010 - The Strangest Experiment I Ever Conducted
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- čas přidán 31. 03. 2024
- This is a story about the first experiment I ever conducted, which was also the strangest experiment I ever conducted. It is called "Explanations of the Staring Phenomenon".
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Glad you talked about this. We need brave scientists.
Thanks! There will be other controversial studies I present, but probably none this odd. :-) - Jarred Younger
Honest, ethical scientific research should never be a "career killer" and it is disheartening to know politics holds progress back.
Sudden urge to re-watch "The Men Who Stare At Goats" 😂.
Thanks for the great video. Really interesting & a Great reminder!
Ha yep! I taught a class at Stanford called "Researching Strange Things". Russell Targ was the individual who led the CIA remote viewing experiments decades ago, and he lived a mile from campus. He came by the class to show his collection of underground bases and such that his participants drew. No goats. - Jarred Younger
@@youngerlab 😲 wow! 😄
I was a primary care nurse at a study day about ME around 15 yrs ago and I asked why there's so little interest in researching the cause. The GP giving the talk said ME wasn't "sexy" enough to appeal to those in the medical profession. She meant there was no Kudos amidst peers in acknowledging ME existed. The only really interested consultant in starting any local clinical was refused funding. That would have been around 12-15 yrs ago, and there's still no professional lead in Manchester, UK. Last time I checked, ME was under psychological services.
The point of my comment is how sad it is that studies seen irrelevant by those choosing which studies are relevant to their own agenda.
What is ME?
@@rebeccamccall4772 It is myalgic encephalomyelitis. Many use this term instead of chronic fatigue syndrome because it better labels the actual pathology. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is vague, can be misconstrued, and doesn't convey the severity of the issue. The terms are typically combined into ME/CFS, but ME has more stringent diagnosis criteria than CFS. - Jarred Younger
You are absolutely right. ME has been following the same story as fibromyalgia (FM), but FM is further ahead and has 3 FDA-approved medicines in the U.S. There are still a number of papers asking whether FM is a real disease, same as ME. This is why I and others are working so much on brain imaging. If we can point to a clear pathology and show it to clinicians, the acceptance of ME would increase drastically. The clinical options are still very limited and are no better in my area. - Jarred Younger
I've also wondered about all the studies and PhD's done that could help lives but won't make pharmaceutical companies profits so they get left on shelves to gather dust.
There are so many interesting ones that are even published, but they go nowhere because of financial reasons. If I test a new indication for a pharmaceutical and then publish a paper about it, the treatment idea is now considered public knowledge and it is then hard for a company to get patents and the money for FDA approvals and all the rest. That is definitely a shame with some treatments that show promise. - Jarred Younger
Jarred thousands of some of the most recovered CFS patients have been screaming about mold for decades. Erik johnson was a patient in the 80s tahoe outbreak, and he knew it was from the mold. Mold/bacteria + certain chemicals is creating something extremely foreign and harmful which is turning on our immune response you so elegantly identified. CIRS further explains this, to a degree. I have so much respect and faith in you. You will be the one that brings this full circle if you choose to. Please choose to and save all my friends wasting away in damp dark rooms.
Thanks! From the scientific discussions I have been involved in over the past year or so, I think the current consensus is that ME/CFS can be initiated by a number of different pathogens, including bacterial, viral, or fungal. Outbreaks could be caused by any of these, but regional outbreaks are more likely to be bacterial or fungal. I think the problem with ME/CFS is that the condition outlasts the exposure to the pathogen, so the instigating problem may be long gone by the time I see them. I am focusing on correcting the long-term problem (chronic brain inflammation), but it would be nice if the ME/CFS field could gather some mold experts to help with prevention and mitigation of ME/CFS. - Jarred Younger
@@youngerlab The mold avoidance community's consensus is that those pathogens are simply catalysts. We must asky why we stay sick from routine infections. Exposure to water damaged buildings lays the groundwork for immune dysregulation to enable the chronic effects (I believe it to be protective and not just dysfunctional, reducing ROS production through hypometabolism). The interaction between mold/bacteria and chemicals within the building materials is seemingly creating airborne compounds (nanoparticles or biotoxin-chemical conjugates, for example) that are extremely invasive and damaging and somehow evading the adaptive immune system. Our innate system is therefore our only defense and so gives us the symptoms that make up the syndrome.
Love this story. The science world should have a place where everyone can be fearless. Diversity of thought should be celebrated instead of being considered as career limiting. I wonder if that mentor feels the same way about their advice today.
Jarred, wow! thankyou for this video. And sharing some of your academic history!
As a long time MECFS sufferer, I never miss your news and this one was a surprising insight into your honesty, bravery and critical thinking. Btw, For a while I have wondered about that painting behind you. I think you know what I mean. ✨️🎇✨️ Appreciate your hard work! 🎉✨️✨️
I wondered about the painting as there are two in view which look identical???
