Redstate

By ilitigant Posted in Life Issues — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Yes, I know: this piece may not automatically fit RedState, but really, it is relevant.

Progressives (and please don't jump me for using that term, it is what they like to be called and they are already emotional basket cases, so humor them a bit,) are reactionary people. They don't, for the most part, organize into proactive ventures. They don't, say, plan ahead for consequences of their inactions, or actions, for that matter. They see what the right thing should be, to them, and jump right to it. Never mind it takes one step at a time. They don't believe in reaching goals, they believe in imposing them. If a Progressive was a car we might understand a good deal of why they are, as they are.

What if you were to take your car to a mechanic because it was just not giving you any get-up-and-go? What if every time your car came to a stop, it sputtered and jumped to an instant surge forward, only to pan out a few feet down the road? What if your car was depressed?

Well, if the mechanic was a neuroscientist and your brain was the car, your car would never be fixed.

Your mechanic would add a special fuel injector to increase the amount of fuel your car used (we'll call that Prozac), and therefore give you more get-up-and-go. When that failed to work as it tends to wear out the parts that are not meant to be a dragster's parts, you would take the car to another neuroscientist who had published a paper saying something like this:

"The chemical hypothesis (more fuel) is being found through trial and real-world experience to be lacking in understanding depression. A more logical approach would be to contemplate not that the brain is unhappy and Prozac makes it happy, trials have determined that the lack of serotonin does not make the brain unhappy, but rather that the brain is sick and Prozac makes it better. We'll call that the healing hypothesis."

After you had managed to read through the argument you take your car to the 'new' neuroscientist who promptly prescribes the same 'more fuel' the previous one did, and you experience the same 'rush' and wear out the same parts.

According to a Yale professor of psychiatry and pharmacology, named by his parents: Ronald Duman, "The best way to think about depression is as a mild neurodegenerative disorder. Your brain cells atrophy, just like in other diseases [such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's]. The only difference with depression is that it's reversible. The brain can recover." [1]

Where the reference article claims "more than 16 percent of people will suffer from a major depressive episode at some point in their lives - a more accurate scientific understanding of the disease is of immense value" [1] neuroscience doesn't want a better understanding of the condition (it is not a disease) they want a better understanding of what Prozac does to make it temporarily better. If Diet Coke did the same thing, there would be a need to understand the brain's depressive condition in the terms of bubbles.

The most hilarious paragraph of the Boston Globe article shows the absolute ignorance of 'science writers' to buy into anything they think sounds 'cool': "The progress exemplifies an important feature of modern medicine, which is the transition from a symptom-based understanding of a disease - depression is an illness of unrelenting sadness - to a more detailed biological understanding, in which the disease is categorized and treated based on its specific anatomical underpinnings." No it isn't. It is the transistion from one symptom-based understanding to another symptom-based understanding. Any mention of a process underlying the symptoms is met with disdain. If the neuroscientist can't 'see' it happen, it doesn't exist.

Where your mechanic would spend a few moments searching for the cause of the lack of get-up-and-go, your neuroscientist would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of your taxpayer money, in months of theorizing and trials and tests and fancy published papers to come to the conclusion that "The mental illness occurs when these stress mechanisms in the brain spiral out of control. [1] That would be Duman again. He said nothing. He said, 'the car won't get-up-and-go because the car's get-up-and-go thing isn't working right. What he doesn't address is what is causing the lack of get-up-and-go.

Your mechanic would find either a clogged fuel filter, a slip in the foot pedal or horribly degraded spark plugs (among only a few potential mechanical causes), while the neuroscientist would find more reasons to theorize and more reasons to ignore any potential that the mechanical thing does something other than be the parts alone. The mechanic knows the parts work as a greater whole through a system of interactions, while the neuroscientists is only interested in the parts and totally ignores the system of interactions.

When you do not use your brain it does not make as many new neurons as when you do. Use it or lose it. But don't consider that neurons could be made less for some actual systemic reason. Only think that a lack of new neurons means the neurons are lacking newness from some theoretical new particle or super-position, or gasp: lack of new neuron center.

Brain cells don't atrophy because they are 'sick' or because they are not 'happy'. Brain cells shrink if they are not used. Prozac gives the false signal enhancement to fake the cells into being 'used'. Depression is the lower signal of an unused upper level short-term brain , in primates (yes, humans), and long-term brain in other animals. In humans, it is caused by the lack of use of the short-term process. If you don't take control of your brain, your brain will control you, and that brings me back to Progressives.

Progressives use a great deal of their long-term process, which results in reactions, in a pack mode, to anything that does not match the preconceived memory of the reality the Progressive is convinced exists outside of their own head. But they do not use much short-term process. If they did, they would question every preconceived memory, instead of reacting to the objection to reality it instantly displays.

One Eero Castren, of the University of Helsinki manages to get it right. "Depression is caused by problems with the most fundamental thing the brain does, which is process information. It's much more than just an inability to experience pleasure." [1] It is the process that causes the lack of new cells, the degradation of existing cells. Castren continued, "If you just sit on your couch, then steroids aren't going to be very effective," he says. "Antidepressants are the same way: if you want the drug to work for you, then you have to work for the drug."

If you want your brain to work for you, then you have to work your brain. Progressives don't do that very much. If they did, they would be Conservatives. Or at least they would be Scoop Jackson, Joe Lieberman, Zell Miller Democrats. The fact that such names raise the reactionary animalistic response from Progressives is just one prime example of the truth of the statement, 'a mind is a terrible thing to waste'.

Reference
1: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/06/head_fake/

And if the article did not put you to sleep or make you even more depressed, http://www.enticy.org contains a whole lot more.