Slashdot Mirror
Ever-Happy Mouse Sheds Light on Depression
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have bred a strain of mouse that's permanently cheerful, in hopes of better understanding and treating depression in people. By breeding mice lacking the TREK-1 gene, which is involved in serotonin transmission, researchers were able create a depression-resistant strain. They say it's the first time depression has been eliminated through genetic alteration of an organism."
Reminds me of the movie Brain Candy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116768/
humans can have very similar experience: just quit work and start smoking pot, eating magic mushrooms and dancing on the streets in the nude.
Is it a good idea to get rid of stress-related (causing) mechansims? A stress free life maybe a very exciting prospect for an individual for about a month or a year, but is this going to be good from point of view of the bigger picture? If humans did not stress about things at all, would they bother doing anything, like bothering to find food, protecting the offspring, basically surviving as a species?
You can't handle the truth.
To give you at least some help: Part of the reason for the apathy of the anti-depressant crowd is that the most common anti-depressants are serotonin boosters (SSRIs), and serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Now, certain other antidepressants (e.g, MAOIs) work by boosting other neurotransmitters, and can handle depression without apparently leading to the kind of apathy/nonchalance you're talking about.
With the usual Slashdot disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Spoken like someone who's never had a problem with depression.
Personally, I think that's a small sacrifice to keep from wanting to KILL YOURSELF!
When someone's clinically depressed, the whole world is in shades of grey to them. Things that would normally bring joy are met at best with indifference and anger at worst. Interest in eating and having sex wanes. Social activities and obligations are ignored, along with housework. They feel listless and sleep more.
Then there's the extreme sadness and suicidal tendencies.
Personally, I wouldn't mind not caring for the 4 months out of the year that I'm depressed.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It may actually work the other way around.
See, the brain (and not only in humans) is nicely tuned to keep needing the next thing to be happy about. Whenever you have some achievement (even small ones, like getting food when you're hungry) the brain gives itself a "yay, I'm happy" chemical signal, but that's followed immediately by releasing the "antidote" to that signal, to get back to the baseline. So you'll need the next achievement for your next moment of joy.
It's what keeps humans and all animals active. It's why your cat plays and thus trains its reflexes daily, instead of vegetating in a corner, still happy that it played last month.
In human society it's also a very important factor in why, for example, consumerism is alive and kicking, and keeping the capitalist economy going well past the point where just the needs are covered. People keep having these illusions like "man, I would be soo happy if I had that one more gadget/shirt/etc", and they do get happy about it... for a very brief time. Then they need their next achievement. And in turn, getting caught in the consumerism race also keeps them in the rat race at work, and taking shit they otherwise wouldn't put up with.
You can see in "video game addiction" cases what happens when people can stay continuously happy. It's not really physiological addiction, but good games give people small rewards often, which triggers the "yay, I'm happy" signal in the brain. There's always one more quest you finished, one more recipe you learned, one more item that you sold at the auction house (or IRL on eBay), one more boss you defeated, one more equipment piece you found, etc. So some people, which are kept happy enough by that, end up not doing anything else. You can see cases going all the way to playing for a month and then dropping dead.
So my take is that if someone actually produced genetically-engineered humans which are permanently happy, those humans would be even worse. They wouldn't even need video games to stay happy, so they probably wouldn't bother even with that. If you can be perfectly happy sitting on the couch watching the wall, you don't need to do anything else. You don't even need to buy a TV. Nor take shit from a PHB and do overtime to afford a huge plasma TV and a fashionable house in the suburbs. You get the idea.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.