A record of stardust, quietly accumulating.
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After an OpenAI internal model produced hundreds of mathematical results, the statistical physicist Yoshiyuki Kabashima drew a line: AI is far faster on formulated problems, but carving problems out of phenomena and judging what is interesting are different matters. Where AI stands at each stage of asking questions, and how researchers are trying to measure it.
AILithium came out of guinea-pig experiments, chlorpromazine from an aid to anaesthesia, imipramine from a failed schizophrenia drug. Three psychiatric drugs that appeared within ten years of 1949, the placebo-controlled trials that tested them, and the dopamine hypothesis built afterwards. Part 5 of the series A History of Psychiatry.
Science HistoryFever, coma, convulsions, surgery on the brain: in the first half of the twentieth century four treatments that acted hard on the body entered psychiatry, and two won Nobel Prizes. Set beside the comparisons made later, two of the four held up. Malaria fever therapy, insulin coma, electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy. Part 4 of the series A History of Psychiatry.
Science HistoryAnna O., the founding case of psychoanalysis, was not cured in the way the story was told. The strong claim Freud drew from eighteen patients in 1896 was later withdrawn by Freud himself. And when Hans Eysenck compared treated patients with untreated ones in 1952, no difference could be shown. Part 3 of the series A History of Psychiatry.
Science HistoryGeneral paresis, a killer of asylum patients, was traced to its cause in 1913, when Hideyo Noguchi found the syphilis organism in patients' brains. The approach did not carry over to other illnesses, so Kraepelin sorted them by course instead of cause — and from that came the name schizophrenia. Part 2 of the series A History of Psychiatry.
Science HistoryThe chains at Bicêtre were taken off not by Pinel, as the textbooks say, but by the ward governor Pussin, in 1797. From moral treatment — talk, and sometimes fear — and the York Retreat, to American asylums claiming nine in ten cured, and Pliny Earle's 1876 recount. Part 1 of the series A History of Psychiatry.
Science History