PhDwannabe

<Headslap>

This is a vastly problematic way to view a study like this. In science, we're often interested in breaking down phenomena into granular, manageable bits. When we examine one of them, there is nothing--nothing--about that examination, per se, which claims that any of the other bits aren't important. To say so is to read into it with one's own agenda. If I study environmental contributions to the rate of drug use--neighborhood crime rate, availability of parks, etc.--am I for one moment saying that, for instance, parenting isn't important? Or that drug education isn't important? No. I'm just studying a small piece of a large puzzle. Nothing, nothing, nothing about the focus of my study denies the importance of other things. Even if I focus on that one phenomenon for my whole career, I'm not saying it's the only important contributor, it's just what I've specialized in. Could you make a case that a broad literature base has yet to extensively treat some kind of important contributor to a phenomenon? Yes. But that's greatly different from attempting to make a case that some prejudice or other nefarious motive is behind the missing pieces. Think for a moment about how hard it would actually be to convincingly demonstrate such a claim. By the way, there is an extensive literature on the role of fathers--and absent fathers--in all realms of child development. Enough for many developmental psych classes to have an entire section on it. So, in addition to being logically off-base ("mentioning one thing without another thing that i think is important is bad and wrong, and constitutes a denial that the second thing is important"), if you really believe that social and behavioral science neglects the role of fathers, you're also factually incorrect. Additionally: Has nothing to do with anything, and Appears to constitute a claim that delinquent fathers are somehow consulting the scientific literature, thinking, "Ehh, all this stuff says it's mostly moms that are important, so I don't have to do anything." The science doesn't say that, and nobody'd be behaviorally driven by it in that way even if it did. Finally: Jives neither with peoples' implicit understanding of parenting roles, nor with established science. Children do not react neutrally and equally to both parents, and accept the same sort of inputs in the same way whether they came from mom or dad. The maternal attachment relationship--while not the only thing in a child's life--has been long understood to be of a particular unique importance. Do you think that constitutes some sort of sexist denial of male responsibility and burdening of mothers? Hmmm, I dunno... you should ask Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, great infant attachment theorists, great pioneering women in psychological science, and originators of much of our understanding of the phenomenon. Does sexism exist? For crap's sake, yes. Does everything in the world constitute evidence which you can wave around to support that fact? For crap's sake, no. Watch yourself before you do so. It weakens the case of a team I happen to be on.

When people know very little about, well, any number of different subjects, they cite face-slapping urban legends like the classic Eskimo Words for Snow. (To say nothing of the fact that there isn't an "Eskimo Language," rather, there are lots of separate Inuit languages spoken by distinct Inuit peoples.) There are more than, let's say, 30 webpages, from the entry on Wikipedia, to the sources cited by Wikipedia, to--if you can believe this--things not even cited by Wikipedia, which can clear that up quickly. Not being fooled by urban legends is very important for living on planet earth.

Do any of the people with a PhD in biology have medical diagnosis within their scope of practice? Are any of the physicians present able to perform physical examinations over the internet? Either of these would be highly unusual and interesting people--I look forward to meeting them.

An admirable goal. Of course, Fracastoro, van Leewenhoek, and Snow have beaten you to the punch. You might want to begin by informing the family that the matter has been fairly-well settled for a couple of centuries. In my experience, though, an individual who believes that cold is sufficient for the spontaneous generation of an illness is unlikely to be convinced by either a pleasant piece of empirical research, or a plea to basic scientific history. You may just have to lock them in a walk-in fridge.

I think that there must almost certainly be at least something to this claim, and I predict that the effect would be quite strong.

That is a 1947 book and movie about anti-Semitism in the United States. This is the Medical Science forum of scienceforums.net. There appears to be a substantial gulf between these two things. I am eager to see you bridge it.

I don't know your diet, but if you want to start simple, try altering your carbohydrate-to-fiber ratio. Cut out as many refined carbohydrates as you can; eat more whole grains. They'll burn a lot longer and slower, and a fair amount of people notice mood and energy changes--usually more in the domain of "stability" than a dramatic "increase" per se. Nonetheless, no tolerance, no side effects, and plenty of other known (and likely yet-unknown) health benefits across the board. What a terrible "N of 1" example--I usually scoff at such a thing, but on account of this being fairly simple and noncontroversial I'll indulge for once--but I handle myself just fine through the rigors of graduate school, I think in substantial part due to a diet of a lot of whole grains, beans, healthy plant oils, and tons of fruits and vegetables. I watch the rest of my colleagues eating a lot of junk and sucking down a lot of coffee to stay in the game. I haven't had caffeine for a decade and a half. Again, every other guy you meet on the street's got his own personal claims about what certain diets can do for you. Half the people who say what I just said will go on to tell you how soy causes cancer, HFCS causes autism, and beet extract cured grandma's cancer. I sure won't go there. But I'm pretty sure this is a pretty mundane claim: treat your body closer to the way it was evolved to be used. I think you'll have more energy, and a lot of other benefits.

