Hi, I’m Max.
I run Embodiment Labs, which focuses on the science and practice of pain resolution.
Before that, I worked across computer security, technology policy, and computational cognitive science. I have two degrees from MIT and love to marvel at the human body.
The randomized controlled trial was refined in large part in the 1920’s for testing the effects of fertilizer. The RCT is an incredible development, but its assumptions do not hold in cases where interaction effects are significant (e.g. most social contexts). We will need new ‘epistemic technologies’ beyond the RCT to resolve complex human diseases. What do these look like?
Eugene Gendlin suggests focusing on underlying subprocesses rather than modalities, predicting success/failure differences, focusing on unambiguous resolution, among several other improvements.
A detailed model of every neuron and glial cell would be nearly as difficult to understand as the brain itself. We need useful abstractions to reason better, like the FitzHugh–Nagumo model of action potentials, Braitenberg’s vehicles, or Freeman’s dynamical model of the olfactory system. Toy models are crucial for progress in a field. What are good toy models of the human nervous system?
Similarly, studying the dynamics of persistent illness in simpler animals can allow us to ask questions we cannot in humans. What types of chronic illness exist in a planaria? Can drosophila ‘learn pain’?
Rather than drawing on average effect sizes across populations, it is often highly informative to look at unusual examples, e.g.:
Pain asymbolia: people who do not find ‘pain’ unpleasant
Phantom limb pain: pain reported in limbs that have been amputated
Sensory splitting: advanced meditators who report being able to ‘sensory split’ pain into subjective components
Sarno recoveries: people who recover from chronic pain through reading John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain