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Happiness Is A Warm Electrode
sufijazz writes "A story by Gregory Mone on the Popular Science website talks about trials to use deep brain stimulation to cure chronic depression. It's a deeper exploration of the 'brain pacemaker' discussed here on the site before, and a practical application of research discussed even earlier. Why the pulses affect mood is still unclear, but scientists believe that they may facilitate chemical communication between brain cells, possibly by forcing ions through nerve fibers called axons. In turn, this may trigger the release of mood-regulating chemicals like serotonin and norepinephrine. Similar trials are being conducted in other places. Exact numbers are hard to ascertain, but it's estimated that fewer than 50 patients in North America are walking around with wires in their brain."
Here without the ads and annoying background.
Why the pulses affect mood is still unclear, but scientists believe that they may facilitate chemical communication between brain cells, possibly by forcing ions through nerve fibers called axons.
Isn't that the same way World of Warcraft works?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Happiness Is A Warm Electrode
Hmm, I always thought that happiness was a warm gun.
It's actually both, which means, logically, that happiness is a taser.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
the rise of the wirehead!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead
When I was on anti-depressants I acted in a way that, in retrospect, wasn't natural for me. I did some very weird things and occasionally embarrased myself, which is something that I don't like to do. What the fuck was I thinking back then? And was it really caused by anti-depressants, or have I simply changed? I don't know, but I'm now very wary of any artificial means of making yourself happy or less depressed. Besides, this technology doesn't address the root cause of why someone is depressed. I suppose it's useful to someone who's really badly depressed, but personally I wouldn't want to try it.
If the root cause is that your Axons are not releasing enough neurotransmitters, then this technique is addressing the root cause.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Now I know why I've been happier since I was abducted. Oh wait, this is about a brain probe...
say "we don't know why this works... but we think it makes you happy..."
Yet, somehow, a good joint and a stiff drink are evil.
This is my sig.
Exercise on par with drugs for aiding depression:: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070919/hl_nm/exercise_depression_dc;_ylt=AqwvsOoXYw0l3eNh11Gw1O0DW7oF
So get unglued from your computers occasionally and get some fresh air. =)
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
"You are now a class three citizen, your happiness level will be raised accordingly."
Deleted
While I am not depressed, I am very close to some who are, and they universally describe the feeling of getting on the proper drug regimen as "having a curtain lifted from my eyes", or "feeling a great weight off of my shoulders". Not high, not weird, just no longer crushingly depressed most of the time. On a properly tuned, working, medication regimen, anti-depressants enable the patient to again experience a "normal" range of emotion. Working, properly tuned, anti-depressants don't make you feel happy; instead they enable you to be happy under circumstances that most folks would be happy in, and you feel normal on normal days. You still feel like crap on crappy days.
That said, everyone does react differently, and some can have the side-effect of sending you into a manic state (which can include the symptoms you described). Usually a dosage or timing adjustment can fix this.
Drug tuning is still more art than science. A new drug to treat depression is considered a great success if 50% of the users experience a 50% improvement. Many successful regimens involve combinations of drugs, and it can take a year or more to find the right combination. (It doesn't help that many common drugs take over a month to have any effect.)
SirWired
Take a look at the cochlear implant wearers in the US. The auditory nerve is considered part of the brain in the paper I read a few years ago. There are 10,000 children in the US alone wearing them, according to Wikipedia. Then there are the implants for epilepsy, Parkinson's, and attempts to provide them for balance disorders.
It's interesting work: they're apparently much more effective for transmitting a signal than picking up signals, so the idea of using them for artificial limbs or thought-control of aircraft has never really worked well.
It won't be long until we know if Larry Niven was right about brain stimulation. If the current makes you feel better, will you be less likely to switch it off?
