We’re looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to “represent one consistent thing”. It’s not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases “overall metabolic rate” or “stress”. It’s not an accident that those hormones’ signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason to expect that they’ll be straightforwardly interpretable, and therefore the sort of thing we can look at and (sometimes) intuitively say “I want to turn that up/down”.
This sounds logical but I don’t think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you’re claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can’t speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.
This sounds logical but I don’t think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you’re claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can’t speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.