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'Brain Pacemakers' Being Tested
meshmar writes "Shades of 'The Terminal Man'? Rob Stein of The Washington Post has reported, via MSNBC, that: 'A handful of scientists around the world have begun cautiously experimenting with devices implanted in patients' bodies to deliver precisely targeted electrical stimulation to the brain in hopes of treating otherwise hopeless behavioral, neurological and psychiatric disorders.' A lot of good can come out of this - potentially. But I can see a the potential for misuse too."
Actually for SEVERE depression electric shocks can be a treatment. It is considered a last resort though. For some patients its the only thing that does any good. I recall seeing a 20/20 about it. They shock you in a controlled environment, and the treatments effects last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. The guy they interviewed was unresponsive to meds but got some relief from the shock treatments.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Just now, I realise that nobody is likely to care, but I answered the question already, so I'm posting the answer anyway.
I think you misunderstood the book, or have oversimplified it. He was conditioned to feel ill when thinking about pychotic behavior using drugs. However, one of the movies used to condition him used Beethoven's 9th, which he then became ill when hearing. The govt. removed the conditioning because it was determined that the rights of this pychopath were violated since he could no longer enjoy Beethoven.
Vote for Pedro
A family friend has a daughter which such a disorder and has had something similar to this implanted in her for over a year. It has reduced the frequency and intensity of the seizures since she has had it. It does cause some discomfort at a regular interval to prevent seizures but it is a small price to pay, viewed by the parents and the child, to have less seizure. This is a great technology that needs more development.
Medtronic makes an implantable neurostimulator that treats the symptoms of Parkinsons and Natural Tremor.
n ta ble.html
http://www.medtronic.com/activa/physician/impla
The unit is implanted close to the shoulder, and the leads are fed through the neck, up to the brain.
If symptoms are isolated to one side of the body, only one set of leads are required... otherwise two sets of leads are needed to treat both sides of the body.
This is the only FDA approved implantable device for brain stimulation that I know of.
Ryan,
You MUST read Cory Doctorow's
Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom
It talks about backing up brains and the effect it has on a human society.
http://craphound.com/down/download.php
It's free, too!
Great story!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I'm a candidate for ECT. I'd like to get it done sooner rather than later, as years of all kinds of therapy & drugs have done absolutely nil. It gets tiring going over some similar variation on the drugs/therapy routing, working up a little hope for just a slight improvement, to still go no further.
I wouldn't like to see ECT or probes in the brain used as a first resort for someone who'd been depressed for a couple of weeks, as a little help can go a LONG way in many people.
The shocks used in ECT are quite controlled, with muscle relaxants to minimise any muscular contraction that goes along with the shock. It works for some reason, and that reason isn't exactly known. Personally I don't give a shit why it works or how, or even if it wipes 20 years from my life. Chronic treatment resistant depression has laid waste to the last 20 years of my life, doing nothing isn't going to make the next 20 any better.
The article briefly mentioned the dark history of psychosurgery. A few interesting details were omitted however.
The most popular kind of psychosurgery ever done was the prefontal lobotomy. This technique had something of a heyday in the 1940s.
The gentleman who invented the lobotomy (Freeman) lacked any surgical training. He would perform the procedure on an outpatient basis; he drove around the countryside in his "loboto-mobile" (quite seriously) and performed thousands of the operations himself.
His method of lobotomizing involved jamming an icepick through the eye socket with a hammer, until the icepick was deeply recessed within the brain. Then he would wiggle the icepick around vigorously. (I'm not making this up). The entire procedure took less than 5 minutes. A hospital visit was unnecessary.
Freeman went around the country demonstrating the procedure in mental hospitals etc. The technique fell out of favor in the 1950s, when it was learned that lobotomies had no therapeutic value whatsoever, and often had severe and permanent side-effects.
My mother suffered from Parkinson's. She got sick of all the drugs she had to take to remain functional. Her Doctor refered her to a specialist who implanted a brain pacemaker. Within a month she was off the drugs and feeling much much better.
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Your brain already HAS a natural pacemaker, it's called the alpha rhythm, which cycles at about 8-10 seconds per second. All of the other brainwaves seem run to in sync with this rhythm, being in one way or another multiples of it.