@@DennoWiggle The small one is an original by Jane Kiskaddon from Sonoma, CA. She attends a wonderful art fair held each year among the redwoods on Skyline Blvd. The larger one is a print that is similar in style, but done by Elena Schweitzer. - Jarred Younger
Thanks Lee! Next week, I will probably talk about a potential new treatment that can correct microglia abnormalities and help ME/CFS and FM. I put some info about the paintings in a response below. There are just some images that resonate with me -- half consciously and half subconsciously. - Jarred Younger
So interesting! Just found your channel! You’re very clear and informative in your material. I’m a nurse, but I have such an I inquisitive mind, I have to figure out how everything happens, works, whys, how’s…. I could sit and pick your brain for hours :) thank you for speaking up. So many problems with funding and with the politics within science and research! It’s such a shame as we are missing out on learning so much about our health and wellbeing ❤
The human brain is one of the most damning or redeeming features of humanity. You, and so many of our sadly-not-celebrated-enough true scholars who push on to contribute to our betterment keep my faith in humanity thriving. Knowledge and the sharing of it changes lives, and it is so sad how the field of academics both nourishes AND hinders this so much. Thank you for sharing.
I agree with that 100%. In my large field of biomedicine, there are over 100,000 PhD and MD scientists in the U.S. who are actively doing research. The average person would be lucky to hear about even 1 or 2 of them. - Jarred Younger
Never fear, one or more of your counterparts has published this experiment in a parallel universe.
Oh goodness, I’m going to be thinking about your study and all of the unpublished studies out there for a while 🧐
:-) Hello! Yeah, doing this video reminded me I still have a ton of papers to write up and publish. We have tons of interesting data in the daily immune monitoring study that need to be shared. - Jarred Younger
Hi Dr. Younger, thank you for making theses videos and doing this research. I appreciate you communicating results 👏! I watched video #15 Why the microglia have turned against you. You gave an interesting scenario where someone was exposed to food bacteria, Ebstine Bar, and a cold virus within hours. You mentioned that those exposures and sicknesses have the possibility to trigger the microglia and keep them “ready”. I have a child who, within a six week time period, six months ago, had Haemophilus influenza, then strep, then last covid. Since then my child has had severe headaches, dizziness, body aches, blacking out from the peripheral, and constant sleep disturbances. Brain CT and MRI were both clear. Blood work all clear. The diagnosis is migraines… We’ve tried everything it seems to help. Nothing is working. Migraine medicine works about 30% of the time. 😩
Could this be a Microglia issue? If so, how can I find out and how can I help my child?
I had missed this one. It is a beautiful, intelligent review of the high-level - but practical - mechanics of doing research in science.
Study design and subject-matter framing is as much about craft, imagination, and critical thinking as it is about the details of the science behind the target phenomena. These skills allow us access to data that may be, if all goes well, of actual relevance to the problems we hope to address. We lose sight of this far too often in science, and this proves to be especially true in the medical world. Unsurprisingly, this being so, we find far too many poorly designed studies in the literature across the sciences. The next step in the process - synthesizing the data we find and drawing out conclusions or further hypotheses - lays more weight on critical reasoning and the logical imagination. These allow us to find patterns in our research data that may be subtle in presentation yet turn out to be important to understanding how processes function or fail to function. Here again, the training and temperament necessary to do this well goes beyond what we tend to study when we focus on STEM education, ranging well into skills typically honed in humanities departments. Yet these skills are foundational to the best, most transformative work in science.
Your reflections on these subjects touch gently on a lot of important ideas. I am sure you are correct in suggesting there is a great deal of good work sitting unpublished and unused for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the work. Sadly, the flip side of those considerations is that there is much work that has been published that should sit in cabinets, and its circulation has little to do with the quality of the studies. Navigating all this can be difficult for all of us. Thanks for offering people what guidance you can.
What a great idea for a channel. I hope people send in their papers. Thank you.
Could be those in heaven checking in on you too. ☺❤
Interesting
Wow, ty for sharing this. Please continue with this channel, it’s important and more and more people will find you in time and will greatly benefit.
In 2020 in one of your video's you said that you were going through the good day/bad day study and would write a paper but I never saw the results.
Right now there a few research groups doing this type of longitudinal study. Even if you had null results, there might be something to learn from your study that is applicable to others. Perhaps a topic for a video?
