{"id":4581,"date":"2019-05-18T14:50:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T14:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/18\/diplomats-in-cuba-and-the-mind-brain-relationship\/"},"modified":"2019-05-18T14:50:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T14:50:48","slug":"diplomats-in-cuba-and-the-mind-brain-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/18\/diplomats-in-cuba-and-the-mind-brain-relationship\/","title":{"rendered":"Diplomats in Cuba and the mind-brain relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

…reports from major news organizations, including NBC and The Times, have focused on the \u201cunknown energy source\u201d theory. Most recently, \u201c60 Minutes\u201d aired <\/span>a segment<\/a> <\/span>on March 17 titled \u201cTargeting Americans.\u201d The correspondent Scott Pelley said the diplomats had \u201csuffered serious brain injuries\u201d and noted that the F.B.I. is \u201cinvestigating whether these Americans were attacked by a mysterious weapon that leaves no trace.\u201d The attacks, Pelley intoned in his signature rumble, appear to be \u201ca hostile foreign government\u2019s plan to target Americans serving abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, two and a half years after the first diplomats in Havana said they heard strange sounds and fell ill, and after at least six visits to Cuba by the F.B.I., the study by Penn researchers, <\/span>another study<\/a> <\/span>led by the otolaryngologist at the University of Miami and a continuing investigation by a \u201chealth incidents response task force\u201d organized by the State Department, the claims of an attack by an invisible weapon remain not only unproved but also highly contested by prominent physicists and engineers in the United States and abroad.<\/p>\n

Dozens of leading neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, meanwhile, have offered an alternative narrative: that the diplomats\u2019 symptoms are primarily psychogenic \u2014 or \u201cfunctional\u201d \u2014 in nature. If true, it would mean that the symptoms were caused not by a secret high-tech weapon but by the same confluence of psychological and neurological processes \u2014 entirely subconscious yet remarkably powerful \u2014 underlying hypnosis and the placebo effect. They are disorders, in other words, not of the brain\u2019s hardware but of its software; not of objective injuries to the brain\u2019s structure but of chronic alterations to how the brain functions, typically following exposure to an illness, a physical injury or stress. And the fact that the State Department and doctors the government selected to treat the diplomats have dismissed this explanation out of hand does not surprise these experts. After all, they say, functional neurological disorders are among the most misunderstood, debilitating and denigrated ailments known to medicine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I was rather startled that a neurologist would say the following, which seems rather philosophically confused:<\/p>\n

\u201cI wince when I hear the word \u2018psychogenic,\u2019\u2009\u201d Stone told me during one of many Skype conversations. \u201cIt creates a false impression about what these disorders are. They\u2019re like depression or migraine. They happen in that gray area where the mind and the brain intersect.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2019\/05\/15\/magazine\/diplomat-disorder.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…reports from major news organizations, including NBC and The Times, have focused on the \u201cunknown energy source\u201d theory. Most recently, \u201c60 Minutes\u201d aired a segment on March 17 titled \u201cTargeting Americans.\u201d The correspondent Scott Pelley said the diplomats had \u201csuffered serious brain injuries\u201d and noted that the F.B.I. is \u201cinvestigating whether these Americans were attacked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1bT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}