Glider

The world ain't nasty. There's nothing wrong in the wrold that people didn't cause. People are nasty.

Cockroaches don't have brains per se, they have a chain of ganglia. Decapitating them won't kill them immediately, it just removes their mechanisms of navigation, communication and feeding. If you take the head off a roach, it will remain alive until it starves to death.

So, were there no 'structural changes', severe depression and OCD would not be real? By this logic, acute schitzophrenic episodes, for example, are not real?

Same as asking "Is lowered levels of 5Ht a result of, or a cause of depression?". The actual answer is, probably both. In the same way, these negative distortions in cognition are probably both (why it's known as a depressive cycle). They may result from an initial 'normal' depression (i.e. reactive depression), but once in place, they distort perception in such a way as to encourage chronic depressive patterns of thought and behaviour (i.e. clinical depression).

Claude Debussey was a synaesthete. He used to compose according to how the music 'looked' to him. If you listen to any of his music, you can see, sorry, hear, that it is very different from other music contemporary to him.

There is, in my opinion, an over reliance on drug interventions for depression, but this has come about from the widespread lay belief that drugs are the cure. This is not really the case, as (I'm happy to see) seems to be the thrust of most arguments here. Drug intervention for depression (tricyclics, MAOIs, SSRIs and so-on) provide breathing space only; temporary relief that is nessessary in order for any psychological therapy to be effective (CBT is about the most effective). The severely depressed 'can't hear positivity'. Depression affects cognition, which becomes selective and more sensitive to events/situations that reinforce the depressive cognitive cycle. Depressed people tend to remember more negative events and fewer positive events compared to non depressed people. This cycle is self-reinforcing and self-destructive. Depressed people become more prone to self-fulfilling prophesy. Congnition affects behaviour and behaviour affects the way in which you interact with the environment. If you behave negatively towards the environment, it tends to respond negatively, reinforcing your original cognition (reciprocal determinism). This cycle needs to be broken. Drug interventions break the cycle effectively, but this is only a temporary measure. Many of these drugs (including the modern 'panacea' prozac have some nasty side effects). The purpose of drug intervention is to provide relief and to get the person in a state that is receptive to psychological intervention, i.e. one in which they won't 'block out' any positive thoughts/emotions, and where they have the energy to act upon suggestions. In short, it provides a temporary state of relief and sufficient positivity to allow the individual to begin to alter their cognition under the guidance of therapy. Without therapy, or some other significant event, removal of the drug results in relapse because the underlying pathological thought processes won't have changed. However, this is less true of bipolar disorder which seems to be an entirely different matter. It doesn't respond to traditional antidepressants, responding only to things like lithium and ECT and seems to result from different psychopathological processes.

"name the mammal who has killed more human beings than any other mammal?" I think the question precludes disease. In plague and HIV, the killer is not rat or monkey, it's the disease and neither bacteria nor viruses are mammals. If you sum the mortality from all conflicts since the time when the most high tech killing tool was a rock tied to a stick, the answer has to be man. I doubt anything else even comes close.

Hey, you need to be careful with those balloons! Blowing up balloons can be very risky if you have an aneurism!

You heard wrong. As far as I know, only once has a pig kidney been used in a human. in 1906 a pig kidney was grafted to a woman. She lived for only an hour. Of all transplant organs, the kidney is one of the problematic when it comes to rejection. This can't yet be solved in human to human transplants. Inter species renal transplant is out of the question so far. I did read a piece of research on the potential for simian donors though. It investigated the potential use of baboon kidneys, but again, rejection is an issue and it'll be some time before that can be overcome. [Edit] However, renal transplant and the problems due to the paucity of donor organs is a strong argument for stem cell research and organ cloning.

Using the most basic definition of emotion as affective-motivational state, then any animal that has the capacity to respond to environmental stimuli a way consonant with those states can be considered to posess emotional faculties. To expand a little, any animal that possesses the capacity for an orientation approach/avoidance response that is not 'hard wired' can be considered to posess emotional faculties. For example, an ant will orient to, and be driven to approach/avoid particular stimuli, but the response is hard wired and the ant cannot override it. However, in any animal that can override the basic drive, i.e. not act upon it, the behaviour may not happen, but the drive remains. This can be considered basic emotion.