Two standard deviations above the mean.

So, as is often the case with these things, you really hear nothing about the details of the defense. This reminds me quite a bit of the famous "Twinkie Defense" of Dan White. Defense is making a case that he was out of it enough at the time of the killings that he couldn't rationally premeditate murder, and a pattern of behavior is described to help materially establish his mental deterioration--one of the details is that this really fit guy was suddenly wolfing down Twinkies. Some defense expert makes an offhand comment about how goofy dietary changes can affect mental states, and suddenly the press absolutely loses their pants over it. It makes a great story about our doomed world for the slobbering, enraged La-Z-Boy dweller, who really just wants a good daily reason to shout at his TV screen. Hell in a handbasket, I say! Now, again, I don't know the details of the defense here. But I smell a lot of context here that isn't being related well. "Red Bull made him crazy" doesn't sound to me like a plausible defense, and I think the lawyer is probably laying out a more sophisticated chain of reasoning than that, as in the Dan White case. That's my informed guess.

To say nothing of what I think of our dear Matt880, it's my professional opinion that we not, as a rule, engage in remote psychodiagnostic exercises with individuals uninterested in an assessment. That is simply... unproductive.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that the phrase: is really a pretty disturbing thing to say. Regarding any topic. I'll just go ahead and leave it at that.

I'm an internet doctor, and I believe the man has leprosy. ...Michel, not the OP. I don't know what's wrong with the OP's toenails. Could be he needs to change his diet.

Awesome.

No. No I do not. Do I win?

No. The OP's logic is undeniable.

kej, it's not a stretch to say that it's certainly very possible that your accident is related to the sorts of cognitive difficulties you're struggling with right now. The connection between hypoxic episodes and later cognitive difficulties is well-studied and well-known. But that's a pretty wishy-washy statement. Since you're trying to think parsimoniously (thanks Mr. Occam), another general diagnostic principle to keep in mind is "acute onset, proximate cause." While it's not impossible that time is going to pass before the physiological or psychological effects of some injury or disease state are going to be visible, usually, of course, when you feel something suddenly, the cause is pretty recent. I'll admit that the idea that the deficits you describe are connected to an accident in 1982 is unusual-sounding. It should not come as a surprise (or for that matter, insult) to you that clinicians may be interested in emotional causes, since difficulty concentrating and sleep-initiation insomnia are both commonly results of depression, anxiety, or other mood states that might be reactive to stressful life events. Again, though, it's far from impossible that they're connected, even across such a large span of time. It's plausible that your electrical accident "set you back" somewhat--subtracted a few points from your cognitive budget, if you will--to an extent that did not dip you below a noticeable threshold at the time. Now, normal age-related cognitive decline (I don't know how old you are, but that decline starts to become measurable even at 30 or so) has brought you to a threshold where it's noticeable, earlier than it would have if not for your accident. Or, some other unknown disease state or condition is exacerbating a lasting, previously unseen "scar"-like effect of your accident. Bottom line, if you really want a better idea of what's up, I'd suggest that you see someone for neuropsychological testing. Find a PhD-level psychologist in your area who is trained to administer a full neuropsych testing battery (your physician may or may not know of a psychologist to refer you to; physicians themselves don't really do these, and by and large, psychiatrists don't do them either). It'll take most of a day, and it isn't always cheap, but it's going to be the gold standard diagnostic device to help you understand what your specific deficits are, and, given the pattern of those deficits, suggest a possible cause as well as possible management or treatment strategies. Some sort of neuroimaging may also eventually be indicated, but that is likely going to be between you and your physician--possibly with the recommendations of a testing report from the assessing psychologist. Good luck.

