Reply With QuoteDiddy David Hamilton? Top class entertainer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H..._(broadcasting)
Oh.
You're talking about Dr David Hamilton. The Rupert Sheldrake wannabe.
Somebody has just asked me what I think about this guy. Has this already been discussed here?
Diddy David Hamilton? Top class entertainer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H..._(broadcasting)
Oh.
You're talking about Dr David Hamilton. The Rupert Sheldrake wannabe.
Yes, he's obviously very keen on the Dr bit. What do you think?Originally Posted by Croydon Bob
I don't know enough about him to know whether he is a liar or just a nutter. Sheldrake certainly misleads and twists in a way that suggests that he knows his evidence is false. Hamilton may be fooling himself like Benveniste did.
To be honest, I find this kind of person disturbing. I can accept some ignorant nutter peddling woo, but when there is a modicum of scientific learning attached, it is difficult to work out their motive. Without wanting to start a discussion on the number of braincells one needs to be awarded a PhD from Strathclyde, is this guy deluding himself, or is he just a con artist? I know someone with a science PhD from Bangor who is very active in the astrology scene. How is this possible? Is the need to deceive yourself and/or other people so strong? I just don't get it.
I read the link, and it seemed pretty reasonable to me. We are in essence "made out of energy", or quantum fields if you prefer, and the placebo effect is something measurable and real. And check out the Aharanov-Bohm effect and note the reference to Ehrenberg and Siday's 1949 paper The Refractive Index in Electron Optics and the Principles of Dynamics. Electrons really do have a non-local wavelike quantum nature, hence they interfere, and the interference is demonstrably deflected by a solenoid. OK I haven't read everything Hamilton has said, and maybe he takes it too far, but with this sort of thing sometimes the self-deception is on the other side of the fence, related to a lack of physics knowledge. Why don't you copy and paste some sentence or paragraph that you feel particularly concerned about and I'll tell you what I think? I’ll either back it up with evidence and say it looks legit, or point out that there is no evidence and it looks like bunk.
I doubt that anyone here is interested in what you think?
Hardly surprising. One nutter with a pet pseudo-scientific "theory", finds another one reasonable.
I second brianp's statement.
The article in the OP just gets worse the further down you read.
The basic error is to apply reductionism to something that is most probably an emergent property (the mind).
It's yet another example of an otherwise intelligent person's reasoning going completely to pot when applied to their own belief.
.
Well I read the link.
The placebo effect exists. Agreed. I just can't see what discussion of quantum probability waves adds to the discussion.
I might as well fill a page full of quantum drivel about how a die is made from atoms and the atoms are made from particles and the particles are probability waves before acknowledging that the odds of rolling a 6 are 1 in 6.
The danger of Hamilton's approach is the inferences that might be made. No he doesn't explicitly make them but I'm pretty sure the implication was part of his intent.
Disease, it's all quantum fields. The minds can have an effect at the quantum level, therefore the mind can effect disease.
What he doesn't mention is the limitation of this effect. It's true in as much as the placebo effect is real but the placebo effect is limited. Instead Hamilton leaves the reader to make the leap that all disease can be cured purely by the power of the mind.
Oncoming traffic is also all just quantum fields but if you're in the path of a bus you'd be better using the power of the mind (at the quantum level) to send signals to your legs (which really are neurochemical transmissions even if those neurochemical transmisions are in turn made up of quantum fields) to move you out of the way rather than trying to "mind quantum" the bus out of existence through positive thinking.
As for the free will argument to dismiss the materialistic view of the mind that's argument to consequences. Even if a materialistic viewpoint were to remove the possibility of free will (and I'm sure that's debatable by better philosophers than me) then just ebcause I don't like that idea, wouldn't t make it any the less true. Furthermore breakign these neurotransmissions down into their quantum components does nothing to stop it being materialistic, so what then is he trying to imply here?
Why(*) do people need to invent some wacky theory to try and explain 'how the mind/brain influences the body', when the sole biological purpose of the mind/brain is to influence the operation of the body through a variety of mechanisms, at least some of which are very well-studied, such as the release of various hormones, or by causing the body to do things (or not) by operation of the muscles, such as getting up and exercising rather than sitting in a chair and moping?
