Fact check movie: What the Bleep Do I Know?

[jawdirk]

@Shagnasty

#1 is sort of true in a very high level way. It is saying that emotions and feelings are centered in the brain. What were the other options to choose from? Neurotransmitters do cause behavioral changes (that is what they do) and illegal drugs do bind to the same sites as regular neurotransmitters. However, these effects are located all over the brain and nervous system. The hypothalamus is part of a system called the limbic system. However, it is the whole system rather than just the hypothalmus that has a large role in emotions.

#2 is all screwed up. High exposure to things like neurotransmitters usually results in fewer and weaker receptors not more of them. Neurons cells don’t divide at all. There aren’t a finite number of receptors. Cells upregulate and downregulate them based on lots of factors.

They weren’t talking about neurotransmitters. They were talking about peptides released into the blood by the hypothalamus, effecting all cells in the body, not the nervous system in particular. What you can say, I suppose, is that they were so vague about what they were talking about, and over-simplifying to such a degree that they weren’t really making any verifiable claims at all.

[deevee]

@Stranger On A Train

Furthermore, the bizarreness of this “photon taking all multiple paths” comes from the incorrect conception of a photon (or any fundamental particle) as being a discrete particle. If you start thinking of photons as wave packets that only exist at discrete energy levels and collapse whenever something interacts with them then the whole thing becomes much more explicable. Then, of course, you have to figure out why they are quantitized and what causes the waveform collapse event, but at least you translate an incomprehensible, intractable problem into a different incomprehensible, slighty less intractable problem.

The movie is bunk of the same sort that hijacks quantum mechanics to explain consciousness, et cetera.

Stranger

I don’t understand what you’re saying but the movie seemed to make more sense so I believe it and not you. Science doesn’t explain everything you know.

I keed I keed.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@deevee

I don’t understand what you’re saying but the movie seemed to make more sense so I believe it and not you. Science doesn’t explain everything you know.

I keed I keed.

Ha ha.

Seriously, the wave/particle duality “paradox” is like wondering how car companies manage to fit 300 horses under the hood of a car. The literal truth is that, despite the unfortunate conception of fundamental particle as being little bits of stuff, the fact is that they are something very different from what we think of as a particle. By analogy, a car can have “300 horsepower” in a compact powerplant by using something other than horses to drive the engine.

There are too many fascinating and bizarre things in real science to bother with subscribing to manufactured pseudoscientific nonsense. Of course, I’d say the same thing about astrology, and yet it’s still a major business. Go figure.

Stranger