Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis

The what?



Sounds far out.

I was reading about the controversies in what the placebo effect actually is, whether it affects biological function at all, and by what mechanism it functions and came upon this paragraph:


"Collectively, the findings of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here strongly support the view that the subjective nature and the intentional content (what they are “about” from a first-person perspective) of mental processes (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the various levels of brain functioning (e.g., molecular, cellular, neural circuit) and brain plasticity. Furthermore, these findings indicate that mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of the neural bases of behavior in humans. An attempt is made to interpret the results of these neuroimaging studies with a new theoretical framework called the Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis."


The Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis? I love it when you talk dirty to me like to me sciencey writers. So what is this Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis?


Roy J. J. Pereira, a Jesuit priest working on his Ph.D. at the Philosophy Department of Boston College, tells us this:


"I .... make use of Beauregard and O’Leary’s Psychoneural Translation Hypothesis (PTH) which posits that ‘the mind (the psychological world, the first person perspective) and the brain (which is part of the so-called “material” world, the third-person perspective) represent two epistemologically different domains that can interact because they are complementary aspects of the same transcendental reality."






Ah I get it. So thoughts are spiritual phenomena that can't be measured by science because they don't exactly match neurological measurements of thought process. I admit, I find this fact infuriating. You mean you haven't mapped out the location of my thoughts yet oh scientists? But surely they must have  a a specific location, I can feel them happening in my head!! Where are my thoughts happening in my brain?!






I'll have to look into this matter further because this is simply unacceptable.

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