[FRIAM] is this true?

[Frank Wimberly]

In my mind "affect" as a noun means behavior determined by a mood or
feeling complex.  For example, "He has flat affect".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 11:49 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> And, just to be as clear as I can, it's not lost on me that there's a
> common confusion between "affect" and "effect".  However, I tend to think
> linguistic confusion is often an indicator for an underlying conceptual
> ambiguity.  When I say "effect on the brain", I do NOT mean "affect on the
> brain".  I mean something more linear, cause-effect.  So, it seems
> reasonable to hear "the affects of talk therapy on the brain" as a
> behavioral measure.  But it seems more analytic/synthetic to say "the
> effects of talk therapy on the brain".  That is a more constructive
> (constructionist? constructivist?) measure.  The former is more
> consequentialist, the latter is more axiomatic.
>
> And the reason I believe the original author meant the latter is because
> the actual words were "changes the brain in similar ways".  "Way" being
> more of a constructive concept than, say, "destination".
>
> Technical writing has (painfully) verbose ways to handle this ambiguity.
> But since we're discussing snarkiness, we shouldn't need to point out that
> people *always* prefer pithy snark to technical verbosity.  This is why
> bullsh¡t is more efficient than the truth.
>
> On 3/13/19 10:23 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> > The idea that the path of least resistance *names* the end result is
> interesting.  But it's definitely NOT what *I* mean when I hear "similar
> effects on the brain".  What I mean is along the same lines of the 3 links
> I posted:
> >
> >
> https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/health/behavior-like-drugs-talk-therapy-can-change-brain-chemistry.html
> > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0128-4
> > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5957509/
> >
> > Patterns in PET scans (glucose uptake?) and the like are "effects on the
> brain" (and other parts of the body, it should go without saying).  The
> "effect" is what we observe on the sliced out part of the object, not the
> whole organism. Maybe it would help to talk about the liver?  When I talk
> about alcohol's "effect on the liver", I'm not talking about alcoholics
> over-sharing in church basements.  Similarly, if I say, "slamming my hand
> on the table had an effect", the "effect" I'm talking about is that my hand
> start to hurt, not how the other people in the room react.  And I believe
> that's how the author was using the word "effect" when they made their
> unjustified claim that talk therapy has similar effects to drug therapy.
> But I could easily be wrong about that, too.
> >
> >
> > On 3/13/19 10:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> >> Ok.  I should stop being snarky and try to answer my own damned
> question.  I think we parse things into "brain" effects and "therapy"
> effects depending on the lability of behavior with respect to the
> manipulation we are contemplating.  Let's say the symptom is Thompson's
> Snarkiness.  Let's say it could be cured either by a 25 cent pill or ten
> thousand hours of therapy.  We would call this a brain effect.  On the
> other hand, let's say it could be cured by a ten thousand dollar course of
> pills or one hour of therapy. We would call this a therapy effect.  These
> attributions would apply even if it could be demonstated that they all
> acted on precisely the same part of the brain.
> >>
> >>  Am I wrong about that?
> >
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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