Things not understood by science

[Denny Crane!]

Things we can't understand yet, magnificent co-incidences that seem beyond belief or even spiritual phenomenon if you are brave enough to try and prove it can't be explained and actually happened.

I'll go first:

I have seen a study where a number of dogs are left in a room and observed. Up to fifteen minutes before there owners arrive they get restless and start moving around and looking at the door.

I have personally witnessed this with the massive amount of time spent around these animals. In the Dog Salon it is noticeable (though this may be argued that it is always a set pick up time) but my own labrador has exhibited the same trait with people arriving on random time patterns.

Peter

[PacSubCom]

I have seen a study where a number of dogs are left in a room and observed. Up to fifteen minutes before there owners arrive they get restless and start moving around and looking at the door.

Cool. And now please tell us why this happens.

[Darth Wong]

I have seen a study ...

Tell us where we can find this study to examine it. Until then, this is nothing more than an unverifiable personal claim.

I have personally witnessed ...

Wow, another unverifiable personal claim.

[Denny Crane!]

Ok my bad I should of looked for a study, it is something I saw about 8months ago and have personal experience of but can't back it up. What about this:

The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

http://www.newscientistspace.com/art...mg18524911.600

[Darth Wong]

Is there some reason you think the placebo effect requires some kind of supernatural force rather than simple brain/body chemistry? There is nothing "beyond belief" about placebo effect.

[Denny Crane!]

Not beyond belief unexplainable. Look at the thread title.

Peter

[Darth Wong]

Not beyond belief unexplainable. Look at the thread title.

Peter

Ah, my mistake for actually reading your opening post where you said "beyond belief".

[Denny Crane!]

No that was for co-incidences that seem beyond belief. Of which there are a few.

My favorite is this little known fact: In Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear." (More remarkable than this coincidence is that someone should have noted this!)
http://www.davidmyers.org/Brix?pageID=91

Hernán Cortés' arrival in Mexico in 1519 coincided with the year in the Mayan Calendar when it was predicted that the pale-faced man-god Quetzalcoatl would return to reclaim the city of Tenochtitlán. The Aztecs therefore assumed Cortés to be the legendary man-god, which assisted him in capturing the city and thence Mexico

I'm not out to prove the supernatural but there are some generally wierd things that scientists have yet to come up with an explanation for yet.

Peter

[Darth Wong]

I'm not out to prove the supernatural but there are some generally wierd things that scientists have yet to come up with an explanation for yet.

I wouldn't call placebo a "weird" phenomenon. We don't yet understand everything about the human body but you're implying that there's something strange about placebo when there's really nothing strange about it at all; your mind controls your body, so when your mind is not weighed down by fear and stress, your body works better.

[Denny Crane!]

I wouldn't call placebo a "weird" phenomenon. We don't yet understand everything about the human body but you're implying that there's something strange about placebo when there's really nothing strange about it at all; your mind controls your body, so when your mind is not weighed down by fear and stress, your body works better.

You don't find this wierd:

Morphine injected pain stops

Pain stops after morphine is replaced with saline (no morphine at all now)

Put morphine blocker in and pain resumes despite the fact there was no morphine to block.

This has nothing to do with stress or fear, why or how it works is yet to be answered. I'm sure someone will one day but not yet.

Peter

[MaximiIian]

You don't find this wierd:

Morphine injected pain stops

Pain stops after morphine is replaced with saline (no morphine at all now)

Put morphine blocker in and pain resumes despite the fact there was no morphine to block.

This has nothing to do with stress or fear, why or how it works is yet to be answered. I'm sure someone will one day but not yet.

Peter

The brain thinks it's morphine, so saline will work like morphine to that guy. Whoopdy doo. People have done crazier things, like throw catcti at moving vehicles...

