- not medical research -- but secret votes. Some conditions that had been voted into the prior version were voted out (including Asperger Syndrome), but not one new condition was included based on medical and clinical evidence that identified a cause, as is required in mainstream medicine. All decisions were carried out in secret, by voting experts. No microscopes, no brain scans, and not one identified cause.
This is all rather academic, because as we speak, emphasis is shifting away from psychiatry and psychology to neuroscience, because the public has gradually become aware of the importance of evidence-based practice in medicine and other fields, a move reinforced by the fact that psychiatry and psychology have such poor evidence to support its clinical activities.
> Still, how is the statistical nature of a sufficiently large sample of humans providing qualial data different from that of a sufficiently large number of H20 molecules providing neutrino collision data?
The difference is that physicists don't bother publishing until they have a theory about why the neutrinos behave the way they do. Also physicists don't have clinics, and they don't try to tell people how sick they are, based on diseases they voted into existence.
According to your example about the night sky, a claim is merely an observation if everyone will make the same claim in response to the same evidence. This seems very porous and weak, but following that logic, I would argue that given evidence that "the brain generates our experience of self by merging information about our body from multiple sources, including the eyes, the skin, the ears, and even one’s internal organs" it does not obviously follow that by observing a visualization of your body and heart beat will cause one to experience the phenomena of dissociation with his body. Then it seems that claiming so and contriving repeated samples is scientific.
It seems to me, the point you're really driving at is that a claim must be couched in some systemic view. It must base itself on a collection of related reinforcing ideas and assumptions (and state as much), and refine or extend that system. These systems abstract irrelevant things. Neuroscientific work is not phrased in string theory. It builds on a system that includes physical assumptions. Should a theoretical physicist argue neuroscience is on shaky ground because we do not understand all the details of the underlying physics? Should a neuroscientist argue evolutionary anthropology is on shaky ground because we don't understand all the details of the underlying neuroscience?
To your broader point. The motives and actions of neither psychiatric pharma, nor society, nor academia even, do not invalidate the possibility that collections of reinforcing ideas and assumptions can explain human thought at some level of neuroscientific abstraction. For better or worse, Jung, Freud, etc have established such systems which can and have been subject to methodical examination and testing by others. That they have subsequently not held up does not mean that the possibility is invalid.
I think also that there's a tendency to conflate the physicality (non-qualiality) of phenomena and its ability to be subject to "scientific" methods. And yet entrepreneurs expand knowledge with this all the time, as they make predictions about customer behavior, statistically test, refine, extend... This might not be Los Alamos "science", but it's method is certainly "scientific".
Not exactly, since that's true of established theories also. I would instead say that an observation is something that collects data but doesn't try to integrate it into a general pattern or thesis. For example, in England the peppered moth changed colors between 1700 and 1850. Before 1700 it was light-colored, after 1850, it had fully transitioned to a darker color. We now have an observation, a description. No matter how many times the observation is repeated, we will find once again that the moths change color over time, but we still have no explanation.
Eventually, because of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the color change was explained as resulting from the moth's ability to hide from predators by having the same general color as its surroundings -- and the color of the surroundings had changed as a result of coal-burning. Those moths that happened by chance to have genes for a darker color, were better able to hide from predators. We now have a theory. Our theory can be applied to other neighborhoods, even other species. It's not just a specific statement about a particular moth species in a particular place, it's a general statement about reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
> The motives and actions of neither psychiatric pharma, nor society, nor academia even, do not invalidate the possibility that collections of reinforcing ideas and assumptions can explain human thought at some level of neuroscientific abstraction.
Yes, but the principle is not the fact. Also, psychology and neuroscience are as different as two fields can possibly be. Psychology studies the mind, which is a philosophical abstraction lacking a physical embodiment. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, which are physical entities amenable to empirical observations, observations on which similarly equipped observers can (must) agree.
> For better or worse, Jung, Freud, etc have established such systems which can and have been subject to methodical examination and testing by others. That they have subsequently not held up does not mean that the possibility is invalid.
Actually yes, because of the null hypothesis (the precept that an idea without evidence is assumed to be false), it does mean that. An essential property of scientific theories is that they must be empirically falsifiable in practical tests. Some psychological theories cannot be meaningfully tested, which makes them unscientific. Others can be tested, have been tested, and have been falsified, which makes them unscientific.
> And yet entrepreneurs expand knowledge with this all the time, as they make predictions about customer behavior, statistically test, refine, extend...
Yes, but without a theory that both explains and correctly predicts particular outcomes in advance -- that shows and proves a link between causes and effects -- there is no testable theory and there is no science.
> This might not be Los Alamos "science", but it's method is certainly "scientific".
Exercise of a particular scientific method isn't by itself enough to call something science. Were this not true, I could hire some scientists to study astrology and thereby make astrology into a science:
http://arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html#The_Architecture_...
> Should a neuroscientist argue evolutionary anthropology is on shaky ground because we don't understand all the details of the underlying neuroscience?
In a word, yes, he or she should do just that. If there's no structure that connects repeated observations with an empirical, testable theory, it's not science.
Why do I care? Why should anyone care what psychiatrists and psychologists do? Because they have public clinics and, rather than wait for people to call on them for help, they shout from the rooftops about how sick people are, using as "evidence" the symptoms of diseases they voted into existence. Then they prescribe drugs that have no reliable clinical evidence for effectiveness. More here:
"The Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" : http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/04/28/the-astonishing-rise-...
The problem is that we are seriously limited in what we can actually do/use if we base psychology entirely on this premise. I mean this both conceptually and technologically. We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations. Likewise, we don't actually fully know how most psychoactive compounds work to produce the effects they do, much less 'designer medications'. This isn't a reason to dismiss their usefulness though. There's a difference between being 'limited', and being 'wrong'. You could've made a similar argument about physics back before we really understood the atom (again, due to limitations).
Additionally, the notion of 'wrong' here is only relative to the philosophical theory of falsification, which is good, but has it's own set of gotchas and nuances that others have tried to address:
http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Lakatos.html
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/papers/Lakatos.htm
http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-philosoph...
http://andrewgelman.com/2004/10/14/bayes_and_poppe/
So while good, this definition of science is still far from a stable building-block to deem all nonconforming studies unequivocally 'wrong'.
Yes, that's true, but current events suggest that the remedy is not to claim that psychology is scientific on dubious grounds, but instead to shift focus to neuroscience, see where a more biological approach will take us. This happens to be the NIMH director's view as well.
> We haven't fully mapped out the brain, we don't know about all the neurotransmitters out there, and we don't even know what fMRI shows us exactly, so we gotta be realistic with our expectations given our current limitations.
But that's not psychology, that's neuroscience. Psychology is the study of the mind, not the brain, and the mind is not accessible to brain scanners.
> ... however the past thread I linked to makes me weary about pursuing this discussion further.
Perfectly understandable. In any case, recent events like the NIMH director's decision to phase out the DSM make anything we choose to say rather unimportant.