Heads up for UK dwellers on Toilet Empire plans:

We don't have confirmation of this from reliable sources yet, but there could be some truth to it:


The UK Department of Health is putting the fast food companies, processed food companies, and soft drink manufacturers at the heart of writing government policy on obesity.

The companies in question include McDonald's, KFC, PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo.

Health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five "responsibility deal" networks with businesses to come up with policies. Many say this is the equivalent of putting cancer policy in the hands of tobacco companies.

According to The Guardian:

    "The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises ... In early meetings, these commercial partners have been invited to draft priorities and identify barriers, such as EU legislation, that they would like removed."

AR

Hi dude,
Yeh the trouble is, it's not clear whether the duration of development is because of development delay and dysfunction, because we have no 'control' example of a brain in optimal conditions.

It seems likely to be the former...
There's also a confusion between development and ongoing changes, because in real life, how long does anything organic teke to develop? A tree that's 'mature' in 2 years is still going to be very different in another 5 years...what humans mean by 'mature' is 'stops growing & changing', whereas in real life nothing organic ever does that.

It's gonna be hard for us to get the hang of perpetual change in biology. A healthy two year old organism is not an incomplete 20 year old organism, but a mature 2 year old organism.

The only thing that appears to stop development in a healthy organism is ceasing to receive new input. Context, experience and use shape the rate of change -and there is no particular age in a healthy organism at which the ability to adapt goes away.

So are these dudes really saying 'most people we tested stopped maturing at around age 30 or 40?' Or should the headline really read "Brain takes 30 years to catch up due to all the crap its given in the first place"?  :  )

Most such articles need editing in light of all the other stuff we know. The best course is to look at the experiment conditions, methods & results and then draw your own conclusions.
Best,
AR

Hi dude,
I already discovered the second article, pretty well written.
The first link quotes neuroscience that is 30 years out of date (the Triune brain theory was proved to be inaccurate during the eighties -that's even in wikipedia: <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Triune_brain_theory>).

Surprisingly, both Chilton Pearce and Carl Sagan were convinced by it back then. It seems intuitively correct because its very similar to what is really going on with networks, but McClean got a lot of his anatomy wrong, inventing the 'limbic system' and confusing a lot of people for a long time. To be fair, there were no fMRI/DTI tools to make it easy for him.

It's very scary to think that people are hacking based on an inaccurate model of what they are hacking. This is a timely reminder to stay up to date  :  )
Best,
AR

Scalino Wrote:
An interesting article about addiction therapies research: http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article … therapies/


The results achieved with laboratory rats cannot be replicated with wild rats (always a big issue to watch out for these days), and consideration of addiction pathways needs to bear that in mind -some factor/s in the lab rats lifestyle is altering the expression of their genome and they don't respond in the same way to most events or circumstances. Wild rats are much more difficult to get addicted, although they do like a session now and again. They self-moderate, much like gorillas with fermented fruit, (and what I hypothesize people would do if we had lower resting cortisol).

The correlation of addictive response and a high GI diet is particularly interesting because diet is one of the big differences between these groups of rats of course, but the biggest difference is their resting cortisol levels based on their overall unconscious anxiety. Chasing glutamate responses may only reveal the end chain of a pile of multiple causes, although it may provide another entry point for hacking.

I think this article misses one point that all such articles seem to, and that's the status factor. Lawrence says: “Most people with hypertension will willingly seek treatment, but not all drug addicts will.”

I have to disagree with this. Most people with hypertension don't even know they've got hypertension. Among those who do, in much of the world there is still a huge stigma attached to admitting to “mental problems”, and it isn't there without cause.

A lot of people don't realize the power of this stigma in societies other than their own. The US for example is very open-minded about this sort of thing, it's fine to have a therapist and its fine to get stressed out now and again, but this is a very unusual response compared with most of the rest of the world and I suspect many US dwellers don't know this at all.

In many places having a record of any “mental problems” can render one unemployable and socially shunned. I still meet people who lie about their family medical history because they are too ashamed to admit they have 'a mental' in the family. Others (especially the paranoid) fear that revealing mental distress will make them susceptible and vulnerable to future manipulation by the state (eg, involuntary incarceration). Some cannot reveal their problems for fear of being cut off by their family and losing their inheritance. Others fear losing their jobs, friends, and partners.

Someone known to have “needed therapy” is in many places viewed as “a nutter” and will never really be trusted or taken seriously again. They will be expected to crack under pressure and they will be expected to show violent behavior when they do. They will be expected to have drug problems and criminal tendencies.

This obfuscates the anxiety issue a lot because most folks are terrified that anyone will find out they are “mentally weak”. That leaves those who do go to a doctor and own up to suffering anxiety looking like a tiny minority while the majority of 'silent' sufferers wanders around zonked out on anything it can get its hands on to relieve the symptoms.
Best,
AR

Hi dudes,

don't miss this one, full of food for thoughts & actions...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaEl … re=related

Duuuudes...!!

http://www.thehindu.com/health/article621167.ece

as soon as we can do the same thing with pure imagination....

oooh yeah...

Scal, the second link is not working?