Placebos work because people who take it believe that they're actually medicine, right? I mean, that's the basic tenet of every modern medical studies, which use placebos as controls.
But can placebos work without any deception? Here's an intriguing study from Harvard Medical School that discovered the surprising healing power of sugar pills:
"Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," says Kaptchuk. "We told the patients that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills."
For a three-week period, the patients were monitored. By the end of the trial, nearly twice as many patients treated with the placebo reported adequate symptom relief as compared to the control group (59 percent vs. 35 percent). Also, on other outcome measures, patients taking the placebo doubled their rates of improvement to a degree roughly equivalent to the effects of the most powerful IBS medications.
"I didn't think it would work," says senior author Anthony Lembo, HMS associate professor of medicine at BIDMC and an expert on IBS. "I felt awkward asking patients to literally take a placebo. But to my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them."
Comments (2)
Also: What Johnald said. Animals are pretty alien. How about deciphering babies?
Take for instance Scottish, Irish, and English - these three languages exist in the United Kingdom only miles of each other, yet they are completely distinct from each other.
The language tree is a fascinating subject. You can find out more about it at Daniel Short's website.
What about just English in England? Liverpudlian to West Country, the words, the pronunciation, slang and meaning change etc
I agree with Johnald. When we can translate whales chat and they can tell us about the Martians then I will believe. (2 intertubes for who guesses the book).
Most Americans don't even understand what their next-door neighbors are saying, who needs aliens?
E.T. did a pretty good job at speaking English. Maybe we can enlist him as a translator?
IF the structure remains the same but
THEY have a different way of looking at the world and
SPEAK in ways we've never encountered or make
STUPID reference we know nothing about (Darmak and Jilad)...
FOIL
HATS
TOM
CRUISE
The problem is that linguists since the 1950s have acknowledged that language-production is under-determined by environmental input, and have concluded that much of language consists of an innate 'universal grammar' that particular languages then fill in with their own syntax, lexicon, morphology, semantics, etc. This is all relatively uncontroversial.
Any species with a different evolutionary history will not share this 'universal grammar' unless there are very specific constraints on what language can possibly be. The '60 human languages' sampled here are all human languages, that is, languages sharing in the evolutionary history of the species.
Just as there are many ways to evolve sight (compound? lens? pinhole?) the innate linguistic structures of alien species may or may not have anything to do with ours. It's a neat idea, but we have no idea of how likely it is that linguistic evolution is constrained tightly enough that structures similar enough would have independently evolved.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar
Hehe...Don't run. We are your friends.