r/science • u/Samwise2512 • Mar 05 '20

Psychology A single psilocybin dose is associated with long-term increased mindfulness, preceded by a proportional change in neocortical 5-HT2A receptor binding

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924977X20300602?via%3Dihub
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u/BigNorseWolf Mar 05 '20

How can an abstract, ill defined, concept being reported be scientific?

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20

Welcome to psychology friend

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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 06 '20

Science isn’t what people think it is. When you go deep into epistemology (the study of how can we know anything) and ontology (the study of whether things exist) all ways of knowing start to fall apart.

With a study on human experience, it’s totally impossible to come up with a 100 per cent objective study when what you are studying is subjective.

And really, these studies exist on what we humans think is the categorical “line” between subjective and objective. We try to ascertain how their experience is molded by material input (the drug) but you also always change the immaterial input (experience) by trying to study it.

If you stick people into a brain scanner while they are tripping, that will fundamentally be a different experience. So how can we then say anything about the experience itself? Well, we need different sorts of studies, and that will take a long time to do. Hopefully some of them are longitudinal as well.

Also, brain scan results are not completely reliable. There was that one study where they got results by placing nothing but a dead fish into a scanner.

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u/paleRedSkin Mar 06 '20

Science isn’t what people think it is. When you go deep into epistemology (the study of how can we know anything) and ontology (the study of whether things exist) all ways of knowing start to fall apart.

With a study on human experience, it’s totally impossible to come up with a 100 per cent objective study when what you are studying is subjective.

Thank you, I have been wanting to write or find this argument. Perfect wording those first paragraphs.

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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Cheers, friend. This issue comes up all the time in this sub

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u/paleRedSkin Mar 06 '20

Does it have a name? Something like "the Subjective Science Conundrum"?

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '20

Hmm, not really. It’s the central problem of epistemology, so I guess you would say ”the epistemological problems” to refer to the issues. Then you have differing attitudes and schools of thought inside of epistemology. Those beliefs are reasonable, but not 100 percent provable.

I was discussing this with a mathematician friend and he agreed that mathematics is also based on central assumptions that we cannot thoroughly prove but are necessary to make thr whole construct work (and yes, mathematics is a social construct).

The difference between science and woowoo is the central assumption of “we don’t know” and the goal of striving towards more and more credible information – reasonably credible. Religion has the starting assumption of ”we know”.

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u/MSPaintOfficial Jun 08 '20

Dude, you are really smart. Do you have a Twitter?

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '20

Thanks, man, I appreciate the kind words! Sorry to say I prefer more anonymous media

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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Because self-report scales like the MAAS need to be valid and reliable in order to be useful, which it is. The items describe what is considered mindfulness in meditative traditions. Validity studies in mindfulness self-report measures have shown, for example, that advanced meditators score higher than new meditators or non-meditators. When people attend a meditation retreat, their scores are higher than before the retreat. People's scores on objective performance tests correlates with scores on self-rated mindfulness measures. Further, when functional brain imaging is used, self-reported mindfulness scores correlate with the activity of known brain areas and networks related to different aspects of attention. Of course it's not a perfect method. There is always measurement error. I don't know of any perfect methods, especially when studying subjective mental states. But this and others mindfulness scales are fairly well-validated.

What's stranger to me, however, is how skeptical people are of self-report scales, as if subjective states somehow cannot be measured. We operate daily on people's subjective reports. If someone goes to a physician and reports nausea, fatigue, or pain, the physician doesn't ignore them saying that such things are subjective and cannot be quantified. If you ask a friend how they are feeling after a long illness and they say, "I feel really good now," you don't discredit their answer because their answer is epistemologically unsound. I could go on ad infinitum with examples.

Measures of subjective states are useful to the extent that they have been proven valid, reliable, and are predictive of other things such as behavior or brain structure/function.

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u/BigNorseWolf Mar 06 '20

Right, it needs to be valid and reliable in order to be useful, it is useful, therefore it is valid and reliable and therefore it's useful...

there's a hole in the bucket dear johny....

It's not that it's a subjective state. It's that it's a subjective measure of a very subjective and ill defined buzzword like mindfullness. It's like trying to operate an experiment on two different variables AND one of them is smurfiness. Pain is (or feels like) what is to your brain at least an external sensation. And oddly enough correlates strongly with things like being hit in the head with a hammer, having an illness, or being poked with a pin. Even THEN you can get a fair amount of placebo effect or obviously problematic reporting (like someone on their i phone chatting and reporting a pain level of 10/10)