Where science and mysticism collide: Ader was investigating how long conditioned responses (in the sense of Pavlovs conditioning of dogs to drool when they heard a bell ring) might last in laboratory rats. To condition the rats, he used a combination[clarification needed] of saccharin-laced water (the conditioned stimulus) and the drug Cytoxan which unconditionally induces nausea and taste aversion and suppression of the immune system. Ader was surprised to discover that after conditioning, just feeding the rats saccharin-laced water was associated with the death of some animals and he proposed that they had been immunosuppressed after receiving the conditioned stimulus. Ader (a psychologist) and Cohen (an immunologist) directly tested this hypothesis by deliberately immunizing conditioned and unconditioned animals, exposing these and other control groups to the conditioned taste stimulus, and then measuring the amount of antibody produced. The highly reproducible results revealed that conditioned rats exposed to the conditioned stimulus were indeed immuno suppressed. In other words, a signal via the nervous system (taste) was affecting immune function. This was one of the first scientific experiments that demonstrated that the nervous system can affect the immune system. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology (Oh, the shit I read on Wikipedia... How did I end up here again?)
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 20:22:11 +0000
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