How is a mind/brain supposed to be able to focus the clearly distributed (and in quantum terms, glacially slow) electrical activity of thought into an output of energy waves which could hope to affect single molecules, even if the mind/brain could somehow miraculously know the instantaneous location of a molecule which needed alteration, and also miraculously know how it should be altered?
(*apart from a desire to sell books to morons)
Good 'ole quantum theory, it's a gift to crackpots!
Let's go through it bit by bit:
At what point does a thought influence matter? This is a question I have asked myself on numerous occasions. One of the first times was in 1995, in the final year of my PhD in organic chemistry, shortly before I took up a post as a scientist with one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
No problem there.
My professor gave the PhD research students tasks every few months to learn about something different and present it to the other students. I decided to study and present what is known as ‘Molecular Orbital Theory’ (MO Theory). Basically, without over complicating things, it is the theory of how atoms join together to form molecules and it underpins the entire science of organic chemistry. For instance, water is the combination of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. The way they combine, or ‘bond’ as it is known, is that they overlap with one another, a little like the Olympic rings overlap with one another, with each ring representing an atom.
Sounds fair enough.
What is actually doing the overlapping is the electrons of each atom, which are classically described as orbiting the centre of the atom (where the protons and neutrons live), much as the moon orbits the Earth. But the electrons don’t really orbit the nucleus. This is merely a model used to teach a basic understanding of the atom.
True.
An electrons can actually be thought of like a field of energy that vibrates at a certain level. Think of it a bit like a fridge magnet. It is not just a magnet on the surface but actually attracts or repels from an inch or so out from the surface. This is its ‘magnetic field’. A magnet that was a little ball, then, would have a magnetic field much bigger than the ball and we would feel invisible attraction and repulsion about an inch or more from the surface.
Good analogy.
Now think of each hydrogen and oxygen in water as a little ball, but instead of a magnetic field it had an ‘electron’ field extending an inch or so from the centre. So when two hydrogens and one oxygen come together and bond, the ‘electron’ fields of the hydrogens resonate, or overlap, with the electron fields of the oxygen, and then we have water. And actually, just to be clear, there is actually no ‘ball’. The ball, itself, is also a field of energy. Weird isn’t it? It’s all energy! Everything is energy.
That's how it is.
When I first studied MO theory I was already aware that the mind could cause biochemical changes in the body because it was known that too many stressful thoughts could lead to negative effects in the body and positive thinking could lead to beneficial ones. I assumed that our thoughts and emotions might possibly be exerting a force upon the fields that make up the atoms or the electron fields that join them together, and therefore affecting, on some level, atoms and molecules.
In the end, that is essentially what happens.
At some point we have to consider that some force or energy generated by our thoughts or emotions must influence biology. Many believe that there is no such force or energy associated with a thought; that thoughts are, in fact, by-products of chemical interactions in the brain. Taking this line, there could be no free will.
I'm in the latter camp, and I'd say there isn't quite as much free will as you might think. People can be extremely dogmatic. But it's going too far to say there is none.
Each thought that we think of as our own would be merely the result of brain chemistry. But this cannot account for what we are now seeing in neuroscience; that imagining something can cause a change in the chemistry and actual fine structure of the brain.
It's just brain chemistry. We're just machines. We employ feedback, is all.
Studies of neuroplasticity show this very well. The famous ‘piano’ study conducted at Harvard showed that volunteers could imagine playing piano notes over and over again, for 2 hours on 5 consecutive days, and the area of the brain connected to their finger muscles grew quite substantially.
Not a problem.
For this growth to occur, several messenger molecules had to move towards the centre of brain cells in this area of the brain and activate several genes that would produce the organic material needed to form new neural connections between brain cells.
Granted.
What triggered the movement of the messenger molecules? An electrical or chemical change! What caused the electrical or chemical change? A change in one or two molecules, where they might shed or gain some atoms (an organic chemical reaction). And what needs to occur for this to happen? Something has to interact with the electron waves that make up the bonds between atoms. Other chemicals can do it, but what prompts them to action?
This is the "hard" question of consciousness. When you say "I'm going to make a cup of tea" and then do so, you're displaying what is in essence mind over matter. And nobody can actually tell you what this mind is. I think it's an emergent property myself, with absolutely nothing weird or spooky to it. Souls are most definitely out.
