Dr. Paloma <Dr._member@newsguy.com> writes:

> In article <92o8zmfkh2i.fsf@yarf.eecs.umich.edu>, Karl says...
> >Dr. Paloma <Dr._member@newsguy.com> writes:
> >> In article <92oelw8kivu.fsf@yarf.eecs.umich.edu>, Karl says...
> >> >And yet another sock puppet steps up to the plate to mindlessly parrot
> >> >13 year old statements as if they were relevant today...
> >> >
> >> >Tell me, Madaline, why did *only* subjects previously diagnosed with
> >> >schizophrenia show activation of the basal ganglia and thalamus on
> >> >working memory tasks in the study described below if schizophrenia
> >> >doesn't actually exist? Why did the subjects previously diagnosed with
> >> >schizophrenia show the other differences in brain activity described
> >> >if schizophrenia doesn't actually exist?
> >> Tell me Karl, why are you spamming with this psych gibberish?
> >"Spamming"? It was a responsive, non-repetative reply to a previous post.
> >If that was "spam," so was the post I was replying to -- I haven't seen
> >you complaining to "Madaline" regarding her spamming.
> Anyone can understand what Madaline's saying; your posts, however, are
> gibberish.
"Math is hard. Let's go shopping!" Gee, Mr. P, I'm sorry my refusal to provide a free online course in biomedical imaging and neuroanatomy irks you so. If people don't want to do the work involved in understanding the research that is being done, that isn't my problem.

If you actually had an advanced degree in the area you're claiming to you wouldn't need me to translate the abstracts for you, you'd understand them.

If you actually had any real advanced background in the area you're claiming to, you'd be responding on the technical issues. That means either (1) your claim to have an MD or PhD is fraudulent, or (2) you can't actually offer a rebuttal on the scientific issues.

> (By the way, that's not how you spell "repetitive". Are you sure
> you're a PhD?)
Ah, yes. The spelling flame -- last refuge of the incompetent.

> >> Is this supposed to impress someone?
> >No, it's supposed to provide information for interested readers who might
> >otherwise be misled by the lies of people like you and "Madaline."
> Then why don't you translate it from gibberish so someone can understand
> what you mean?
Your contempt for technical language that actually requires some degree of specialized knowledge to understand makes it seem rather unlikely you have a high school diploma, let alone an MD or PhD. Again, if you had such a degree in the area claimed you wouldn't require my translation of what the abstracts are saying.

> >> (Notice this report, like the others you've introduced, is equivocal
> >> throughout ("thought to"; "may" etc.) and is a sad effort to impersonate
> >> science.
> >Notice that the things which the abstract describes using terms Paloma
> >characterizes as equivocal are irrelevant. With respect to the
> >point I was making it doesn't matter whether or not the basal ganglia and
> >thalamus mediate WM as they are "thought to", nor does it matter whether
> >or not "aberrant WM performance and brain activation in schizophrenia may"
> >(or may not) "reflect dysfunction of frontostriatal circuitry that subserves
> >WM." What matters is that the finding (activation of the basal ganglia and
> >thalmus while doing working memory related tasks in *ONLY* the subjects
> >previously diagnosed with schizophrenia) tends to contradict the claim that
> >schizophrenia is a false reification of unrelated and vague symptoms with
> >no underlying distinguishing physical characteristics.
> Karl, gosh darn it, there you go again.
I'll try to do this slowly, in words of one syllable, so that you can keep up this time:

1) Madaline wrote The truth is--schizophrenia is one of the great myths of our time, and if you suffer from it, you might find this statement outrageous. In his book Schizophrenia - The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry, psychiatry professor Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., says, "There is, in short, no such thing as schizophrenia" (Syracuse University Press, 1988, p. 191). So the supposed "symptoms" or defining characteristics of "schizophrenia" are broad indeed, defining people as having some kind of schizophrenia because they have delusions or do not, hallucinate or do not, are jumpy or catatonic, are happy, sad, or neither happy nor sad, or cycling back and forth between happiness and sadness. Since no physical causes of "schizophrenia" have been found, this "disease" can be defined only in terms of its "symptoms."

2) I described that claim as schizophrenia is a false reification of unrelated and vague symptoms with no underlying distinguishing physical characteristics.

If you don't understand how what I said in (2) is equivalent to what Madaline is claiming in (1), I believe Scientology has a process called "word clearing"

which may help deal with your cognitive problems. "Reification" is probably the big, bad word causing your wittle head to ache. Look it up.

3) I posted a reference to a paper by Manoach, et al, in the July, 2000 issue of _Biological Psychiatry_ in which they used MRI to look at the degree of activity in certain brain regions while subjects (one group of "normal" individuals, one group diagnosed with schizophrenia) worked on tasks which involved different levels of loading of Working Memory (also known as short term memory). Anyone sufficiently motivated to do an AltaVista search would find that the "Sternberg Item Recognition Paradigm"

referred to is the following:

The Sternberg paradigm is one in which subjects see a relatively small list of items and then are presented with a single item and have to judge whether that item is from the list. As the result was originally described and is still described in many textbooks, the claim is that there is a linear relationship between the number of items in the memory set and time to make this judgment. In fact the relationship is more typically curvilinear and extends out to lists as long as 20 items in length (Briggs, 1974). Data illustrating this relationship was reported in Burrows and Okada (1975).

(see http://act.psy.cmu.edu/ACT/ftp/models/List_Memory/list_memory.html) 4) What Manoach and colleagues found was that the schizophrenic subjects (and ONLY the schizophrenic subjects) showed activity in the basal ganglia and thalamus structures. There were other consistent differences, but let's just takes this one. If you want to know where those structures are, perhaps you could consult a book such as Stephan Goldberg's _Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple_. Actually, there's a diagram on the web:

http://seniorhealth.about.com/health/seniorhealth/library/parkinsons/blpdwhatis2.htm 5) The question I then posed (and which you have dodged under cover of feigning an inability to understand what I was posting) was the following:

If there is no such thing as schizophrenia -- if, as Szasz claims, diagnoses of schizophrenia are meaningless labels based on overly broad symptoms -- then why do the schizophrenics in that study show the same distinctive difference in information processing in the brain?

Do you have an answer for that question, "Doc"?

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