Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
Meditation had been shown to be less than effective (Tuvok and Vorik both tried and failed to use meditation to get through their Pon Farrs).
It seems that, in universe, something about Vulcan physiology also prevents medication from being particularly effective as well (also failed for both Tuvok and Vorik).
Coming from someone with an academic background in biology, the treknobabble in biology and medicine is pretty terrible.
There’s a concept called the neural correlates of consciousness that basically states that every thought, memory, emotion, or other mental process has a direct correlation with the wiring and states of the cells in your brain. We can debate on whether or not to include other body states or gut bacteria, but the essence of the argument is that there is no “mind” as a phenomenon apart from the brain. This being a more serious sub, I’d argue that something like transporter technology implicitly assumes this, since you arrive with the same thoughts, memories, and emotional states as you had when you were decompiled.
So you’d be able to say that the Vulcan amygdala becomes hypertrophic during pon farr due to signaling by some other physical brain structure and activates the limbic system which itself becomes hypersensitive to stimulation and so on. So you can govern your pointy-eared patient some space Xanax, which increases the effectiveness of Vulcan GABA, which calms them down. Or using your advanced knowledge of physiology that no doubt extends down to the level of quantum effects, find another avenue of intervention.
Basically, I’m acknowledging your point - it’s a necessary complication that makes for interesting plot lines - but it really doesn’t line up with a justifiable in-universe answer.
Shoulda paired it with a wank. There's gotta be a holodeck treatment for this that can fool the body