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Is Neurostim Becoming a Reality?
destinyland writes "There is a current mass market for 'cognitive enhancement' products — and arguments about the black market potential for neurostim. 'The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson's Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time... Mix the glamour of surgical self-improvement with the geekiness of high-tech gadget fetishism and you have a niche cosmetic neurostim market waiting to be tapped...'"
You are suggesting do-it-yourself brain surgery? I guess that would be "glamourous". If it works. And if it doesn't, it might win you a Darwin award.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Can I get one tweaked to give me a mind blowing orgasm every time I blink my eyes in rapid succession 10 times?
The name of the science fiction book in Russian would translate as something like "Predating things of the times". I don't think, an English translation is available (yet?), although plenty of their other books have already been translated.
(Benevolent) secret police investigate strange goings-on in a leisurely resort town. They discover a very simple to make device is capable of giving a very strong pleasure — endlessly (until the user is interrupted, or the body starves and dies, or — on very rare occasions — the user's own will prevails). The town's attitudes toward the device and its users, as well as similar (but not as all-encompassing) devices are examined...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And can I have my droud back, please?
Thanks
--
BMO
I'll be able to move faster, do more damage, and take more damage, all at a small cost of my health?
Fire it up!
If one is "high all the time," then that state becomes the normal state, and anytime they aren't "high" means they are in a "low state." Both psychologically and physiologically, one can become tolerant or adjusted to certain states.
If something is special, doing it all the time detracts from its appeal.
You cannot reboot your brain if it crashes. From my perspective... no thanks, at least for the foreseeable future.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Curious if this could be the steroids of competitive academia?
All those neurostimming drug fiends always hog the best tables at my internet provider, doing stupid stuff, reading junk and talking about nothing when they could be recompiling their C compiler.
Look pal, it's easy. You just take this neurospike and that hammer and apply according to the instructions. Now, you'll get a splitting headache afterward, but that goes without saying.
If your still interested in my other products, check out my new and improved nut-vice. Pure pain with pleasure!
Life is not for the lazy.
Screw making me happy, I can do that myself. Make one that stops me being lazy, I'll buy it in a second.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
doesn't have anything better to do than getting doped up and hanging out and talking with their friends for hours about nothing.
We've already got Slashdot for that.
Have gnu, will travel.
Are you suggesting sensible behaviour from the war-on-drugs crowd? Please. If they were capable of that, then we'd already have legalised drugs. Let's face it, we can't stop drugs, and if we could control them at least they'd be clean, and the profits could go to making drugs for ill people or whatever rather than crime. It's not perfect, but it'd be better than the current situation. Of course, everyone has it beaten into them the current stance is the only good one.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Even if cocaine and other drugs were completely harmless, their ability to give serious but unearned pleasure would seriously warrant their banning.
And who are you to say what does and what doesn’t constitute legitimately “earning” a form of pleasure that someone chooses to experience?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Who needs DIY when you could get your local Dr. Nick Riviera to do a little neurosurgery! Perma Coke high? I can see some rich folks paying to have that done.
Look at something like steroids. For professional athletes that have to go to the black market it's illegal. But if you're an actor that needs to bulk up for a movie you can get a doctor to create a roid regiment and prescription for you. Perfectly legal.
And if it doesn't, it might win you a Darwin award.
Or you might be a redneck.
Mix the glamour of surgical self-improvement
Yeah, until they find your body. Then it has all the "glamor" of autoerotic asphyxiation.
I can see it now in the police blog..."His batteries died and he commited suicide before they could be replaced"
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
"Consider sex (yes, I said it) -- the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing. Contrary to the wide-spread misunderstanding, the mainstream religions want us to have sex -- as much as possible. They just want it all to be for the purpose of reproduction, rather than simple self-indulgence."
Pleasure isn't the reward, it's the enticement to get people to do the act and possibly make babies.
Oblig. Simpsons quote.
Dr. Nick: "I'll perform any operation for $129.95! Come in for brain surgery and receive a free Chinese finger trap!"
Had you finished reading my post before replying to its beginning, you wouldn't have asked this question... In short, I'm not advocating legal ban on such undeserved pleasures, but express my disapproval of people indulging in them, for they will — and quickly — stop being helpful members of society or even family.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't know about anyone else but every person I know who uses drugs on a regular basis is a complete moron
You, of course, include caffeine in those drugs.
You can't take the sky from me...
You don't know about the functional one
Opiate even if it completely nullify one emotional life can leave you pretty functional
I used to get high all the time at work using snorted hydromorphone and I used to get raised and perk
Now that I am sober I look like an hippy and I am not a productive member of society
Consider sex (yes, I said it) — the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing.
fapfapfap
You can't take the sky from me...
