Dr. Lowe, from In the Pipeline, writes:
Not to get too philosophical, but all our physical sensations from the outside world have to be mediated by some sort of receptor in our own bodies. Heat, cold, pressure, pain, pleasure – these are all constructs of our mental processing, but they (generally!) have physical referents. Our sensation of eyesight, for example, is a mental construct, with rather large and specially formed brain regions dedicated to it, but these layers of neurons are responding to impulses coming up the optic nerve, which in turn are set off by the receptors in the retina and their behavior when various wavelength of light hit them. Going further, those rhodopsin receptors are changing shape as retinal molecules isomerize when light hits them – vision comes down to a cis/trans double bond switch; that the spring from which everything flows, the first domino in the mighty chain.
The same goes for all our other physical sensations. The TRPV family of ion channels, for example, is what mediates the taste sensations of garlic and hot peppers, and contribute (as you'd figure) to feelings of heat and pain. The TRPM family is all over the place, but TRPM8 is responsible for the sensation of cold (and for the "cool" sensation of menthol, eucapyltol, and other compounds). In the same way that rhodopsin is balanced on a knife edge, to be tipped over by light hitting it, TRPM8 is similarly balanced so that its conformation changes as the temperature drops, which sets off changes in calcium flux and further messages inside the cells where it's expressed.
[...] So this area would be a good example to bring up when it's time to talk about how complex human biology gets, and how much we don't know about it. Everything from "I feel cold" or "Boy, that's a spicy Thai curry" to a whole list of serious diseases is tied together, in ways that are only partly understood, and which are obscured by big piles of functionality that we don't know anything about at all.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/06/09/the-great-untangling
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday June 13 2017, @11:20AM (4 children)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday June 13 2017, @11:24AM (2 children)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @03:55PM
You mean, coffee can improve a shitty keyboard? Because that for me is the main reason for errors like that.
And no, I can't simply use another keyboard, at least not without inconvenience, because it's a laptop integrated keyboard (the laptop otherwise is great, only the keyboard sucks). I wouldn't want to carry an external keyboard around in addition to the laptop.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday June 13 2017, @08:32PM
"though tit" is typically uttered a few seconds before "Ow! My balls!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @12:30PM
Science can test the phenomena (at least the predictive capacity of it) you describe just fine. AFAIK those "feelings" are the result of intuitive reasoning, at best, and cognitive biases. What you describe reminds me of how people generally are less likely to trust ugly people or people outside their social group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness_stereotype [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 13 2017, @04:50PM (1 child)
Once they understand sensations and perception enough to understand how to induce pleasure, they will have something to sell.
Stoners replaced by Wireheads [wikipedia.org].
New laws will be needed . . . because!
Is there a chemotherapy treatment for excessively low blood alcohol level?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @01:15AM
We've already done that to animals in labs. They all waste away to death by pressing the pleasure button and never doing anything else. It'll be easy to create a slave class of humans controlled by embedded pain/pleasure controls. We already train pets this way as well as many humans too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @05:12PM
Title is wrong it's not the science of sensations, it's about something else.
We can re-experience stuff from memory/imagination. Sensations and all. Not everyone can do it well on demand but apparently some lucid dreamers can do it in dream state. So if you're talking about the actual sensations, _some_ are _initially_ generated by the receptors but not all and not always.