There is absolutely no straight answer here. "Addiction" is not clinically defined in any rigorous, "official" sense that a wide membership of the relevant sciences agrees upon. (Cue the part where somebody looks up something authoritative-sounding, quotes it, and claims that it has been. Come on, get it over with. Difficult for me to prove a negative and all.) Surprisingly, you actually don't need to really nail it down completely to do a lot of research on it. The closest we have are disorders of substance use and abuse. A rough clinical formulation of addiction that is more-or-less agreed upon at the moment is that addiction involves both tolerance and withdrawal. With tolerance, you need more and more of the substance (we'll just go with "substance" for now) to achieve identical effects. Many mechanisms of drug tolerance are fairly well-explained physiologically: for many recreational drugs of abuse, the brain deploys antogonistic processes to maintain homeostasis in the face of the insult to the system that the drug represents--your brain is used to dealing with opioids, for instance, since it makes plenty of its own, so it has a small arsenal of opioid antagonists ready to dull the effects of too much activity at those receptor sites. (This is often referred to as "opponent process.") It's slightly more controversial to explore what you might call psychological mechanisms of tolerance (of course, all behavior and experience involves activity at the physiological level, but psychological mechanisms might be loosely thought of as those sort of better explained behaviorally.) These more distal psychological mechanisms of tolerance would probably be necessary to claim tolerance in non-drug "addictive" activity. This is despite the ardent desire of many researchers, "advocates," and those in the popular press to say that it's "all brain chemicals." You've no doubt read all kinds of fun articles about how this or that neurological pleasure center is activated in gambling, or how sex looks the same as cocaine to the brain, or any other such silliness. That line of thinking is reductive, tautological, and mostly worthless in the form it's presented in (I don't deny that it is very useful research, but that's another story), since, again, all behavior and experience is mediated by physiological processes. Gambling behavior is mediated by neuronal activity. Uhhh... we're supposed to be surprised by this? So is peeing, or coughing, or signing your name, or picking up the remote control. Bottom line, tolerance is harder to demonstrate for non-drug stuff; since all of the relevant outcomes are not objectively measurable, but instead consist of subjective experiences like "pleasure," we're force to ask people about them rather than being able to rely exclusively on fun neurotransmitter assays. Not that such things are unstudyable. But it's a damned can of worms. So, withdrawal, then? We're just as sticky here. It's easy to say that people experience withdrawal when any sort of reinforcer is removed from their environment. Lemur gets to this when he says: ...but this is really a connotative extension of this construct, "withdrawal," which more narrowly defines what we now often call a "withdrawal syndrome." When we're talking about "real" withdrawal, we're not just talking about feeling crappy because something fun is gone. We're talking about a syndromal collection of (typically measurable physiological) changes that typically represent a sort of mirror image of the substance's effects. So, benzodiazapines typically act as anxiolytics and anticonvulsants; suddenly go cold turkey, and you feel anxious and get tremors. Again, some of this is explained by "opponent process." The antagonistic mechanisms maintained by the body in a fight against the insult persist for a bit after the drug is removed, until they can catch on to the new state of affairs and return to baseline. Now, you could take a step here and say, "well, if the effects of something are fun and happiness, wouldn't anhedonia and dysphoria be the withdrawal syndrome, then?" Well, you could, but we're stretching the spirit of the law, here. Do that, and you expand the construct to explain so many things that it doesn't really end up explaining anything. Withdrawal is conceptually difficult to define outside of more readily identifiable chemical processes. We're just not usually talking about negative emotional states when we're talking about withdrawal--rather, those states are reactive to an unpleasant withdrawal process that's defined more rigorously. So, then, what are we left with? I tend to view the idea of "sex addiction" with great skepticism, as I do gambling addiction, shopping addiction, internet addiction, eating addiction, and the rest of the great flowering of pathologies which self-help groups and popular book authors--not to mention more than a handful of real researchers--have more or less invented in the past few decades. Are these real and problematic behaviors? Good god, absolutely. Many of them have effects as debilitating and horrifying as any drug problem. But are these "addictions" the same kind of beast as drug addiction? Let's be clear: the mere use of that term is basically a rhetorical attempt to say that they are. As is much research which attempts to illuminate their neuropsychological underpinnings. But you really have to take a step or two back and ask yourself--and this is where empiricism begins to fail us--what the hell do we even mean when we say "addiction," anyway? If I want desperately to hop on one foot all day, but I resist it with great effort, is that an addiction? Does it become one when I fail to resist it? What about when hopping on one foot all the time begins to cause problems in my social or occupational life? (This is our all-important "clinically significant distress" criterion.) Well, that's got its own problems. Most importantly, what does it say about the relative "power" of that substance (or activity) over me? Does it say I'm less culpable--in an almost moral sense--for my actions when I fail to resist my urge? Or ought it simply be less surprising to others when I continue to do so? Does it have implications for how others should be treating me? Sadly, most people seem to have locked onto a relatively simplistic dichotomy of "your-fault, lock-you-up" vs. "not-your-fault, have-some-sympathy." That obscures a whole hell of a lot of complication. What we're climbing towards is this: do we really think this thing somehow abrogates my free will? Is such a thing even possible? Consider what is, from one perspective, a nonsensical admonition of 12-step programs: that booze--or whatever--has complete power over me. And yet, we're all here sitting in this room not currently drinking. So is that power really complete? Seems like it could be a little more powerful, you know, and make you run screaming out the door right now. Maybe it's just got, like, 30% power over you. Wait... what the hell exactly does a human being with 70% of a normal level of moral agency look like? I don't have the answers for you. I can answer, in a way, a question you didn't ask: what's an addiction? Well, we haven't really decided yet. As of now, the answer tells you as much about the values of the respondent as it does about the addict. Is sex addiction an addiction? Well, it depends on what the hell an addiction is. Is it the same thing as a crack addiction, or a nicotine addiction? I tend to think not. Though it might be closer, on a spectrum of behaviors-that-can-generally-sort-of-get-out-of-hand, than reading the morning paper or gardening. Is it a process that removes some chunk of free will or moral agency? I tend to think not. What a mess.

