Would "multicast/broadcast message passing" be a good analogy for pharmacodynamics?

[Aetherius Rimor]

Would "multicast/broadcast message passing" be a good analogy for pharmacodynamics?

As a software developer, I've used this analogy to explain my interest in pharmacology in a socially acceptable manner rather than to say recreational use caused my interest. It is partially true, since it is through my research and desire to understand how drugs work to ensure my own safety in my recreational use that I came to this belief, which spurred my interest far greater than recreational use alone could have.

The analogy to me makes perfect sense. In message passing systems, an actor sends a message which is received by other actors and responded to accordingly. The messages would be the ligands, the sending actors would be a person administering a drug, or the organs releasing the neurotransmitters, and the receiving actors would be the cells.

Synchronization locking would be analogous (though not perfectly) to competitive/non-competitive binding.

Agonism/Antagonism/Inverse agonism and related variables would be properties or parameters of the message being sent.

One thing I'm unsure of, is whether multicast or broadcast would be more appropriate. I've settled on multicast due to things like the blood-brain barrier in limiting the scope of possible receivers. Though anycast is also somewhat appropriate since each ligand/message can only interact with one receiver at a time, just in the body, there are a massive amounts of anycast messages released at once which from an outside perspective appears as a broadcast/multicast.

For those not familiar with message passing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

Anyways, with my current understanding of pharmacology, I'm not mistaken. However I don't want to mislead people, so I'm asking here if anyone with more experience can confirm my understanding of the process as correct?

 

[sekio]

Go read Society of Mind or any of Marvin Minsky's works, you'd like them.

The idea of the 'mind' being personified as a bunch of individual 'actors' is not an old idea. It's actually a rather nice model for the brain in some situations.

Realistically cellular synapses should be modeled as a multicast type deal. Very few cells cause a truly global release of neuotransmitters when triggered; it's a localised event as far as I can tell (in most cases)

The bridge between psychopharmacology and the mechanics of mind is not always so easy to navigate, though, because as much as we'd like to believe so, the mind isn't a mechanical device.

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

I don't even remember writing this .

I'm actually now writing an article/book/whatever it is when I'm done (maybe monograph?) about this subject.

I'm mapping our mind and body's biomechanics to well established computer science models and design patterns in an attempt to aid understanding.

When I first wrote this, I didn't understand enough about pharmacology/neuroscience to dispute anything you said but at this point I would like to ask you to clarify what you mean by the mind isn't a mechanical device.

I'm starting with a very mechanical understanding and mapping our body's mechanics onto the OSI Model. Other than some minor incongruities it's mapped over extremely well. The hiccups primarily existed in the transport and session layers.

I ended up mapping Transport to:
- Reuptake
- Receptor regulation
- G-protein channel decoupling and other types of receptor desensitization
- Routes of Admission
- Excretion
- Metabolism

All are similar to or are philosophically flow control protocols similar to transport layer protocols in computer science.

Session layer also is rather difficult at a mechanical layer, and the only analog I could think of was the "session" created by a ligand binding to a receptor. It's a session between the ligand and the receptor however, instead of a session between the message sender and recipient as typically found in computer science.

Presentation layer covers the type of ligands and processes for how they're interpreted by receptors leading to an effect that transitions into the application layer.

Application layer becomes the abstract non-physical "functionality" that results from cells interpreting received messages.

Example:
- Session is created between a ligand and cell in the session layer
- That session triggers an interpretation of the message in the presentation layer
- That interpretation results in the constriction of a blood vessel by cells responding to the ligand, forming the application layer result.


As you say, the mind itself a mechanical device, however it is software that runs on a mechanical device and can be modeled in a similar manner.

Once you understand the basics of the mechanical protocols and functionality that serve as the I/O for the mind's software, you can abstract that away into a black box for the most part when modeling the mind itself.

The primary problem you'll run into, is that we don't have anything in computer science now that even comes close to the sheer complexity in hardware capabilities or amount of input/output data streams that our mind has.

My understanding so far is the brain and it's software (the mind) are essentially a massively parallel abstract symbol processing unit converting incoming data streams into patterns and outputting response patterns to it's outgoing data streams. Firmware exists (through genetic programming of brain structure) that gives basic necessary functionality for survival, but the majority of everything else is left to be self-programming through firmware based learning algorithms allowing for a high potential for adaptation.

I haven't read the books you recommended yet... but I'm betting I probably should now.

 

[sekio]

I haven't read the books you recommended yet... but I'm betting I probably should now.

Minsky is a computer scientist/AI researcher, so ... yeah

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

It has been acquired. Once I've finished reading "Programming the Human Bio-computer" by John C. Lily, "Society of Mind" will be next on the list of recreational reading.

I think reading these books does more for my sanity than my curiosity, as a lot of the cognitive science books I've read discuss things I was almost certain no one else thought about but me. When I started this thread, I had only recently learned of cognitive science as a discipline and had no clue about any of the people involved. Since then I've discovered Hofstadter, Lily, and a few other authors I can't recall off the top of my head that gave me peace of mind in knowing I'm not alone with a lot of these thoughts.

Thanks for the reference!