The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
When the doctor prescribes a sedative and says that the drug will "help" you to sleep, the doctor is presenting a theory about the nature of the drug and its effect on your body and this theory is unproven.
Doctors do not know how the nervous system works and anytime they explain why something "works" they are presenting a theory, and a theory that usually serves their interests or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that promote such language all of the time.
It is truthful to say that when people take a certain sedative, they are more likely to go to sleep. But to say that the drug "helps sleep" is implying that the drug is safe and beneficial ("it is good for you") and that is not something that can be proven even if a sleep is greatly needed and will occur with the help of the drug.
It is just as legal (but almost unheard of) to say that this sedative will give you a greater "need for sleep" so that sleep is more likely to occur. The need for sleep is caused by mathematical events accumulating in the brain so that inhibition of a percentage of cellular events is interfering with the processing of information and must be readjusted by a period of rest where the sensitivities change back to where there is a greater sensitivity to excitation in the brain in general. The sedative accelerates this need by inhibiting the nervous system. You sleep because the nervous system is inhibited. The sedative inhibits the brain further.
If sedatives "help" a person to sleep, why are they so unhelpful when misused. It can be shown that sleep under the influence of sedatives is not as beneficial as sleep without. Clearly there is a greater need for sleep if one takes too many sedatives which will cause coma or death!
If stress is communicated in such a way in the nervous system that it collects and can be reduced with sleep, and the sedative adds more of this same stress that triggers sleep to occur, then to say that the drug "helps" one is to suggest that adding more stress to the system is helpful. I understand that such language is necessary for the convenience of giving confidence in the doctor and such decisions. I also understand that such language is useful for the marketing of these pharmaceutical products.
A more honest approach in the absense of knowledge would be to say that a sedative "either helps you to sleep or gives you more need for sleep" but that sort of truthful approach will be rare to find.
Needed theoretical change leading to breakthroughs will not occur if we continue to let our physicians tell us convenient distortions of known truths.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