Do you have a reference? Besides Moby Dick, obviously.

Much of what you hear about people being--as if it were a sort of personality characteristic--"right" or "left-brained" is essentially pop neuroscience that isn't grounded in reality. Sure, people can be characterologically more logical, more verbal, more creative, etc. than others. But that doesn't necessarily correspond to some sort of cartoonish view of increased strength, size, or activity on one side of the brain. I'll expand a little on Glider's good comments about lateralization: Even the what we normally talk about as lateralized functions are really representations of most of the population. For instance, language, which everybody seems to know is on the left side of the brain, actually ends up on the right for about one in twenty right-handers, and about one in five left-handers. Another fifth of lefties, and a very very small number of righties, actually show bilaterally distributed language functions. There are those who like to emphasize how separate the functions of the two hemispheres are; this is part of a tradition in neuroscience which emphasizes localization of function (in opposition to a different line of thinking which tends to emphasize the holistic function of the brain.) Nonetheless, most of what you are able to accomplish behaviorally involves use of, communication between, afferent inputs into, and efferent outputs from, both hemispheres of the brain. (That isn't to say that it isn't plastic enough--particularly in kids--for one half to take over a lot of stuff if the other half gets cut out.) We've got plenty of variation between members of the species, which is unsurprising for something as evolutionarily recent as the neocortex. While our current anatomical/functional maps of the brain are a bit better than their phrenological predecessors, they're still only general guides. This is why people often undergo wakeful brain surgery before they get anything major cut out of it--the surgeon has to get in there, press on something, and ask the patient to add and subtract, name animals, sing, etc. Obviously, they don't want to cut out anything major. Since every brain is different, they need to establish the map for that individual, rather than rely on a general one that doesn't apply well enough to any individual brain. Edit: holy hell, I just saw the OP was from 2004. brooke7holley, what on earth are you doing dragging 7-year-old threads out of their graves?

Social dominance, DrmDoc, is a construct. It has a specific operationalization. It's not just a noun and a modifier. You've stumbled into an empirically identified construct--it's clear to me that you didn't know you did so, from your Google Scholaring--which I at first (wrongly) took you to understand. Social dominance (usually fully called Social Dominance Orientation or SDO) is different than "social" (modifier) "dominance" (noun), which we might connect to this wobbly poorly-defined phenomenon of "respect." SDO is in a bit of a different area. I'm not going to take the time to ramble about it. Those articles are talking about a variety of different constructs which make use of the noun "dominance." When you're not conversant in a specific area of literature, and/or when your interaction with social science consists mostly of a priori musing, you run into misunderstandings like these. I here bow out of this increasingly tiresome thread.

No (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001).

No.

This is not the sort of dataless navel-gazing that really belongs in psychology & psychiatry. But I'm done complaining.