[From Bill Powers (941206.1320 MST)]
Bruce Abbott (941205.2000 EST) --
How nice of you to serve as a subject in a PCT experiment concerning
fevers. I approve of the experimental approach. Hope you recover
rapidly, but not too rapidly to notice what's happening.
When you start to get a fever, do you feel hot? No, you feel cold. You
pile on the covers and shiver, doing all the things needed to bring the
body temperature to the new higher set point. When you get there, you
feel somewhat weird, but you don't sweat, and you stop shivering.
Then at some point the fever "breaks." Suddenly you feel hot. You throw
off the covers. You start to sweat. You do what is necessary to bring
the body temperature down to the set point, which has been returned
toward normal.
Obviously, you have some built-in control systems that raise the
reference level for body temperature as a way of doing something about
an illness, and when the error is corrected, resets the reference levels
for normal operation. So what should you do about a fever? Admire it.
All of this is telling us how a neat little two-level control system
works, and how its operation is interpreted by conscious perceptions.
ยทยทยท
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Best,
Bill P.