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By "our", I mean political scene in one not-very-small central European country. Which is quite unlike American or British one.
True, our politicial scene sucks,
Lol, sometimes I feel like this guy is this forum.
Which I obviously enjoy tremendously.
)I stop by every once in awhile and read if something tickles. But I don't actively promote the whole thing as I used to.
And to be clear, I think that Pinchbeck is fucking genius for having affected the Evolver spores. An invaluable tool of real-world dissemination.
I don't think she's talking about the placebo effect and I think the presentation of her talk is extremely dangerous. I think it is irresponsible to qualify all that content as "placebo effect." She basically suggested that all social psychology can be explained by "the placebo effect."
"What we found is that in somebody with Parkinson's disease, a placebo can release as much dopamine as amphetamine or speed can in somebody with a healthy dopamine system. So it's a very dramatic response."
That dramatic response only appears to last for a short while - a placebo certainly isn't a miracle cure.
And even if it was, doctors could hardly start lying to their patients and replacing real drugs with placebo pills.
It's also unclear exactly how a placebo is able to spur the brain into producing more dopamine, given that Parkinson's is caused by an apparent inability of the brain to produce enough.
But what is certainly clear is that the dopamine isn't coming from the placebo pill itself: there's nothing in it. The dopamine is coming from our brains.
And that goes to the heart of how a placebo works. There's now a strong body of evidence that a dummy pill can activate the brain's natural ability to produce the chemicals that we need.
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
I'm not one to really support Reality Sandwich anymore but...
Beyond the Machine Elves: On DMT Culture, Visionary Plants and Entheodelic Storytelling