Eventually, at some point in the chain, atoms and their bonds have to be directly affected by something. They don’t just do it randomly by themselves. The start of the chain is a thought! It is the visual image of playing the piano keys. This sets of the following chain reaction: Energy (or force) of thought interacts with electron waves causing a chemical change, which causes another, and another etc, which triggers the release of messenger molecules, which activate the genes that code for the organic material of the neural connections.
Whilst I don't quite agree with "energy of thought", I don't have any real issue with what the guy's saying here.
Our thoughts can add up to quite substantial forces. The same thought, repeated frequently, was able to produce substantial chemical and structural changes in the brain. What if we visualized our bodies healing when we were sick? Our minds should be able to influence the health of the body. Perhaps this is where positive thinking really begins.
Again no problem. The placebo effect is real, even though it's all in the mind. You won't be able to fix your broken leg, but some grit and determination sounds like a good idea if you're fighting an infection. What else are you going to do? Roll over and die?
A few years ago I also wanted to have a visualization that brought the mind into the quantum world. Thus I created a technique called, ‘Quantum Field Healing’ (link to amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Field-Healing-David-Hamilton/dp/1848502281/ref=pd_sim_b_5). It guides the listener to visualize the waves of energy that make up the biology of a disease instead of thinking of the disease as something more or less solid. If you look down inside any part of the body you see cells, then, DNA, then atoms, then, protons, neutrons, and electrons, and a few other others particles, and each of these are also known to exist as pure waves of energy swimming in what is known as the ‘Quantum Field’. So we can think of a disease not as something solid in the body, but as waves of energy just as we were able to think of the atoms of water as waves of energy. If you were the size of a quantum particle, that is what you would ‘see’ – waves of energy.
That is what you'd "see", so I don't have a big issue with this. Sure, if a bus is coming, leg it. But if you're ill in bed you think about the cells in your body and bacteria fighting a battle, and you say I am going to get better. And you do. Hopefully.
So even if you didn’t buy all this stuff about thoughts generating a force that resonates with electron waves of atoms and thus affecting the body, at the very least when we look at a disease from a quantum perspective it gives us a very different perspective from normal. And here’s another source of power to affect the body: a change in perspective can cause a change in biology. Looking at a photo of a burns patient causes a physiological spike in most people, for instance. But when people are told that it isn’t really a burns patient but an actor preparing for a scene where he plays the role of a burns patient, no such spike exists. A shift in perspective led to a shift in biology.
True. You won't find me arguing with experimental results.
So at the very least, viewing a disease from a quantum perspective, where we see waves of energy instead of something more or less solid or chemical, might lead to some beneficial physiological changes in the body. This is because at the level of the quantum field we see waves and we know that waves are easily changed. You only need to move your hand in the bath to create waves and then move it again to change them.
Sounds reasonable to me.
And this shift in perspective towards seeing a wave as something that can be changed generates a belief in us that the disease can be changed, healed, or that it will be healed. This actually forms part of what makes the placebo effect work, that a condition can or will improve.
It amazes me that people are so quick to dismiss the placebo effect. And they never seem to think that determination can make a difference either.
So even if mind over matter ended up being ‘just’ the placebo effect, what would it matter? As long as our thoughts, hopes, and desires, produced beneficial changes to our health and we feel a sense of inner power that we can make ourselves well. And that makes all the difference.
Agreed.
Really, I can't see what the big problem is with all this. Here's a guy doing neuroscience wondering what initiates thoughts and drives processes and makes a difference. He's largely correct in what he's saying, so IMHO words like crackpot and drivel signal a sneering dismissive overreaction.
The basic problem is confusing speculation with results. Does the placebo effect work? yes - end of story. How does it work? don't know. What is the total contribution in any given individual patient? don't know. Can it be reliably harnessed? probably not at present. Are there any down sides? yes if the underlying disease process is not addressed.
What this guy is doing is dressing up his pet visualisation of what positive thinking is up as an agent for inducing the placebo effect (without evidence that this is a correct association) and selling it as a quasi religious approach to healing, without the required 'health warnings' about the fact that the underlying disease process will not be influenced by merely feeling better as a consequence of the placebo effect.
Let's be clear feeling better is hugely helpful if you have a self limiting condition, for otherwise progressive conditions while being appropriately treated those who feel better about themselves have a greater chance of getting to a successful conclusion of therapy - but without the therapy those who feel better and those who don't all go the same way.
Well I can see what's wrong with it and have explained as much. Perhaps, being "farsighted" you're too close to the issue to see the problem.
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