"This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do anything because no matter how I struggle, I can’t move a muscle."
—The Last Word On Nothing's Sally Adee writes about the science, the history and her own experience of a condition known variously as "the incubus," "witch's pressure," "old hag syndrome" or, most commonly, night terrors.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
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I've wrassled with the Old Hag myself. I've also had sleep paralysis!
Fun fact, in Louisiana she's called the cauchemar.
http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/main_misc_cauchemar.html
Anyone who speaks French knows 'cauchemar' means nightmare. As a science writer Sally Adee, who has shown interest in trans-cranial electrochemical stimulation, is familiar with the infinitesimal benefits of electrochemistry for matters dealing with night horrors and amplification of focal abilities. As a science writer she most assuredly has some background in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the science itself. She professes a fascination with electrons and applied physics. I would like to apprise her of a scandalous bit of charlatanry that has become a staple of neuroscience. This charlatanry concerns the failure of that same neuroscience to assimilate the lessons from quantum mechanics about the chemical aspects of electricity that evolved in the second and third decades of the 20th century. I'm speaking now of electrochemistry, and its legion of applications to things as varied as the origins of life, the nature of aging, and the energetic constraints behind the speciation that drives evolution. These subjects are touched upon in an essay on mathematical biology published in '09 in the journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling, in an article by me entitled "The terrestrial evolution of metabolism and life - by the numbers." The math deals with the allometric scaling of metabolic energy (ASM), where that energy is electrochemical. The math is extremely reductionist, uniting physics and the life science through the medium of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. The math defines the nature of biological organization as a mathematical construct dealing with process, and dismissive of structural complexity, where life is expressed as aggregations of biomass shaped by fluctuations of openness of electrolytic cells pressured by thermodynamics for stability of electrical properties around a steady-state average that is metabolic rate.
The published paper is not exhaustive in its discussion of the relevance of the ASM. This relevance applies to cancer and stem cell replication, and to the energetic pressures behind the development of nerves and nervous systems, things having direct interest to Ms. Adee, and the rest of humanity. These things are discussed in a second, yet unpublished paper entitled "Battery as Metaphor: bioelectricity and metabolism", and a longer paper still dealing with the history of science as it relates to understanding of electricity and the nervous system. An interesting story emerges to the effect that modern understanding of the electrical nature of the nervous system has its origins in an hypothesis from 1902 that was never tested, associating induced magnetic fields with ion concentration gradient rundown, an hypothesis about bioelectricity that preceded understanding of the quantum role of electrons in chemical bonding by over 20 years, and which is taught still as valid despite not having any equivalent in the physics of electromagnetism. The details are presented in a paper entitled "Electrochemical therapy, biophysics, and scientific incongruity," also available upon request. The overall points of the paper are: 1. physics doe not need to be supplemented by biophysics to explain life; 2. process alone is enough to understand how life differs from the rocks; 3. that process deals with electrochemistry and organic bonding; 4. ASM accounts for all molecular complexity and evolution; 5. electromagnetism explains why biological moleculer chirality occurs, and is not, as the alleged consensus opinion of origins-of-life holds, a matter of the circumstantial amplification of chance; 6. electromagnetism accounts for why the F1 rotor in the ATP synthase complex, and the microbial tail rotor changes direction of rotation with ATP synthesis and hydrolysis; 7. how the longevity-increase of rodents from caloric restriction works, and why it doesn't work on birds; and why this bit of biological opacity about electrochemistry is perpetuated by socioeconomic pressures, not scientific ones, with the result being the continuing ineffectuality of electrical medicine.
If Sally Adee wants a good story, one that starkly exposes the continuing gap between applied physics and the life sciences as due to the traditionalism of life scientists who never revised their mistaken hypotheses about the quantum nature of electricity in the shameless pursuit of Nobel Prizes, she might try looking at the material. The story includes exposure of the oxidative-phosphorylation myth now part of all biological textbooks, where it has catechetical value only, and is left behind as clinically worthless; and the Hodgkin-Huxley Model of the nerve impulse that received the Nobel kiss of approval in 1963, thereby precluding the use of electrochemistry to prevent the advance of disuse atrophy in stroke and concussion patients who then go on to live unnecessary lives of paralysis because of reversible myopathy rather than always, as diagnosed, irreversible neuropathy. There is a reason neuroscience is the sick man of medicine, and it is why electrical medicine has never risen from superstition to widespread clinical application for the treatment of motor disorders.