Niven didn't pull that idea out of nowhere - He based in on experiments on rats and chimps contemporary with his writing that found they would rather zap their brains than eat, sleep, have sex, or take favored drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
So yes, it would almost certainly have the exact same effect on people. Imagine the best orgasm you've ever had, while eating your favorite meal, while high on your favorite intoxicant, then quadruple that. The most restrained willful human alive would turn into a drooling zap-junkie, no question at all.
Well, I've always liked the Russian answer to happiness:
"You come home from work, are sitting in your broken-down chair reading Pravda, when three men in badly-fitting suits knock on your door.
'Mr Voyslatovich?'
'No, he lives 3 floors up.'"
I am officially gone from
depression != unhappy
Unhappy is what normal people feel when something exists to make them unhappy.
Depression is what depressed people feel all, or most of, the time, for no apparent reason.
Anti depressants allow a depressed person to feel normal - i.e. they can feel unhappy again, as well as happy and everything in between. It reconnects their emotional response to everything, rather than being permanently, well, literally depressed.
...it's estimated that fewer than 50 patients in North America are walking around with wires in their brain."Yeah, but I bet there's a much bigger number who think that they are!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I feel more "stable" when I take my meds than I do otherwise, and if you were to ask my husband, he would tell you that it's like night and day. No, I don't walk around all smiles, but I'm not exactly crying all the time either. Depression sucks as bad as any other major disease. If I could get some kind of implant put in that could fix the depression in a permanent manner, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat, if only to be able to give up the pills (I have problems remembering to take them).
What makes matters the worst for a depression sufferer is if their triggers happen to be something that themselves are either long-term or essentially unsolveable problems which the sufferer is stuck with. In those cases, pills simply aren't enough, and so you're back to feeling like hell all the time. That's where I stand (two such conditions), and I hate it worse than the most rabid Linux user hates Microsoft.
I presume that women are not allowed to have such wires in Alabama.
http://sexinthepublicsquare.wordpress.com/2007/02/15/q-when-is-a-vibrator-more-dangerous-than-a-gun/
Bert
Who still wonders how Americans can sing about "home of the free"
Isn't this basically an electrical frontal lobotomy.
Great question! If you mean "electrical frontal lobotomy" as in "a way to use electricity to separate the frontal lobes of the brain from the rest of the brain", then no I don't think it is. Then again, I'm no doctor, but I did read the article!
On the other hand, if you mean "electrical procedure that is supposed to cure mental illness and that a lot of people really want to believe in to the degree that they may be willing to overlook gruesome consequences for several decades", then maybe. Who knows? Once upon a time, people thought sliced brains were the best thing since sliced bread.
For a great story on the topic, check out http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080
Well, first off, it's not a "pseudo-programming" sig. It's a sig that's been abbreviated using logical operators so that it doesn't run over the character limit. I'm a science and philosophy nerd, not a programming nerd, and it wouldn't even occur to me that my sig looks like a fake computer program.
Secondly, I disagree with your contention. True, it is highly unlikely that one person's sig will effect lasting changes in the uses and misuses of /. features. However, I certainly believe that an individual moderator, with no consistent behavior towards conscientiousness or abuse, could be reminded by my sig to side with the former after disagreeing with one of my posts. I have no way to test this hypothesis, but it makes sense given what I know of decision-making, and it costs me nothing to implement. So, I believe that my sig can change people's behavior, although certainly not in a widespread or meaningful way. This belief is not the motivator for my sig choice, though.
Let me point out that it's pretty presumptuous to even assume that a sig is meant to change behavior. Most sigs are just expressions of some tiny fraction of the author's opinion, frequently given indirectly through quotes or cultural references, that indicate a little something about the author's personality. So's mine: it points to my personal distaste for tag and mod abuse. On another level, it lets the reader know that I am the kind of stickler who cares enough about such things to make them the focus of my sig (which is every /.er's privilege, being a legitimized form of comment spam.) I previously had a Schopenhauer quote about the abuse of anonymity - not because I thought it would stop posters from abusing anonymity, but because I wanted to let the abusers know that I think they're cowardly assholes, and because I figured (correctly) that I might get e-mails from people who shared my interest in Schopenhauer.
