Study Finds Evidence of Neurobiological Mechanism for Hallucinations and Delusions - Neuroscience News
Summary: Hallucinations and delusions share a common neurobiological mechanism while simultaneously depending on symptom-specific pathways.
ttps://neurosciencenews.com/stud
y-finds-evidence-of-neurobiological-mechanism-for-hallucinations-and-delusions/
The study:
Distinct hierarchical alterations of intrinsic neural timescales account for different manifestations of psychosis.
Thought it interesting. Two problems why didn't make it into publication, and the reviewers were really kind of a little unnecessarily polite or mealy mouth about saying so so it might have been a little confusing to get the real reason.
The problem the reviewers had was with the arbitrary selection of a group of schizophrenic symptoms as if schizophrenia is caused by a single source or source whose mechanisms can be more directly traced to single line circuitry then is actually possible. For instance, there wasn't enough treatment of visual hallucinations, and for another example the problem with paranoid perception (what they referred to as delusion) is perhaps as much from process of excessive reasoning error rather than perceptual (machine mechanism) patterns...i.e., different likely processes entirely from hallucination. It's like trying to apply inferential math to interpret dreams, as if dreams could be relegated to slide rule hard science phenomena that could be defined in tracked and differentiated. Pretty big error in mistaking interactions of context for mechanism. Also, the study failed to look at or try to account for the qualitative differences between delusions, hallucinations, and something else in the picture but not touched upon, which are illusions. Another problem was that a study tried to use inferential statistics to try to pull on and unravel as individual little strings all the different symptoms without identifying or really understanding that they all are not necessarily related in their signaling problems. This is why their statistics really fail to show much differentiated or strong they were trying to compare apples to oranges to pears to berries. The study really just suffers from an unchallenged but possibly flawed premise which exposes it unfortunately to a bias, and that biases that there is somehow related connection, as well as hierarchical activation signaling connections, when there may be none. Inferential statistics were created to deal with problems of fuzzy complexities because those complexities source and function are not strictly mechanical. It's like trying to measure an electron stream as if that those electrons were individually all coming from different paths and taking different directions to get to their ending location. Poetry doesn't get you very far when you are analyzing electronic phenomena for some industrial application or constructing a computer chip, but that's a little like what the authors were trying to do.
The reviewers responded to all of these little issues by referring to a more psychiatric oriented set of publishers or journals but really they could have been a little more forthright in saying that the recommendation was because psychiatry deals with a lot of speculation and softer science in which inference plays a larger role than what we might call hard science.
Why? Because that is the level that schizophrenia is conceptually understood today... It's still at the "trying to wrestle down a greased pig" level. Something like trying to define and describe the physics of a ball of cooked spaghetti by trying to follow and untangle each of the individual little pasta strands. It might have had a better shot with trying to apply their efforts toward Parkinson rather than schizophrenia, it might be easier to conceptualize and then actually "harder" science to signaling and biochemical mechanisms in Parkinson's, and try to account better for the phenomena of illusions, perception problems, motor and sensory inputs, and account for their role in distortions down with schizophrenia, whose concepts and reasoning have to build backward from the undifferentiated whole and somehow account for things such as dreams, paranoid reasoning and delusions, without having to account for their construction using what really has to be in the realm of fanciful speculation as much as measurement science.
The reviewers probably were trying not to seem too obvious in what could be interpreted as taking a cheap shot at psychiatry. Inferential approaches are really better left to social science than medicine and biochemistry. The authors were essentially trying to reverse engineer schizophrenic symptoms and relate them into some sort of physical concept. Nice try but it doesn't always work that way, it seems to work really well with physics and mechanics, but seems to me it would be far more difficult to do when complex biological mechanisms and functions are also involved...and some of them may not even be functions, and a good warning word and whenever you see it in psychiatry or social sciences is the word "functional." When you see the term, it might be relating to some actual function, or it may be a cover term or code for "I don't really know what it is or whether it is something at all, so what might be or seems to be some apparent relationship I will use this term as a place marker and come back to it later because I don't know what it is or if it is and I'm trying to work out some sort of concept or context in the meantime." Just too much complexity and subtle phenomena to try to detangle using pure physical measurements and instrumentation. Even the term "psychosis" is a relative one. I don't see how they can get under the surface when all you have access to is the surface itself.
Impressive critique. Thank you.
It was a little fuzzy because I was mostly asleep just back from a 3 am dog walking and did it all on the phone. Now that I'm awake I see it could have been made a lot clearer so if anyone cares I can clean it up.
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