Thanks for checking! The good day/bad day study is the 3rd study of our 5-year NIH grant. We are wrapping up the 1st study (MRI) and 2nd study (PET), and now starting the good day/bad day study. I meant to start it years ago, but the COVID-19 stuff threw a big wrench into doing ME/CFS good day/bad day work. When people were having a bad day, they were actually sometimes just getting a viral infection, which is a totally different question. I waited a long time, but the infections and vaccinations seem to be quiet enough now for me to do good day/bad day work. - Jarred Younger
I understand that, good as it was, the experiment could be improved now. I also respect that you're not inclined to do so. Would it do any harm now to publish as is? It might provide the inspiration for someone else to do the further experimentation. It could also encourage others to publish results that have been gathering dust. "It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness."
Thank you so much for your dedication and kind heart! As someone struggling with #LongCovid I'm deeply grateful. Out lives ate on hold, just like your unpublished experiment. :)
13:46 GSR-meter, is that the same principle as the E-meter the scientology chuch uses?
I am not involved in that church but some 40 years ago I tested one of those sessions and the E-meter could spot some interesting facts.
Your video was very interesting!
Yep, I think that device you mentioned is mostly based on galvanic skin response. But I have never had one in my hands to test, so I can't say much about it. GSR technology is quite cheap, but the devices are not purchased often, so the prices are pretty inflated. Cheapest are around $100 - and the most expensive probably go into the thousands. But the $100 version is what I used, and it works fine. It is basically just passing a small current across the skin. - Jarred Younger
Wow this is very interesting. Do you think you will ever publish it? I mean after you do more testing I really think it’s a good idea.
My son w/ ME/CFS has been wondering why when he was filling out an ADHD assessment and was trying to score, getting distracted, etc, why all of a sudden, his brain ‘woke up’, and he could suddenly think and see and interact so much more - woke up instantly and dramatically out of his fog for the next few hours. We can’t figure out why it happened (or duplicate it),but it triggered that memory when you spoke if people sensing the staring more while doing a cognitive activity. I wish we understood what happened!
Most interesting. Going through a severe post viral state, losing significantly higher level convergent thinking, one has experiences of more direct, leaky being and intuition, like ones soul boundaries are more porous. Others I speak with with long term post viral syndrome affirm similar experiences. So I am clear that we are human souls and there is the spiritual level.
Oh, unpublished research. Yeh I have that! Possibly the worlds longest longitudinal N=1 daily date collection of a long term CFS person. Not finished yet, but keeping up the diligence with a view to revealing, analysing, in time. It is a hostile environment out there though. Good things is, CFS destroyed my science career, so no career reputation to loose! Can be a gift.
Thanks for the message. It is a critical point that people (unfortunately) have to be their own scientists right now to help their FM, ME/CFS, and other conditions. - Jarred Younger
Interesting Jarred! Rupert Sheldrake did experiments along these lines. My guess about being more aware of staring doing a task would be the wave frequency of the brain. If one is daydreaming, or bored this might interfere with this kind of awereness, doing a light task might be the perfect state for picking it up.
Thanks! Yes, I think of how much just normal visual perception shrinks when anxious and widens when relaxed. And people who are distracted can miss pretty much every cue in the world that something is wrong around them. If I were doing more experiments, I would definitely test different states of consciousness (maybe others have already done those experiments). - Jarred Younger
Interesting. Etzel Cardena & Dean Radin have also done some careful work & it seems time to recognize psi research as a legitimate field. But I must strongly disagree with the characterization of polygraphs / 'lie detectors' as being valid tools for law enforcement. A 50% false positive rate is not good; it may be even higher for trauma victims. From an interview with Maria Konnikova (concerning Elizabeth Holmes and her low blinking rate): “I will caveat this by saying that it’s impossible to tell when someone’s lying, and anyone who tells you that it is possible is full of shit,” Konnikova prefaced the interview. Here’s what else she said. What can blinking tell us? What is it about blinking that is so significant when it comes to trying to read people? The answer is: absolutely nothing. The bottom line, for people who have studied this for years and years, is that there is no such thing as a Pinocchio’s nose of lying. There is no way you can look at a person and be like, “This person is lying,” or “This person is not lying.” The person who develops that technology is going to be billionaire; this is why lie detector tests don’t work. What we can tell is if a person is experiencing cognitive load, which means they’re uncomfortable or there’s something going on in their mind that is overwhelming their processing capacity. There are signs of cognitive load, and those signs might mean that they’re lying - but they might mean something else, and there’s your problem."
That is a great point I should have made myself. While GSR is an excellent marker of sympathetic activity, sympathetic activity is not an excellent marker of lying. There are 100 things that could cause sympathetic (and, therefore, GSR) activity to rise besides lying. Law enforcement uses GSR (and other polygraph tools) significantly in lie detection paradigms, but there are severe caveats -- such as psychopaths who may not experience lying sympathetic arousal, or people who cause pain to themselves to trick the polygraph. - Jarred Younger
I subscribe to your channel because of my fibromyalgia since I was
That is a very interesting story. Thank you. I have not heard of a person working in that way. Yeah it is funny that I didn't even make the connection with April Fools' day until after I posted. It may be because I recorded it the night before. I'll have to remember in the future not to do any grand research updates on April 1! :-)
This reminds me of a book called The Gift of Fear that was recommended to me by a detective. The book was very interesting.