I hope this helps, and I thank you for your concern.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
If the brain isn't producing enough chemicals to allow you to experience happiness then no amount of luxury is going to lift you from depression. A common comment from people who have no clue about depression is "what do they have to be depressed about?" The answer to this is typically nothing, except for a brain that isn't working correctly.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
If we weren't supposed to eat those 4000 animals, they wouldn't taste so good.
Defending Janov by pointing to an anecdote and encouraging the reader to "try it and see what you feel like," instead of linking to an empirical study of his clinical results, only adds credence to the GP's allegations of pesudoscience, since those are the typical rhetorical methods of its defenders. I'm sure at least one of this site's intrepid Googlers can find some actual research on either side, assuming it exists. Of course, if it doesn't exist, that's a statement in itself.
His technique certainly goes against my understanding of healing. What Janov calls a "release of suppressed emotion," I call "rehearsing anxiety states," and I question the psychodynamic concepts that underlie his explanation of the technique. Unless Janov can show better results than the cognitive therapies, there's probably a better use of an hour than reading his book. Do you have any links to these results?
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I will rephrase that. You do not have an idea what you're talking about. I'm not even going to debate with you about suffering: I put human beings first and animals second. If it comes down to a choice between a human being and 4,000 animals, I know which way I'd choose. Period. End-of-statement.
... it's been a long time) and the difference was like night and day. "I have my life back" he said, and stopped drinking ... he didn't need it anymore, just to feel normal for a while. It was astonishing, and the relief we all felt was palpable. He still suffered from the effects of his condition 'til he died, but at least he had a life. If that drug hadn't come out when it did he wouldn't have lasted another six months, a year tops. He switched to different drugs over time, as better ones became available, but he got an extra twenty five years because of them.
... very difficult. I'm not saying that antidepressants (like virtually all drugs) aren't capable of being abused, but to claim that people suffering from clinical depression should just "get over themselves" is a preposterous falsehood. Period. End of statement.
When you've finished dealing with the fact that I disagree with you on every point, go read this. After you've educated yourself on how wrong you are, come back tell me that what you said is even slightly relevant. Like the GP, I've had two family members suffer from severe clinical depression, suicide was narrowly averted multiple times. In one case the onset was before the age of antidepressants: he drank to mask the effects of the depression, but overall alcohol simply worsens the problem. When one of the early drugs became available we got him on it (Elevil in the late seventies, I think
People who claim that no-one needs antidepressants ("Tom Cruise, are you listening?") are fools. Ignorant assholes who would cheerfully consign other human beings to a living hell contained within their own skulls. I still don't understand how it must feel to suffer from this disease, and yet I had to deal with the consequences of it for almost thirty years. All of us did, and it was
If there is a God, I hope He delivers people like you a sample of what you say doesn't exist. For just a few years: I wouldn't want you to get so depressed that you actually off yourself. Maybe then you'll understand why what you just said offended me to the core.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You are confusing clinical depression with pessimism. Telling somebody who is suffering from clinical depression to "modify their opinions" or "control their emotional state" is mostly useless. Somebody suffering from clinical depression is simply unable to feel happy. It doesn't matter at all what their circumstances are, or how a normally functioning person would feel about them. Yes, psychotherapy is at least partially effective for some forms of depression, but it is totally ineffective for others. (And usually psychotherapy is far more expensive than drugs.)
Real life isn't as neat and clean as 10-minute therapy on "Dr. Phil". Telling a depressed person that they should just be happier is about as effective as telling somebody who is drunk off their ass to "think sober".
It is silly to argue against anti-depressants because they "create a dangerous dependency on the supplier". You could say that about medication for just about any chronic medical condition. Anti-depressants are not like narcotics, you do not need to continually increase your dosage to maintain effectiveness. Most anti-depressants on the market today are not particularly expensive either, as most are available in generic form.
SirWired