Then how can we exist around large magnetic fields without them affecting us mentally - no forgetting, no dropping unconscious, no trippy psychedelic experiences - seemingly nothing at all? How come our mains electricity does not not act on our minds analogously to a blowtorch on our skin, or a hydraulic press on our bones?
MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...
(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )
Not necessarily - I think it works like Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Your conscious system is System 2 - when it's not working correctly, you just fall back to System 1.
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
You know the mechanism of TMS is not mysterious. It requires no magnetoreception or "stochastic resonance". It is simply inducing electrical currents to modulate neural activity. Its effects are consistent with the known laws of physics, known properties of neurons, and decades of neuroscience research.
I think you're conflating one question with another. The "why" in question is why altering neural activity in that way results in clinical effects. It is not the "why" TMS alters neural activity.
I appreciate that you feel this way, but the mechanisms behind exactly which neural circuits are activated by TMS are simply not yet fully understood.
From 2024:
> Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive, FDA-cleared treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders with broad potential for new applications, but the neural circuits that are engaged during TMS are still poorly understood.
Again, different question. We know, fundamentally, how TMS causes stimulation/suppression of neural activity, and it does not require magnetoreception. Look at it this way: we don't fully understand how SSRI's cure depression, but we do know their primary target and that their mechanism of action is mediated through that primary target.
I think Daniel Kahneman's System 1 (habits, unconscious) and System 2 (learning, "error correction", conscious) are physical systems, and System 2 takes a LOT more energy to run.
So, when you get tired, System 2 leans more and more on the much more energy efficient System 1. So you get behaviors that look like unrestrained habits: poor impulse control, lowered emotional regulation, etc
I love the simplicity of the System 1/2 breakdown - but is there any actual evidence behind it? It seems like such a classic pop-psychology observational deduction of how something might work with no science to prove it.
In cognitive psychology there's all sorts of evidence that we have two distinct processes, but I don't think anyone has really mapped it to a physical system yet.
Modeling two physical systems is pretty interesting though because dementia ends up looking like a clear failure of System 2. Really neat idea generator even if imperfect.
My very controversial interpretation of taoism's wu wei [effortless action] is exactly this concept, which 2500 years later we can express in much more scientific ways.
Motivation, pure effort and stubbornness to change our ways, are wasted energy and a waste of time. The only way to effect behavioural change in ourselves is through the unconscious habits that drive 99% of our daily lives.
I feel not many people are aware that conscious activity is very energy-intense and sporadic. Most people have days that are 100% routine from morning to bedtime.
These have always felt like symptoms of the problem to me, so perhaps just downstream effects! Definitely not sure, obviously plenty of complexity to this one.
In my experience, I've found most deeply embedded self-destructive ideas to be rooted in fear.
The brain and body are effectively locked in a paranoid "fight" state - "I know this behavior is unhealthy, but if I don't behave this way, then [insert irrational fear] will happen."
If you can figure out what she is afraid of, you might be able to help her walk back the behaviors from there. But trying to correct the behaviors on their own is very hard. Since the fear is usually irrational, the behaviors may be a relatively rational response to said fear. They may hold the fear itself as table stakes - not understanding that they are afraid of something that isn't real (i.e. I will never find love if I'm not as skinny as the other girls on Instagram).
Again IME - the feeling from inside the self-destructive brain is "I shouldn't be doing this self-destructive behavior, but I don't know another way to achieve X goal, and I absolutely need to achieve X goal." Asking the question "Why do you need so badly to achieve X goal?" is usually a good start to defanging the fear.
Thank you, I will work on getting an answer to that question today!
Not the underlying fear that you mention, but seeing her reaction to being asked (forced) to eat is reminiscent of being asked (forced) to pat a spider.
I'm not sure if visceral, immediate fear maps to an underlying fear or not, but fear seems to play some part at least.
No disrespect, but maybe you should instead be working on getting her into therapy instead of trying to be her therapist. If she is not inclined to be honest with you or herself in the first place, you don’t have the tools and are too close to the situation, especially if you are the one who is the “cause” (regardless of whether YOU think you do something to be the “cause”).
