Honest Placebos

I've come across a few things referencing placebos lately, in particular 'transparent' or 'open' placebos where the fact that it contains no known effective ingredient is not hidden.

One is a link to this research on "Effects of open-label placebos in clinical trials: a systematic review and meta-analysis" from Nature dated Feb 16, 2021:

Open-label placebos (OLPs) are placebos without deception in the sense that patients know that they are receiving a placebo. The objective of our study is to systematically review and analyze the effect of OLPs in comparison to no treatment in clinical trials.

We found a significant overall effect (standardized mean difference = 0.72, 95% Cl 0.39–1.05, p < 0.0001, I2 = 76%) of OLP. Thus, OLPs appear to be a promising treatment in different conditions but the respective research is in its infancy.

Then in perusing Andy Clark's latest book The Experience Machine, which posits the brain as a prediction engine, constantly engaging with sensory input both consciously and unconsciously to enable action, he concludes with some material about what he refers to as 'honest' placebos:

Honest placebos appear to work by activating subterranean expectations through superficial indicators of reliability and efficacy such as good packaging and professional presentation (foil and blister packs, familiar font, size and uniformity of the pills, and so on). This is because - as we have seen - the bulk of the brain's prediction empire is nonconscious.

Clark reviews a number of other findings in his 'Hacking the Prediction Machine' chapter, and in a sense concludes:

In the end, it looks like anything that can be done to increase our confidence in an intervention, procedure, or outcome is likely to have real benefits. 

He also describes use of certain psychedelic drugs as having the potential to 'reset' the prediction machine in very useful ways.

Conversing with a whale

This Dec. 12, 2023 report from the Seti Institute, Whale-SETI: Groundbreaking Encounter with Humpback Whales Reveals Potential for Non-Human Intelligence Communication seems encouraging.

In response to a recorded humpback ‘contact’ call played into the sea via an underwater speaker, a humpback whale named Twain approached and circled the team’s boat, while responding in a conversational style to the whale ‘greeting signal.’ During the 20-minute exchange, Twain responded to each playback call and matched the interval variations between each signal.

I've long thought it would make sense to attempt communication with the intelligent species on our own planet! 

Evolution and Free Will

Pulled from the blog list, the recent Brain Science podcast with Kevin Mitchell is worthwhile.

As with his new book, it's titled "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" and was posted Oct 27, 2023.

AI reads the brain?

Well, long time no posting!

The post "A.I. trained to read minds and translate private thought to text via brain scans" from BoingBoing caught my eye. Here with extensive training on a specific person's brain activity while listening to spoken text, is able to correlate later brain activity (while watching silent films or thinking of speaking) and do pretty well at reconstructing at least some of what the person "had in mind". Note though that patterns for one person do not carry over to other people.

This language-decoding method had limitations, Dr. Huth and his colleagues noted. For one, fMRI scanners are bulky and expensive. Moreover, training the model is a long, tedious process, and to be effective it must be done on individuals. When the researchers tried to use a decoder trained on one person to read the brain activity of another, it failed, suggesting that every brain has unique ways of representing meaning.