What If Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
WTF. And what happens when you had cancer in 2003 but got cured, would it come back? Better avoid The Big Lebowski in that case.
Unless this past environment was one that actually kills cancers cells (I don't know how the Big Lebowksi might do that) or perhaps reduces tumor growth I can't imagine any way how this can work.
What I can imagine is going on a time out, reducing stress and thus biological stress responses does have an influence on a tumor. I hope they are compensating for this effect. They should have a control group in a reduced stress environment (or something that mimics all evironmental variables of the back-in-time room but for the back-in-time aspect) perhaps with a bluray disc of Lucy.
Hey or perhaps dumbphones induce less stress. Perhaps you get better sleep in the 2003 environment, light/circadian rithm is known to influence cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_factors_for_breast_cancer#...
Et cetera et cetera, et cetera
It does not now, nor has it ever, meant strictly the biological notion you limited it to above. The GP post used the word correctly.
I said no such thing. I am not the person who used the word "evolve". I merely am capable of understanding that sometimes pedantry doesn't actually help anything.
Because modern medicine (and science) does not like to believe anything that it has no explanation for. You can show not only correlations, but causative action and a lot of people will reject the finding if it is unintuitive and has no known mechanism. IMHO this has become a problem.
Even though we claim science starts with observation, people still don't believe what is in front of them unless they have something conceptual to hang it on.
It does, obviously. Contracting a voluntary muscle requires work that is done at the cellular level. A signal travels from the brain and ends up translated into a chemical message at the cellular level which contracts muscle fibers.
The brain is even able to address a specific set of cells that correspond to a bundle of specific nerve fibers for that muscle.
Nervous-system signaling involves the cellular level: changing electric potentials, ions flowing across cell membranes, and and such.
The placebo effect is more complex than, intuitively, it should be. Otherwise, all you'd need to do was explain the placebo effect to someone, and the belief in the placebo effect itself would effect the desired results (in effect, the placebo effect would be the placebo<g>). Instead, we need to do tricks—sugar pills, simulated environments—to get it to work. It really defies reason.
So in that same sense, if you take an adult and tell them to imagine it is 2003 in a blank room it's going to be difficult. And if you do the same in a room that is filled with things from today it will also be difficult because they will be trying to force objects from post 2003 to fit into a 2003 mindset. But finally, if you put them in a room filled with things from 2003 they will be able to use their imaginations much more effectively to enter a 2003 mindset.
For the record, these are just my thoughts on the matter.
Are there any studies saying that this precise trick, consciously invoked by people who understand the situation, doesn't work?
The placebo effect is, the most part, a measurement error when collecting subjective measurements. When coupled with objective measurements, it is normal to see people subjectively reporting feeling better when objective measurements say they are doing awful.
There is some valid disagreement about whether a subjective improvement is good enough when it is a subjective condition being treated, eg, pain or depression or anxiety. On the one hand, if a person reports feeling better, great. On the other hand, reporting feeling better is very different from feeling better, as anyone who has ever tried to lie to themselves or others about how they feel knows.
The effect of placebo's certainly is not limited to subjective feelings of improvement, it actually causes people to not only feel better, but be better up to a certain amount. Some medicines give significantly better results than a placebo, and some medicines, well, don't - so in that case they're probably placebos in essence.
I'm not even sure if what you describe would be called a placebo effect in medical literature - if objective measurements say they're doing awful, then we count it as a failure, period, and not an expression of the placebo.
That's a very specific claim, and I would expect it to be published in a medical journal article that we can all look up if it is true. More than that, if this claim is generally accepted, it will be found in authoritative medical textbooks used to train medical practitioners. I have resources for looking up references like that--I go to my alma mater university library just about weekly to look up facts about things I read here on Hacker News. Do you have any references for anything you have read on this topic?
Meanwhile, I am sure that if any of our friends here on Hacker News are (may it never be) injured in a car crash, they are not going to go look for placebo treatments, but for actually effective treatments. The medical researchers who look at the issue with proper study designs and statistical controls know that placebos are essentially useless, as they at most have influence just on self-reported subjective symptoms, not on any sign that affects the progression of a disease or maintenance of good health.[1] This topic keeps coming up over and over and over here on Hacker News because most participants here have heard about this issue only in popular press reports or blog posts that are mostly wrong. I encourage you and all our friends here to take some more time and effort to learn more about the actual research base before assuming that a placebo can change your heart rate over the long term, reduce allergy symptoms (I know all about those), or heal tissue. (Which tissue?)
Findings on placebo effects by researchers who have considered the issue carefully include
"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."[2]
"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."[3]
[1] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/michael-specter-on-the-p...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ted-kaptchuk-versus-plac...
[2] http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...
I'm not sure the placebo effect is really interesting so much as it has a great PR guy. It's like the Kardashians of science.
http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html
But the sample size planned for this study is tiny, and the study won't really have the statistical power to demonstrate a true effect, even if the groups differ in outcomes (which I rather doubt they will).