Thank you for this video!
I remember that one from a long time ago - probably almost 20 years ago. The subconscious is great at picking up subliminal cues, fitting the pieces together, and signaling that something is not right. It may work better for some than others, but I definitely trust my gut instincts now more than I used to. - Jarred Younger
You bring up an interesting point. No one will ever know how many important discoveries remain hidden because the investigator self-censored himself/herself. We like to imagine that our scientists are perfectly objective and unemotional. But science is a human activity undertaken by by human beings who experience the same emotions as the rest of us - including fear. Maybe what it takes to address the obstacles you mentioned in the video is an acceptance by those tasked to peer review these studies of the data and results as is, without using those results to judge the investigator who produced them, i.e. don't shoot the messenger. I know ..... maybe only in an alternate universe. :(
BTW, a perfectly good topic for April 1.
@@bradsalz4084 Yeah that is a great point. I think there has been a slow move from the original "gatekeeper" approach to a newer "repository" approach. I still like the general ideas of the peer-review because some scientists put out really bad and misleading articles. I like the idea of an ongoing, community peer-review system that some fields use in different stages of publishing results. I think it is used mostly in physics (could be wrong on that). - Jarred Younger
Thank you for this channel. And this bit of "comic relief". Great story, great experiment, should be replicated. (But not by you; you've got too much critically important work under way, for which we are grateful.)
In first year college I used to yawn{before looking around} when I got that being watched feeling because the contagious yawning worked pretty well ..just as a little social experiment to myself. During lectures people are also more inclined to yawn 😂 .. ok, so not exactly a great dataset 🤫
There was a Japanese study showing dogs yawn in empathy of their owners.
www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/a_00186.html
The amazing thing about yawning contagion is that it can happen completely subconsciously. I remember a study from quite a while ago suggesting that psychopaths don't catch other people's yawns because they lack empathy. Though I don't recommend using yawning to screen people. 🥱
I too have unpublished findings from my master's thesis. It focussed on whether impulsivity is a predictive factor for performance on DWI screening. We had a wet lab with a placebo arm. I received my MS degree, but developed ME shortly thereafter.
lol, I also always had that.. It's even stronger than that, while I'm asleep I often wake up in a flash staring back at anyone staring at me, right in his/her eyes, instantly and powerfully... It happened many times (in a hospital, nurse was staring at me from afar... Girlfriend looking at me while I'm asleep)... I'd say there's nothing either magical to it, but it's not explainable by science either... It's what Mesmer called vital fluids or magnetism... We don't have to uncover it, keep it mysterious, don't disenchant the world)
Interesting! I read a story about a completely blind woman who would face someone if they stared at her, but I don't think that ability was experimentally tested. - Jarred Younger
if you think that this study should be published, why not do it anonymously?
I like the idea. Scientific journals don't allow anonymous publications because of transparency requirements, but it is possible to just put a paper on the internet somewhere. Of course, I just ruined that option with this video. :-D - Jarred Younger
Do you think anaduralia would impact the results? Is that something you would want to control for?
That is an interesting question. I *think* the effect was tested on individuals who are blind, but I believe that was the only sensory abnormality or absence tested. I don't know what the results were - I haven't followed the literature. - Jarred Younger
Publish it!
❤
I really hope this isn't April fools because this study sounded really interesting! Pretty sure it is though #RobertSheldrake
I totally forgot about April Fools'! This story is all real. That is a good skeptical catch though! I have seen presentations from/about Sheldrake, but I've never spoken to him. I'm sure he doesn't even know I ran this study. - Jarred Younger
I think he would be very interested in your study.
@@youngerlab Wow glad it's real. Perhaps you and Sheldrake can join together for a study someday! Not directly related but have you heard of Dr. Lionel Feuillet's study on a fully functional man found with 90% of his brain volume missing? There's so many interesting things still to be discovered. You would hope with science's history of being super wrong about things (eg geocentric theory) science would be opened minded, does the community not remember Galileo was jailed for his ideas. The fact we have no clue what 95% of the universe even is according to physics should be a reason to entertain ideas like this, we don't even fully understand consciousness/the brain, why can't these ideas be given airtime? There is work going on right now with dogs and cats using AAC buttons to speak and a lot of people will do anything to explain away the inconvenient possibility that *shock* animals think about things. Multiple cats have recommended catnip via their buttons to their owners if they have a headache! Apologies for the meandering rant x). Thank for posting and for your work in general (have had cfs 6 years).
Contact Rupert Sheldrake 🙂
🔬- Jarred Younger