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A Brain Pacemaker for Depression
Ranger writes "Scientists claim to have developed a
pacemaker 'cure' for depression. It may also have applications to controlling tremor's in Parkison' sufferers. This sounds vaguely like Ren & Stimpy's Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy helmet from
Stimpy's Invention."
(A Tasp is a device that lets one remotely tickle someone else's brain pleasure center. It's illegal, of course, since very often, the victim, after a moment of pure joy, is bound to get depressed and eventually becomes a wirehead, by having a wire to the pleasure center surgically implanted, then getting high on house current [presumably transformed down to a managable voltage/current] and avoiding normal sundry chores like working, washing-up and eventually eating).
A dupe from almost a year ago.
Hey - the basic catechism of life in America is that you have the right to pursue happiness. This implies that you cannot ever achieve it because then you would lose the ability to pursue it.
So this helmet has to go.
This reminds me a little bit of an article I read a little while back on a spinal cord stimulation device which has been dubbed the "Orgasmatron."
Article link
Snippet:
While Dr. Stuart Meloy was working on a new device to treat chronic pain, he was surprised to discover it could also bring pleasure to his female patients.
While Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.
"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "
Meloy soon realized he may have discovered a device that could help thousands of women who have trouble achieving orgasm.
"The device is the use of a pre-existing device called a spinal cord stimulator," he said. "Instead of treating chronic pain with the stimulator, we're treating orgasmic dysfunction," Meloy said.
In a surgical procedure done in his office, Meloy implants the electrodes from this device into the back of the patient, at the bottom part of the spinal cord. When the electrodes are stimulated with a remote control, the brain interprets the signal as an orgasm, he said. The device is about the size of a pacemaker and can be turned on and off with a handheld remote control.
I've tried a fair number of anti-depression remedies myself. The best of them, endorphin highs from exercise and anti-depressant medications made me feel a bit empty and disconnected. I was still depressed, but it didn't really bother me that I was.
Actually, a neat theory I heard about depression is that it comes into existence because the world doesn't suck. The basic idea is this. In nature a human be under constant life and death adversity. You would always be hungry and always searching for food. Depression in such in instance would offer up a defense against a lack of food. If you ran out of food, you would become depressed, expend less energy, and spend your time worrying how to obtain more food. Hopefully, you would find more food and resume a normal life.
Fast forward to today. You are a 16 year old girl in America. You are never going to starve. Survival will never be an issue for you. You have a mechanism that is designed to deal with life and death situations, but there are none. Instead, it goes crazy. It picks something that has absolutely nothing to do with survival, like boys, school, grades, popularity, or whatever. Worse still, none of these problems are easily satisfied. You can find plentiful food and be totally full, but how do satisfy more abstract worries like relationships and school? These are problems that can never be totally solved.
That is one BS theory I heard anyways. I have also heard something similar about allergies. People's immune systems are used to looking for environmental containments in nature, but when you live in a sterile environment it goes nuts and over reacts.
We've been making the world "less shitty" for centuries with every advance; improved medicine, housing, communications, and education. If people of 100 years ago had peered into the future and seen our world, they'd be amazed at the lengths we've traveled.
And yet we're more miserable than ever.
It's as if all of the things we go to buy at Circuit City to fill our empty holes are only making them deeper.
There is a possibility, however: perhaps it's that, with each advance, our imagination travels more and we're dissapointed with what we have. The people of the 1950's thought we'd all be flying across the world in Mach 3 airliners, and the people in the sixties and seventies thought we'd have colonized other planets by now.
So...are we spoiled? Is that it? Or is it that we're looking to the wrong things for happiness? I could make the argument that in these days of Hollywood, everyone thinks they should be rich and famous, and not everyone can be a star.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Being depressive myself (bipolar II, actually) I'm just curious: what diet and exercises can help with depression? Is it really working? Thanks in advance...
I used to get depressed.... then I took a tough step to ruthlessly go over every aspect of my life & thought that touched me emotionally - and have had to get *really* honest with myself as well. The result: I'm much more functional today than I ever was because I came to understand the nature of where my depression came from and DEAL WITH IT HEAD ON. So many depressives I've met all have characteristic personality traits that indicate to me that they are in avoidance of being aware of certain aspects of themselves. You don't need drugs, people! You need to allow youselves to open up emotionally and challenge yourself. It's a hard road - you have to do it every day - at any instant you feel that internal twang try to pull you aside.
Good luck
.
-shpoffo
I don't even know how that would work. I don't shop at Amazon, I just googled for the book and grabbed a link.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.