Extended network learning error: A new way of conceptualising chronic fatigue syndrome (2007)

[Jenny TipsforME]

I don't agree with it obviously, but from the abstract this paper is actually bona fide BioPsychoSocial. I studied some BioPsychoSocial and PsychoNeuroImmunology at uni in the late 90s and I recognise this as being part of that.

Current ME BPS stuff I don't recognise as being BPS. How things in ME are currently explained is almost more Freudian and has more in common with the idea of hysteria than the more complex BPS model.

BPS model carefully hidden in a lot of jargon.

I think academics should be allowed to use jargon in their specialist journal articles. It is what jargon exists for! I don't think the BPS model is hidden. This is what BPS papers should be like (according to what is valued within BPS anyway ): exploring the complex interaction between these different levels of explanation. It is true to itself, even if we think it is wrong.

 

[Snow Leopard]

I think academics should be allowed to use jargon in their specialist journal articles. It is what jargon exists for! I don't think the BPS model is hidden. This is what BPS papers should be like (according to what is valued within BPS anyway ): exploring the complex interaction between these different levels of explanation. It is true to itself, even if we think it is wrong.

The manuscript doesn't actually provide an empirically derived or testable model and the author tries to hide the fact with waffle. That is the problem.

 

[Woolie]

I think academics should be allowed to use jargon in their specialist journal articles. It is what jargon exists for! I don't think the BPS model is hidden. This is what BPS papers should be like (according to what is valued within BPS anyway ): exploring the complex interaction between these different levels of explanation. It is true to itself, even if we think it is wrong.

I disagree. I appears to offer fancy mechanisms, but on closer inspection, none of those mechanisms are doing any explanatory work. Its very nice to insert connectionist terminology in your work - and sometimes that's appropriate if you understand it and if it can contribute something - but here it does not help support the arguments being made. If you want to claim that a disorder reflects a complex interaction between physical and psychological factors, then you should say that and explain those factors. It offers nothing to refer to connectionism (which is an entirely different framework that also happens to share the core idea of interaction).

The HPA axis stuff I don't know as well, but it would also appear to me that that's not doing much explanatory work either. What's doing all the work here is the proposed learned pairing of the aversive physical state and physical activity. The hippocampal-septal system is just a way of replacing the term "learned stimulus-response associations" with the names of a few brain parts that may (or may not) be involved in that learning. It doesn't change the concept or add to it in any way. And what's emphasised is the importance of breaking that pairing via exercise interventions. White et al say a very similar thing, but simply and unpreteniously.

I worry about this kind of work more than the standard BPS stuff, because the essentially psychological nature of the account is obscured. Patients can be hoodwinked into thinking they're being offered a reasonable explanation that might lead to real treatment, not the usual psyc stuff.

I've seen what's happening with FND, where they couch their psychological explanations in fancy neurospeak, and the patients think they're getting real diagnosis and potential treatment, but it all just boils down to the same old treatments - reeducation and exercise.

 

[Jenny TipsforME]

BTW I've only read the abstract

Patients can be hoodwinked into thinking they're being offered a reasonable explanation that might lead to real treatment, not the usual psyc stuff.

This is a danger. It sounds sophisticated and medical even if it is all nonsense! But it is (a) harder to spot the nonsense if a doctor uses this language (b) even if you do pick up on it, when put on the spot in an appointment how are you going to evidence they're wrong?

If they straightforwardly say it is in the mind at least you can attempt to argue that you don't have psychological symptoms, haven't experienced trauma etc, there's no evidence to support this conclusion.

 

[user9876]

I think academics should be allowed to use jargon in their specialist journal articles.

They use bad jargon for their neural network bit. I don't think they understand it they just refer to networks but that is too vague a term and suggestive of distributed systems. They should refer to artificial neural networks for connectionism - the artificial is important as it reminds people that the models are mathematical constructs and not simulations of neurons. That doesn't mean that connectionist approaches have nothing interesting to say about mental processes and representations but like any model it should be taken with caution.

This feels like a paper where people have been to a talk on neural nets and then extrapolated to something they are interested in but without really understanding what they are dealing with. The whole thing is written like they have a very partial grasp of the subject.

They are just talking crap there is not even enough of a real identifiable concept in the paper to pull apart. The main comment is that they have been completely taken in by the idea that the brain operates some form of non-linear optimisation process that can randomly get stuck in a (bad) local minima when presented with certain data. But they don't explain why this would only happen occasionally. They also confuse learning in connectionist AI from using vectors as compositional mental representations which can be used in problem solving.

 

[Snow Leopard]

BTW I've only read the abstract.

And it shows.

Of course a bigger problem is when medical practitioners only read the abstract of studies, but assume the abstract is all they need to know. (many won't admit they do this, but...)

 

[Jenny TipsforME]

@Snow Leopard i was attempting (badly obviously) to make a slightly different point about how BPS has changed. The language in this abstract is familiar to me from what I was taught BPS was at uni, but I don't recognise current ME stuff as actually being BPS. It is just the psychosocial agenda which wasn't the same thing, though you can't really separate them now.

I was commenting on the style of language.

I imagine most BPS papers are flawed because no one can understand all those areas at a deep level, so unless you have a good multidisciplinary team, papers probably tend towards being superficial.