You're welcome It never hurts to err on the side of caution in statistics.

Yes, you can do power analysis for correlational tests. Generally you will be correlating two measures from one sample, so you won't have to double the sample size as for a two sample test like a t-test. As far as the size of the correlation coefficients go, you can use the conventions laid down by Cohen. If I remeber rightly, it's something like up to r = 0.3 = 'Weak', up to r = 0.6 = 'Moderate' and r > 0.6 = 'Strong'. Cohen's conventions for the power of r are generally accepted (though I'm a bit hazy on the precise values. However, they'll be in any basic stats book).

If it was one thousand point one, that's how it would be said. 'One thousand one' doesn't make grammatical sense. 'One thousand and one' indicates a complete unit (one thousand), and one.

It depends on the experiment and the test you're using, but as a rule, if power analysis shows 25 to be the appropriate sample size, then using 30 won't make much difference to the power of the experiment. If power analysis has shown 30 to be the required sampls size, then using 25 will weaken the experiment. However, he is right insofar as given the 'noisy' nature of some measures, then a difference of 5 won't make much of a difference, but for the same reson, it's always best to err on the side of caution and go for the larger sample.

Presumably, he also advised you not to play golf for a while? Bummer about the infected bites though. That's bad luck.

If it is a spiral fracture, there should be little/no dosplacement, so it shouldn't need reduction. If you tape it to the next finger to stabilize it, it shouldn't you give any problems. It will take 4-6 weeks to heal properly.

That sounds like quite a bad reaction. Probably good to get it checked then. You might get some topical antihistamine for them. That should help.

Heat and inflammation are caused by a histamine response. This can mean either that you are reacting to the bites in those areas immunologically, or that the bites are infected. It's not unusual for mosquito bites to swell and become inflamed, especially in tender skin areas (e.g. under the arm, wrist etc.). However, it is unusual for them to become infected, unless you scratch them and introduce the infection that way. Try a cold compress on them. If they don't reduce by tomorrow, get them checked out.

An electrical impulse in the brain in the right areas bring about a basic affective (emotional) state in less than 250 ms. The brain brings about autonomic and other physiological changes that are percieved as the more complex experiential emotions (in the brain). The impulse doesn't get emotion, it's just an electrochemical signal. In the same way as the electrical currant in your TV doesn't get a picture an any particular point. The activity of many circuits come together to form an by directing the activity in the effectors (i.e. the electron guns at the back of the crt). So, the signals in the 'circuits' of the brain dealing with emotion bring about the sensation of emotion by directing the activity of effectors (pituitary, adrenal glands, GI tract, cardiovascular system etc.). There are electrical impulses in the heart. They're how it works.

Nonetheless, you have described it very well. It sounds like a very depressing situation and I can see how it could make a person seem cynical. It must be very hard and extremely frustrating to work under those circumstances; watching what goes on and not able to do anything about it. It sounds awful.

They must be really bad therapists. What would be the point of trying to convince a person, who, as a function of their condition, already believes themselves to be helpless and dependent, that they are helpless and dependent? It's true about labelling, but this is usually by the public, not the clinicians, and is due to the public perception of mental illness (which is also the reason that charities to do with mental illness are significantly under subscribed when compared to those dealing with the more 'popular' physical illnesses). Remember, the term 'breakdown' is a lay term, not a clinical one. Which particular 'theraputic community' would not see recovery/rehabilitation as an advantage? Surely that contradicts the term 'theraputic'? Here (in the UK), it would be the former. Due to governmental changes in the funding mechanisms of GP practices, a relatively fast patient turnover is rewarded. This is why people with chronic conditions are finding it harder to register. Chronic consumers are a drain on resources that have to come out of the practice budget. As for the actual salary of doctors, that remains unaffected by the recovery or otherwise of individual patients. It would be a clear conflict of interests for doctor's salary to be linked in any way to the state of their patients. It would certainly be unethical to give doctors a financial incentive to prolong the suffering of their patient, wouldn't you agree?