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>To your first point, I'm not sure how this helps the sufferers. What they have shown is that there is a different neural signature correlating with a different emotional response. There's no causal link here, meaning that I might still tell someone to just shrug it off. Maybe they can control their neural activity, just like I can control my neural activity related to thinking about elephants by not thinking about elephants. >To your second point, I would offer two responses. First, while being able to measure something is a win in itself, we need to be clear about what they're measuring. They have shown that suffering ailment X increases the probability that they find neural signature X. They do not know the reverse, meaning this isn't going to unlock early diagnostics or anything. It is unclear how discriminating this response is. Second, it's not clear that this is the product/effect of the way their "brain is wired". Perhaps changes in neural activity caused the observations of different neural connectivity. Perhaps some other factor of their experience or biology caused this sensitivity and the visible differences in connectivity, neural activity, etc. We just don't know. That's a very good point, to expand, it appears the implicit conclusion at the intersection of biology and psychology that sufferers 'have a genetic predisposition to be upset' might possibly be taken as sufferers 'have an inherited right to be upset,' which is something I've been seeing more of in the world, and something that I am reading between the lines in the article--and even in the diagnoses itself, Misophonia. We know no one is perfect, and most of us are far from it, but are we headed to a future where we are all walking baskets of 'scientifically-diagnosed' defects that we must tolerate (that we really don't fully understand if we're honest about it--the brain is still, for the most part, an unsolved mystery)? I think it's important to be respectfully tolerant of genetic defects, i.e. mistreating a deaf person would really upset me, because we know a deaf person cannot 'get over it;' but can we really know the same about the plethora of new neurological conditions such as this one? It's possible there might be something about scientific journalism that is selling itself for more than its worth here, but maybe that's not true, it just doesn't appear there is enough to know right now but I see that admission nowhere in these kind of articles. |
There have been attempts, though, to make deaf people "get over it" by trying to teach them lip reading, and speaking word even though they cannot hear themselves what they are saying. They have not been very successful.
"In 1980, a vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983 there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language