I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.
> there may be quantum effects involved
Quantum Mechanics is why atoms and molecules exist and form bonds. QM is the physics of chemistry. Without QM, chemistry does not happen. The universe would just be a big churning mess of particles and you would never get little lego pieces that snap together according to repeatable rules that, when repeated, form macroscopic substances of innumerable description up to and including life itself.
So QM is no doubt involved, but on this scale it is either a trivial fact or an indication that someone tried to lean on a classical approximation, it broke, and they had to revise it (which arguably says more about the approximation than it says about the underlying behavior).
Apologies for the nitpick. It's a pet peeve of mine that discussions of QM tend to focus so hard on the strange behavior that they forget to mention where QM fits into the bigger picture and leave people with the impression that it only matters under special circumstances when in fact it matters so much that you can hardly have "matter" without it.
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Re: anesthetic, a large fraction of simple halocarbon compounds have intense neural effects, so anyone doing halocarbon chemistry would quickly be put on the "scent" even if they weren't tasting everything in the Sigma Aldrich catalog.
I would say everyone understands that "quantum effects" refers to situations in which classical approximations break down.
Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. "Disk corruption" doesn't necessarily mean anything is physically wrong with the disk, only that its contents have become inconsistent with the filesystem abstraction it normally supports, etc.
The numerical version of this sin is
which promotes a similar confusion of concepts, even if the true meaning is understood by experts.That said, I think the QM/not QM lingo from the molecular dynamics community is considerably worse because it stokes a common misunderstanding: that the universe runs on classical mechanics except in lasers, particle accelerators, and other "exotic circumstances." By contrast, nobody thinks that the universe runs on float32s except in lasers and spaceships where it runs on float64s. Where confusion does not exist, we do not need to fight it, but where it does, we should probably try.
>Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down.
Guys, try this in your desktop or mobile app calculator:
do square root of 2.
then subtract from it the result that you see on screen.
for me:
√2−1.41421356237
i get:
3.095048801E−12
i.e. not 0.
I discovered this on a physical Casio electronic calculator long back, and also verified it just now on a stock Android mobile calculator app.
what is your result, and interpretation of it?
It's just the difference between internal and displayed precision.
sqrt(2) ≈ 1.414213562373095048801
So if you type in sqrt(2) - 1.41421356237, you're just getting the next 10 digits after that.
= 3.095048801e12yes, exactly :)
that's what i figured out when i first came across this, in school.
> what is your result, and interpretation of it?
that the square root of 2 is not 1.41421356237.
true, because the √2 is an irrational number.
but I was looking for an answer more along the lines that anamexis gave.
I understand your frustration, sorry for the poor wording.
"Electron spin changes during general anesthesia in Drosophila" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25114249/
I learned about this from Nick Lane's book "Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death"
As a non-physicist and non-chemist who keeps running into quantum mechanics only through headlines, extra thanks for pointing this out. It's quite obvious in retrospect to acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the physics of chemistry, and I don't know why I didn't see that before. It certainly helps to view a lot of things in a new light.
(In support of your point about QM:)
To contrast with an example of where quantum mechanics is relevant at the level of biology--this is one I'm familiar with:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-fragility-may-he...
Unfortunately I'm not finding anything related to anesthesia except for hand-wavy pieces about "quantum consciousness" (anyone, please do correct me with a link or two if I'm wrong). I blame Sir Roger Penrose, if only because him talking speculatively about it (even in a sophisticated, informed way) seems to give so many others leeway to speak far more casually about the same topic, with far less coherence. This is why we can't have our cake and eat it too I guess
More discussion in "Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology." I can't recommend the book unreservedly, but it's worth checking out reviews.
Will take a look--thanks. Also, re: anesthesia, appreciate that you linked to the "Electron spin changes..." paper in the other comment, will check it out!
Do you know for sure they meant only those quantum effects which operate near or at the classical limit?
There's a fascinating Radiolab episode about anesthesia that is worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia
Only if you can stand the format. Even when (maybe especially when) they cover a topic that I'm interested in, I find it infuriating to listen to.
It's filled with endless repetition and rephrasing of the same thing over and over again. For example here's a snippet from a transcript:
The whole thing is like that, where they take something that could have been a single sentence and stretch it out over 3, 5, even 10 minutes of repetition and unnecessary detail and throughout all of it they randomly insert stock audio and sound effects of things that don't matter to the content at all. Like someone will say they went into work and the audio abruptly cuts to 15-30 seconds of nothing but the ambient sounds of an office environment.The transcript might be easier for some to tolerate. The anesthesia episode doesn't seem to be too bad in terms of the number of sentence fragments, repetitions, and pointless interjections as some episodes. Even as transcripts some are extremely frustrating to extract information from.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia/transcript
My understanding is that regular human speech is generally this way.
I'd expect a lot of interjections (yeahs, okays, ums, rights, etc) in normal conversation, but people don't keep repeating back everything that's said for the "benefit" of an audience. Not in my experience anyway, although I suppose there are probably some people who do... maybe as a vocal tic or something. You'd get none of the pauses for sound effects or music in normal speech either. The podcast comes off as being very "produced" as opposed to having a natural conversational tone, and some people love that aspect, but the low information density is what gets to me the most.
I mean, here's an except from another transcript and even ignoring that they're using a ton of sound clips to explain something simple, the amount of repetition would be insane in a normal conversation:
This is traditional, leisurely paced “slow media”. Nothing wrong with it. You can get the same content in short form by reading an encyclopedia if that’s preferrable.
I belive methoxetamine could be considered an anesthetic and it was invented expressly for the purpose of mimicing the effects of ketamine at a lower dosage threshold to avoid the ketamine associated bladder damage.
I believe the chemist was an amputee as a result of a terrorist attack and spent his life wirking to develop an analgesic as effective as ketamine for nerve pain without the side affects.
mxe was a very beloved "researcg chemical" (read:designer drug) prior to like 2016 when supply dried up.
How do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is anesthetized?
I don't think they measure if plants/bacterium are anesthetized, but in exposing them to things that cause anesthesia in humans, other potentially unrelated effects are noticed.
Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different biologies for completely different things. They're essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a lot of variance in effect even among different instances of human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and profound.
It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead" (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male lizards)
or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a completely different function for it in the brain and regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother"
or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant, maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and handle all the new effects rather than overloading the existing semaphore".
Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy. Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.
I'm really just reposting one of the first few DDG links after inputting your question, but this article covers a few different plants:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-work...