You can use biofeedback (or more specifically neurofeedback) to "train up" this natural pacemaker activity, teaching the brain to relieve it's own Parkinson's symptoms. This would have the advantage of having a lot fewer side effects than opening up the skill and jamming electrified wires in your brain.
A good resource for people interested in non-surgical ways of changing their brain is Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's book "The Mind and the Brain: neuroplasticity and the power of mental force" -- he demonstrates how people can cause profound changes in their brain wiring merely through thought.
Insight meditation, for example has been proven helpful in teaching OCD patients how to gain control over their own obsessive thoughts.
It certainly sounds sexy to have something like electric implants but there are other ways to get the benefits without the side effects of brain surgery. It's kind of like a back patient has the choice of having their vertebrae fused or going to a chiropractor or physical therapist.
I managed to get a copy of the book finally, and discovered wonderful passages such as the following on page 115:
This passage is eerily reminiscent of a passage from Richard Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype" chapter titled "Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes":
Seastead this.
I work as a software engineer for the second biggest medical electronics company in that field (Medtronic being the biggest). I can't speak for them, but nothing goes into an implant that is not supposed to be there for functionality of what it's designed for. With the FDA constantly looking at us, we verify and validate the heck out of these things. My boss actually developed the Epileptic Stimulator pretty much all by himself back in the late 80's and early 90's. It's gone though through testing since then. It takes forever for this stuff to get put into a human. And these things are real simple. If you saw the code in these, there is no way they could do anything "evil". There is just enough code to keep time and shock the nerve ever so often, and some user settings. In order to make these last longer than a few months, the processor is clocked down into the khz and just enough code to get the job done and that's it. In this business it's all about how long the device will last till it has to get explanted. There is no way we would give up longevity for having some government mind control v-chip or something. And I'm not a Dr. but I think the electrical shock doesn't trevel that far, it starts getting "absorbed" as it traveles, so danger to the heart from a nerve stim is pretty much nil. In fact they even see that people who use the Epileptic Stimulator also seem to have a better mood. They think that no only will it help against tremmors, and parkenson's but depression as well. I suppose that if you let your mind run away with you, you could see the potential misuse in just about anything. But with how simple these are and how we want to sell these to help people (and profit) we don't want any bad press, we want people to want these. And there is no way something "bad" could be put in these with no one noticing. And if it got out, it could ruin a company. And I know that we woudln't want that to happen. I feel bad, cause I see how these help people in Europe and the FDA takes such a long time to convence that people suffer while we are jumping though hoops for them. I know people who could be helped now. I guess it's good for lots of testing though. :)
It certainly is a frightening proposition, but I want to counter some of the stupid /. jokes. You seem to understand the procedure well, almost certainly more than I do. I will add a little more, though.
Typically, a person has a few treatments within a few days. The mechanism of its action is mysterious. It works very well for some people, though. The most likely adverse effect is amnesia, especially for events surrounding the therapy. The recovery from depression can be very fast compared to medications. I have heard of people who preferred ECT to drugs upon having a recurrence of depression years later because it had worked very quickly for them the first time, and they did not want to wait so long to get better. People who receive therapy usually come out with much improved mood and seem perfectly normal.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an investigational tool that may replace ECT someday. The idea is the same, to cause a burst of activity within the brain. It might offer the advantage of better targeting. The magnetic pulses are focused somehow to affect structures such as the amygdala and cingulate gyrus more than the rest of the brain and the body. I have heard that early studies have shown promise, but I have not read about it first hand.
Whether or not you decide to pursue ECT, I wish you the best.
The point is, this is approved because it is safe - it doesn't damage the heart, though I'm sure it's possible that some side effects could include those on heart rate. And "sending shocks into nerves" - this is how the body sends signals on nerves! Sending excess current in would be a bad idea, yes, but electricity itself is not evil. Similarly, it seems that limited electrical signals in the brain could have benefits that outweigh the negatives.
ps: I have no idea WHY vagal stimulation works, though.
I've had ECT. Eight times over two weeks in 2002. I have some memory loss surrounding that time, but I was in the middle of a two month psych stay and I know I didn't miss much. My personality wasn't erased. It is a last resort - when I got to that point I hoped it would erase the prior 4 years. But it didn't, and the procedures eliminated the psychotic symptoms I had and helped reduce the depression for several months.
Given the history of ECT it was a very scary thing for me to consent to, but if it wasn't available then I wouldn't be writing this now.
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