“Forced to cut spending to balance state budgets, legislatures are coming down hardest on higher education, an odd move for a nation that believes its special advantage in global competition is its ‘knowledge workers,’ who are billed as so well educated that they are capable of turning out products and services other nations cannot match.” NY Times

This, about the mental basis of the physical, harmonizes nicely with my piece below about the physical basis of the mental.

The Patient’s Knowledge About a Therapy Affects the Therapy Outcome. This is essentially an empirical demonstration that the placebo effect plays an important role in the effectiveness of medical treatment. Most studies are “placebo-controlled”, that is they hold constant the impact of the subject’s knowledge that they are receiving a treatment and compare the ‘objective’ differences between treatments. This study does the opposite, holding the ‘objective’ effects constant and comparing their effects on two groups of subjects. Those in one group knew they were receiving a treatment and from those in the other group that fact was hidden. To put it succinctly, this overwhelmingly significant finding is that “the hidden administrations of pharmacological and nonpharmacological therapies are less effective than the open ones.”

I am not at all surprised. I have long maintained that the placebo response should not be dismissed as a null hypothesis (‘That treatment only works because the patient believes it does’), but rather that enlisting the patient’s intrinsic healing abilities by enrolling them in a shared belief system is a core element of the healer’s work. This is true whether we are talking about a tribal shaman or a lab-coated modern physician-scientist. And it is true whether we are talking about supposedly ‘physical’ ailments or psychological ones. This is another, important, nail in the coffin of the outmoded notion of mind-body distinctions. I’m going to beg the question of whether we are necessarily talking about some kind of mind-over-matter effects when appreciating the importance of belief to healing, or whether it is a meaningful question to ask. I personally get enough mileage out of my conviction that the material interactions of the CNS with the rest of bodily processes are infinitely more complicated and interwoven than we can conceive of.

It is not a new notion emerging out of recent research findings only, of course — mind-body unity is a core conceptual fundament of the abiding and ubiquitous human practices we refer to as mystical or spiritual pursuits across cultures — and this paper will not be revolutionary, in a very important sense. This is such a recondite provocation to conventional, paradigmatic ways of thinking about things that I predict you will see very little mention of it anywhere. The whole premise of mind-body unity challenges the conceptual framework under which most people operate (and have operated, perhaps, ever since the origins of consciousness and the development of the essentially human capacity for a ‘theory of mind’) so profoundly that it can only be ignored, resisted, marginalized or trivialized wherever it rears its ugly head to threaten the mainstream.

Related:

“Arnold, what the heck are you doing? You’re getting out of Hollywood to go into politics? Well, then forget agents and studio bosses—now you’re dealing with real predators. But since your mind is made up, I hope you won’t mind a little advice from someone who’s been there.

…(B)e yourself. Be Arnold. Be the guy who can sit and have a cigar with the crew. Be honest. Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer to every question asked. Just say, “I don’t know,” if you don’t know. When I did this during my campaign in Minnesota, people were amazed. How revolutionary—a politician who stands in front of the people and doesn’t feed them pre-canned answers!” — Jesse Ventura, Time Magazine

Robert Burke’s Photo Album on the Web:

“It would only take one group of flash mob organizers to abuse the ample trust of their participants for this whole phenomenon to come crashing to a halt. But I suspect that so long as the flash mob objectives remain innocuous and clever, these events will continue to be a good laugh. I’d attend again if I can; I mean, what do I have to lose? If I decide at the last minute I don’t want to take part — surely I can still enjoy my pint!” [via Interesting People]

Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, ‘prequel’ to The Cryptonomicon and vol. 1 of the projected ‘Baroque Cycle’, arrives on September 23. The first chapter is online for you to preview.

Related:

This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins’s script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further. — Stephenson fan Todd Garrison

As Stephenson explains, the cryptographic “… inscription on the splash page is written in Real Character, a system of writing invented in the 1660’s by John Wilkins—an English bishop, natural philosopher, and SF writer who appears as a character in The Baroque Cycle.” What is perhaps most remarkable about Garrison’s cracking the code is that he was totally unfamiliar with the existence of Real Character.