A therapist is an independent person who is completely outside that persons life and their situation and is more likely to have the appropriate tools, or at least more so than a parent will (no matter how many TikTok’s they might see or blogs they might read).
And if she is resistant, explain that “this is someone who you can talk to; I don’t expect anything, I’m only asking that you just go talk with them about whatever you want. It’s not my business what you discuss, and I won’t ever ask you to tell me what you discuss. You can talk about your homework or the sky, it doesn’t matter, I’m only asking that you go talk to them. If you talk to them a few times and don’t like them, we can find someone else. Again, I have no expectations from this and I’m not trying to “fix” you, it’s just someone you can talk with and who might be able to make good suggestions about whatever you discuss…no more, no less”. And then, more importantly, you have to both believe and respect it.
I'm bang up for any suggestions, all good. Under no delusion that I know the right thing to say in this situation. I've actually found it difficult to find the right time to say, almost literally, anything; which may actually be a good thing (in minimising my opportunity to make things worse).
She has been seeing a psych for a month or two (regarding her 'minor' self harm, the eating disorder hadn't "presented" at that time). She's generally pretty closed about her emotions, but she did start opening up after a few sessions. Not that it was able to prevent the decline towards the current situation.
We've asked her "team" at the hospital whether there's a psych involved in her program. They said no, for two reasons:
1. They're currently understaffed in that area
2. They need to get her weight / nutrition back to a baseline level because 'starvation brain' is, essentially, not worth working on - it's not functioning correctly.
Despite that, they said they'd still see what they can organise.
We've also started the process to getting an eating-disorder-specific psych booked for when she's discharged from hospital.
Dr. Becky on Andrew Huberman this year said something like:
The first thing you should do when your kid is feeling something is to just say, "I believe you."
Don't tell her that she really is skinny, or that she really is beautiful, or that she's not thinking right. Don't tell her those things because what you're really saying is, "I know you better than you know yourself." That, unintuitively maybe, damages self confidence - where self confidence is really just "believing oneself."
If you plant a seed of doubt that she doesn't know herself and that others know more about her than she does...
(Obviously this is about validating her feelings and not validating self harm, which is nuanced and could probably use some professional direction or deep thought about how to approach this in a way which doesn't encourage deeper affirmation of the self image)
Anyway, I wish you luck. That sounds gut-wrenching and terrible. I hope you and your family can safely pull through on the other side.
Interesting. Yeah, fear being a component of these things makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. Self-harm makes sense if your arm is pinned under a boulder. I think the psychology of these conditions is closer to that than anything else.
This is so chatGpt it hurts. Can we petition hn to ban ai generated comments? I see more Reddit communities actively putting a ban on ai, hn should follow if it can be done with the available resources.
Generated comments of any kind are already banned according to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628) even though it hasn't been added to the HN guidelines page. So you could legitimately contact the moderators to ask them to investigate.
You aren't too old. I've been out of school for ~10 years and AI makes me feel exactly the way you've described it. I'm trying to navigate it and find an exciting space to carve out for myself, but the future feels unclear in a way it never has before. I'm confident in my own ability to build great things, but to your many points, AI has the unique potential to do everything better than me.
I don't want to say this makes me feel hopeless, because it genuinely doesn't. I'm working on a new startup, I'm starting a family, and I'm doing well.
I just want to build things that matter, that people find useful, and I've been having a hard time figuring out how I'll do that in a world with sufficiently advanced AI. Hobbies have never been enough for me, and never will be. It needs to be more than fun to energize me - I need to feel like I'm moving a needle.
For now, all I know is that I don't know. It feels nearly impossible to guess what the future holds.
The current generation of AI can't do the truly difficult things better than you: finding a good niche, making the decisions about how you want to differentiate, building relationships with your customers, choosing which innovations to pursue and when to build on the features you already have.
I run my own startup too, and I wish it could help me with those things. So far the most I can get from it is things like generating some HTML, and even then it gets it wrong half the time.
That will change in the future, but it will be gradual, and it will help you execute on ideas faster and better.
That's a great point I hadn't considered. I guess they are redirecting all pages to this announcement and, by using a 503, the search results will not be impacted.
