DME; More on Prozac

From Tom Bourbon [940429.1047]

[from Mary Powers 9404.29]

Bob Clark to Bill Powers:

your description of the process [predicting], above, ... becomes
an excellent summary of much of the DME's operation.

But Bill wasn't talking about the DME. He was talking about
principles and strategies.

I agree, Mary. This is the point I tried to make in my own short reply to
Bob.

              * * *

Bob:

excessive attention to time integrals can create other problems.
It can resemble depression, with a generally "sluggish"
response. This response contrasts with the "quick and nervous"
types you suggest for those with excessive attention to time
derivatives. ... it seems to me that we, including McFarland,
discussed this way back when.

Mary:

This is what I was mentioning in my post on Prozac, in case
anyone is interested. The idea is that antidepressants and such-
like psychoactive drugs affect the way control systems do their
controlling. One case discussed in the book was a woman who was
"sluggish in mind and speech", though not depressed according to
the usual diagnostic criteria. After agonizing over whether to
give a drug to someone who was simply a certain kind of person,
and not technically "ill", the psychiatrist did give it to her,
and she became alert and articulate. This gets into all kinds of
fascinating questions - is the way one's control systems function
inborn, or a consequence of experience or trauma?. Should a
symptom like sluggishness be treated if there is no cause (known
at the moment)? If the sluggishness were a consequence, say, of
lead poisoning, there'd be no question about treatment. What
about a way of functioning, a type of control system (too much
integral feedback, or whatever), that is perhaps not
intrinsically off base, but is poorly suited to the culture of
20th century America?

Something along this line is the purpose of work I've just started at the
medical school and our afflilated hospital. All neurologically impaired
patients who go through neuropsychological assessment by our department now
perform a brief battery of control tasks. I am looking to see if the
descriptive statistics and model parameters from PCT control tasks can
discriminate among the various problems that bring patients into the
hospital.

My biggest challenge has been to direct the attention of the professional
staff to real-life problems described by the patients and those close
to them, rather than to the scores from various "assessment instruments." I
believe measures of control, and parameters of best-fit PCT models, will
more readily identify people who came to the hospital because they can't
finish anything because they seem to forget what they are doing, or who
mess things up because they overshoot, or alternatively never quite catch
up, than those measures will identify people who score this or that on
so-and-so's scale of who knows what.

The real issue here is that there seems to be immense confusion
in the psychological/psychiatric community about what is going on
with these drugs - mainly because they are focussed on the
variety of symptoms - behavioral consequences - of more or less
dopamine or serotonin or whatever, and have no idea what is being
affected. In fact a lot of diagnosis is after the fact, in terms
of what drug works, rather than the other way around. For sure,
it's a wild guess on my part that they are affecting the
characteristics of control systems, and it will be a cold day in
hell before any research in that direction is done, if ever, but
I don't see that any current ideas are any better.

Well, maybe it will be a cold day in Houston, rather than in hell --
assuming Houston in the summer time and hell any old time are not one
and the same place :-). If the early results of the project I described
above are good, then we will propose including the control measures in the
set of behaviuoral measures used to study drug effects.

Later,
Tom Bourbon
Department of Neurosurgry
University of Texas Medical School-Houston Phone: 713-792-5760
6431 Fannin, Suite 7.138 Fax: 713-794-5084
Houston, TX 77030 USA tbourbon@heart.med.uth.tmc.edu

RE Tom Bourbon [940429.1047] re

re: Mary

The idea is that antidepressants and such-
like psychoactive drugs affect the way control systems do their
controlling.

Now Tom (940429.1047)

Something along this line is the purpose of work I've just started at the
medical school and our afflilated hospital. All neurologically impaired
patients who go through neuropsychological assessment by our department now
perform a brief battery of control tasks. I am looking to see if the
descriptive statistics and model parameters from PCT control tasks can
discriminate among the various problems that bring patients into the
hospital.

Perhaps I have missed previous discussions on this net of the consequences
of more routinely consumed drugs in this culture - alcohol, marihuana,
caffeine - for the way in which control systems do their controlling?
Martin Taylor is examining the consequences of sleep deprivation. Has
anyone discussed let alone examined the consequences of alcohol consumption
on the way control systems work? What is the relationshp between increased
consumption of alcohol or other drugs and an individual's ordinary
sensitivity to error.

In a series of studies done in the 1970s a psychologist at Kent State
University examined the retaliation for electric shocks received by
subjects who had consumed either alcohol or marihuana. Alcohol consumers
retaliated more quickly and by administering more shock in return than did
marihuana consumers. For alcohol consumers the relationship was
curvilinear with retaliatory shock increasing with the increase in alcohol
consumed but only up to a point after which time the alcohol consumers
retaliated less and less.