AFTER EDIT: I see a downvote, presumably indicating disagreement, has come in. It would be a courtesy to onlookers here (and to me, for that matter) to explain what part of my comment you disagree with, if you please. To be clear, I genuinely think, based on much reading of medical research, that the effect the investigators are looking for will not be found as a replicable effect, even if their preliminary low-n study shows a difference in outcomes among the different study groups. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to claim that tricking people into thinking they live at an earlier time will reverse the disease progression of cancer is to make an extraordinary claim (which is why I think this claim may be within the scope of the James Randi paranormal challenge).
P.S. Has any onlooker calculated how large a difference in outcomes would have to be observed in a study with only 24 participants in each group to convincingly show that the treatment effect is genuine? Statistical power is an issue that is often neglected in published preliminary research.
Also, they'll probably simply disagree that totally changing someone's environment counts as a paranormal way to influence cancer outcomes.
Barring something amazing out of SENS research, I can't do anything about the biological process. But I can do something about that.
I've found little things that help. I occasionally do an experiment where I restrict my music collection to nothing more than five years old. I'll sometimes admit older things only if I was not listening to them when I was a teenager or early-20-something... if they are new to me. It's curiously effective, since central to the ideology of aging is that everything is getting worse than it was "back in my day." If you try this and find your collection sparse, go and find more. Music is a very condensed form of human expression. It carries a lot with it.
Other things that work include avoiding excessive and routine alcohol consumption, changing your setting, getting rid of old things, and learning pretty much anything new.
Another observation:
I have children, and I have not given up on my dreams. I find many people who say you can't pursue your dreams with kids. IMHO those people have given up on their dreams for other reasons and are blaming their children for that. It's a shitty thing to do-- your kids want you to have dreams, since it will inspire them.
I actually consider it a function of "lack of positive reinforcement for adult learning."
Learning anything as a child gets a continuous stream of "oh, isn't that wonderful" no matter how bad the child sucks.
As an adult, try learning a foreign language or a musical instrument. You have to be damn near native fluency or rock star proficiency before you will get a positive word from other adults.
When learning something new as an adult, you have to have an amazing amount of fortitude to continue plowing through a new task.
My approach has been that I'll keep doing things until my body proves to me that I can't. It has started doing so. You can ignore age longer than many people think, but not forever...
Keep using it. You can't just wake up in three decades and decide that you should still be able to be active. You have to keep using it week after week, year after year.
Find something you like to do. Do it regularly. You can keep getting better (more skilled even if not faster) for a long time.
Sometimes you'll get an injury. Rehab it, and get back to doing whatever it was that you enjoyed. It may take a year to get back to where you were. It may hurt. Do it anyway. Do what you don't want to have to do for a year (if it takes that long), so that you can do what you want for several decades.
That all said, know your limits. If you try to crash through them, bad things happen. (I still remember the lecture from that one physical therapist...)
I think it was Seneca who said something along the lines of "When I think as an old man, I have become an old man.". This isn't new knowledge, but something that we seem to have to keep reminding ourselves of.
Also, placebos.
When I was 27 I took a white water guide course up here in the Yukon. The instructor was doing backflips out of the raft in class 3 rapids, swimming for fun in water that was a few degrees above freezing, hauling more than his share of the raft, flipping it and righting it again in the middle of the river, etc. etc.
The instructor was 68 years old, and he's one of many people up here more than twice my age that can out-do me, and I'm no slouch.
I'd like to see a study like this one where rather than having people reminisce and pretend time hasn't passed, they spend more time around a younger crowd. I suspect that has an equal effect.
We already know that exercise and a good diet can slow down the effects of ageing.
I hope we're really considering the effect of widespread longer life might have instead of barreling toward longevity - people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but we should be really thinking about how we'd mitigate that impact.
That's sarcasm, of course, but IMHO saying that we shouldn't prolong life because of possible consequence X is morally exactly equal to saying that we should kill old people to avoid that consequence X.
For every X, either X really is so bad that it's worth killing people for it; or X shouldn't be considered as a valid argument against longevity.
Could you say a bit more about what problems you foresee? Are you talking about over-population, because I don't think we are at all close to that point. Other than medical costs and systems built around an expected retirement age I don't see any problems.
As far as a mindset in itself though, is changing your mindset something that is impossible? Most of us don't even really make an effort at all, so I tend to think of it as a largely uninvestigated area (as far as most people are concerned).
Another fun related tangent is the article examples were very pedestrian and conventional, I wonder what the article readers would think about old dudes at a SCA event or a civil war re-enactor event. Or a star trek convention. Or a Renaissance Faire.
Edit: Didn't read the mc-article who's sole purpose is to sell advertising...another 'old' thing I've picked up over the years.
Very Douglas Adams.
So in a way it is mindset, but not in a meaningful way.
Nice to see many self righteous people downvoting without even trying to discuss.