Somatosensory illusions elicited by sham electromagnetic field exposure, 2020, Wolters et al

Paywall, https://journals.lww.com/psychosoma...sensory_illusions_elicited_by_sham.98487.aspx
Sci hub, no access.

 

It´s metaphoric usage of "predictions", better would be "processing" . Also "interpretation" is metaphoric, and almost as potentially misleading as "prediction".

Non-metaphoric usages suddenly.

Researchers, you miss completely the logical possibility that in the machinery of the CNS something could be unbalanced, resulting in diseases. Thanks again for this instructive short cut. Let me guess, your empirical result says nothing about persisting diseases. Would have been honest to have something like this mentioned.

 

I have only looked at the abstract but this seems to be the same muddle as coming the UK people talking about predictive models. My understanding is that predictive models do not relate to their proposal at all. The predictive model says that we experience the discrepancy from the prediction or we take input to confirm the prediction. If the prediction was too 'strong' then reality would seem surprisingly 'weak' - i.e. the innocuous nature of stimuli would become salient.

At least that is how I understand it.

 

So it sounds like the SSDT, whatever it is, is not a reliable tool, then. But I guess that's unthinkable. Real scientists will spend months, years, tuning and calibrating their instruments to make sure they are reliably measuring exactly what they intend to measure. But these jerks and their awful questionnaires? They can't even imagine the possibility that its responses may not be reliable.

Weird idea to remove all common sense and rational thinking but it does provide for unlimited employment opportunities, it seems.

 

To me this sort of 'nocebo' research sinks itself. If they actually thought that this video changed subject's beliefs and left them susceptible to deleterious effects, this study would be unethical. So (hopefully) they must not think so. So that means that they think the observed effects are unimportant transient suggestibility which would be meaningless in the context of trying to understand chronic debilitating conditions.

This goes against the 'unhelpful beliefs' - or maybe 'unhelpful expectations' is better in this case - model, as it then simply goes to illustrate how trivially easy it is to elicit subjective changes in unblinded circumstances simply due to suggestibility. (The test is not a questionnaire but it is certainly subjective and highly open to suggestibility bias.) Which of course runs counter to the whole evidence base behind 'psychosomatic' diagnosis and treatment of FND or whatever other terminology.

Maybe I am not quite on to what they think their logic is but at best this seems inconsequential to anybody trying to prove anything positive about how disease is 'psychosomatic'.