[Redfoxx]

The brain thinks it's morphine, so saline will work like morphine to that guy. Whoopdy doo. People have done crazier things, like throw catcti at moving vehicles...

whats so crazy about that... not that i've done it or anything .

didnt they do a study where the concluded that love is caused by signals in your brain just matching up with someone else? Well it was something along those lines. If anyone could help me out with that and find the article id be much obliged

[turtle]

I have one. The universe. That is currently an unexplainable (not unbeleivable) collection of things. Where, when and why did it come about. I don't care who you are, those questions cannot be answered. One may think they can answer one or two of these questions, but what they say to be true may not be the full truth, because it is just from one narrow point of view(from our planet).

[Darth Wong]

Where, when and why did it come about.

"Where" is a meaningless question since you can only define the location of the universe in terms of the universe. "When" is roughly 15 billion years ago. "Why" is also a meaningless question since it assumes there must be some kind of higher reason. And the question assumes that the universe "came about" rather than existing for all time (time itself also starting 15 billion years ago).

I don't care who you are, those questions cannot be answered. One may think they can answer one or two of these questions, but what they say to be true may not be the full truth, because it is just from one narrow point of view(from our planet).

Those questions have been answered, but some people don't like the answer.

[turtle]

"Where" is a meaningless question since you can only define the location of the universe in terms of the universe. "When" is roughly 15 billion years ago. "Why" is also a meaningless question since it assumes there must be some kind of higher reason. And the question assumes that the universe "came about" rather than existing for all time (time itself also starting 15 billion years ago).

Those questions have been answered, but some people don't like the answer.

Good points, but again, they are comming from a narrowed point of view. What was there before the universe, if there was something there. Yes ,science has "proven" it to have started 15 billion years ago, but again that is coming from a narrowed point of view. And if there was something there before the universe "where" is not as meaningless a question as you would assume. And if it began 15 billion years ago then what was there before 15 billion years ago. If everything in existence didn't exist before 15 billion years ago, then how can anything have come into existence. We only know the universe from our view... from one small portion of the universe, we think that we can define its existence with set standards such as time and matter, but in truth we have no idea about anything the universe has to offer. Accept what we have experienced. And "why" is not quite as meaningless a question as well, because if there so happens to be a higher power (maybe or maybe not) what could have been its reasoning behind the creation of something so chaotic. So, from an open minded point of view, those questions are not meaningless, but something you can wonder about and never be able to fully answer.

[Tostig]

My favorite is this little known fact: In Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear." (More remarkable than this coincidence is that someone should have noted this!)

More remarkable still is that if it has said staff instead of spear, you would have noted how it was an obscure version of Bill's name! You can keep increasing the number of things that could have happened which would have been remarkable until it becomes that something worthy of remark was bound to happen. Dawkin's compares it to an ever increasing circle of noticable events, or some such. I don't have the book with me, unfortunately.

[Denny Crane!]

More remarkable still is that if it has said staff instead of spear, you would have noted how it was an obscure version of Bill's name! You can keep increasing the number of things that could have happened which would have been remarkable until it becomes that something worthy of remark was bound to happen. Dawkin's compares it to an ever increasing circle of noticable events, or some such. I don't have the book with me, unfortunately.

Your going to have to clear that up for me. What do you mean if it had said staff instead of spear, it didn't so....
Shakestaff... eh?
Peter

[Kanaric]

I have one. The universe. That is currently an unexplainable (not unbeleivable) collection of things. Where, when and why did it come about. I don't care who you are, those questions cannot be answered. One may think they can answer one or two of these questions, but what they say to be true may not be the full truth, because it is just from one narrow point of view(from our planet).

It will be explainable eventually, the universe is just something that is hard to study with current technology.

[turtle]

It will be explainable eventually, the universe is just something that is hard to study with current technology.

Even as technology progresses we will still be limited to a certain point of view. And if you only look at something from one point of view you will never find out the entire truth of it until you realize all the points of view.

[Lusted]

The human mind is a wonderful complex thing, we do not yet fully understand how it works, the placebo effect is a marvellous thing, showing that our mind can help heal our body, there have been placebo surgeries to test the effect and the people who got the placebo surgery and those who got the real surgery healed at the same rate.