Clark McPhail

Clark McPhail
Professor of Sociology
326 Lincoln Hall
University of Illinois
702 S. Wright
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
off/voice mail: 217-333-2528 dept/secretary: 217-333-1950
fax: 217-333-5225 home: 217-367-6058
e-mail: cmcphail@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu

From Tom Bourbon [949429.1717]

RE Tom Bourbon [940429.1047] re

re: Mary

The idea is that antidepressants and such-
like psychoactive drugs affect the way control systems do their
controlling.

Now Tom (940429.1047)

Something along this line is the purpose of work I've just started at the
medical school and our afflilated hospital. All neurologically impaired
patients who go through neuropsychological assessment by our department now
perform a brief battery of control tasks. I am looking to see if the
descriptive statistics and model parameters from PCT control tasks can
discriminate among the various problems that bring patients into the
hospital.

Perhaps I have missed previous discussions on this net of the consequences
of more routinely consumed drugs in this culture - alcohol, marihuana,
caffeine - for the way in which control systems do their controlling?
Martin Taylor is examining the consequences of sleep deprivation. Has
anyone discussed let alone examined the consequences of alcohol consumption
on the way control systems work? What is the relationshp between increased
consumption of alcohol or other drugs and an individual's ordinary
sensitivity to error.

They were easy to miss, Clark. There have been no such discussions. While
I was at an academic institution, the most radical "treatment" we were able
to get past the human subject's committee was a night of sleep deprivation
-- no drugs of any kind -- not even alcohol in moderation. (I'm pretty
sure a few of the students who performed control tasks in my lab courses
*might* have provided some data, but I was not free to ask them about their
physiological states.) There are data on such things from sources other
than people in this group, with a few companies having gone so far as
marketing tracking devices as means by which to assess the functional status
-- impairment (drug or otherwise) or lack thereof -- of employees. What I
have seen of the literature cited in support of those commercial
applications leaves me dissatisfied. As for the remainder of the research
literature on impaired control, it is extensive, with the research conducted
by people most of whom have ideas about control, and about people as
controllers, that are different from ours -- for whatever that is worth.

In a series of studies done in the 1970s a psychologist at Kent State
University examined the retaliation for electric shocks received by
subjects who had consumed either alcohol or marihuana. Alcohol consumers
retaliated more quickly and by administering more shock in return than did
marihuana consumers. For alcohol consumers the relationship was
curvilinear with retaliatory shock increasing with the increase in alcohol
consumed but only up to a point after which time the alcohol consumers
retaliated less and less.

Did all of the subjects in each group act as described in your summary? I
don't question your summary; I do have questions about the original reports.
Inquiring minds want to know. :slight_smile: My warning flags go up, immediately,
when I see descriptions of conventional research where "people in treatment
group A did such and such, but those in treatment group B did so and so." I
just can't help myself -- put all of the blame on Phil Runkel. ,:wink: Rarely
are those claims supported by the data.

I hope our project leads to a chance for us to use some PCT-inspired tasks
and measures to assess people with real neurological impairments and to
assess the performance of people exposed to various psychopharmacological
treatments. There is no literature on those uses of PCT. (Just by
coincidence, if it works, our group might survive a mandate that says
either we produce more money to pay our way, or . . ..)

Later,

Tom

···

In Message Fri, 29 Apr 1994 16:21:38 -0500, Clark Mcphail <cmcphail@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU> writes:

[Dan Miller (940430)]

Mary Powers (940429):

Hi Mary! Nice posts on Prozak. This drug reminds me of "speed"
(that is, amphetamines), popular twenty years ago. Speed made
people feel great - articulate, aware, full of energy, and focused.
Unfortunately, it was easily produced and became a drug of choice on
the streets. Taken liberally it had the tendency to "fry brains."
Prozak is similar in that it, supposedly, affects the same chemical
processes and neurotransmitters.

I suspect that you are correct that it will be a cold day in hell
before any research is done on how such drugs work from the context
of the perceptual control paradigm. If there are some serious
neuropharmacologists and neuroscientists tapping into CSG-Net, then
maybe they will get the idea. Some more think pieces that elaborate
some possible connections between how the brain works through control
and how drugs like Prozak affect the process just might be helpful.
The grounding of PCT into these kinds of problems may appeal to some
as well.

As usual my posting is just a comment.

Later,
Dan Miller
MILLERD@UDAVXB.OCA.UDAYTON.EDU