You mean like this?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/651892.stm
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
I don't know about that. I was a teenager in the 70s when it was almost socially acceptable among people under 30 to smoke pot. I've known plenty of people who indulge fairly regularly (say on the order of once a week or even a bit more) who probably weren't much different than if they'd never used at all. It's dangerous to make such generalizations as "dope makes you a dope", because practically no generalization of that sort is *always* true. Often they can be true enough to be worth paying attention to without being *usually* true.
I've also seen the other side, the people who effectively rewired their brains and lives around dope. It's very easy to do, because so much of what we as animals do is avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. As *humans*, we are driven by something more as well: dissatisfaction. The Pali word "dukka" which is often translated when discussion Buddhism as "suffering" might better be translated as "dissatisfaction". Most of the "suffering" in our life is not grand enough to be called "suffering". It's a niggling, persistent dissatisfaction with the things we thought would make us happy. The very low intellectual standards of people who are stoned are a consequence of easy satisfaction. They laugh at jokes that aren't funny because their standards of funny are low. They don't mind physical squalor because they are beyond dissatisfaction.
It's a funny thing; pain, pleasure and dissatisfaction drive us as individuals, but they aren't there for *our* benefit. They improve us as a *species*. We may wish to subscribe to a philosophy of ethical egoism, but we're still constructed neurologically so the quality of our subjective experience serves the species. Surely it would be to our benefit to live a life devoid of pain and full of pleasure and satisfaction. Any counter argument to this is bound to rest on the benefit to society or to the species, not to us as individuals.
It is conceivable that we could, in a sense, take charge of our lives, truly live them for ourselves, by using biomedical technology to control pain, pleasure, and over time even *dissatisfaction*. But I doubt in such a world read books. Why would we?
When you see a book, you anticipate the pleasure of reading it. Why bother reading it if you can get pleasure at the push of a button? Oh, at first you would make a distinction between "earned" and "unearned" pleasure, but one day you'd be a little tired and instead of picking up the book you'll push the happy button, and sooner or later you'll be going for the happy button because you won't tolerate the effort of reading. In fact it's a kind of intellectual lust that drives us to read, isn't it? And lust is kind of a pleasurable pain; a deficit we imagine in ourselves that is pleasant to fill; an itch that we scratch. If we can eliminate the itch and get the pleasure of scratching, we won't be any kind of lust, physical or intellectual, because we won't accept any kind of discomfort.
I remember working on the early Arpanet, and the amazement of seeing text from a computer appear, printed line by line on a printing terminal. The equivalent of a Slashdot article and its comments would probably have taken fifteen or twenty minutes to "load", but to *us* this was information traveling at amazing rates. Now we consider *any* perceivable delay as intolerable; there is no sensation of speed, only of varying degrees of slowness.
People adjust their feeling of what is pleasurable and satisfactory to what they experience on a day to day basis. Read about how people lived a few centuries ago. YetI suspect people were just as happy or unhappy as they are now, even though the conditions they lived in -- even the aristocrats -- were miserable by modern standards. Our modern threshold of suffering is extremely low; of satisfaction extremely high. When we can control suffering and satisfaction biomedically, the process will not only have reached its logical limit, human life as we know it will cease to be, because that life is organized around the imperatives to seek elusive pleasure, to elude inevitable pain, and to suage unavoidable dissatisfaction.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing.
Do you think we should frown upon infertile people having orgasms? I think you're insane.
Peter: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Remember that?
Egon: That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.
Or make for happily motivated super criminals with a sense of entitlement because they think everyone loves them.
Had you finished reading my post before replying to its beginning
I did. The fact that you’re not advocating a legal ban doesn’t make you seem any less a self-righteous jerk for looking down upon anyone who, in your opinion, didn’t earn something that they got.
For instance:
Consider sex (yes, I said it) — the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing.
Says who? So can I assume that you think masturbation is also an undeserved form of self-indulgence, and you wouldn’t want one of “them” to marry your daughter? Even if that habit didn’t “interfere with others”, because you’d still be “wary of such people”?
Because, as you say, a man who masturbates may some day just suddenly decide to stop caring for your daughter. Yeah. Why not just go a step farther and claim, since every man who cheats on his wife also has masturbated at some point, that all men who masturbate will cheat on their wives?
I'm not advocating legal ban on such undeserved pleasures, but express my disapproval of people indulging in them, for they will — and quickly — stop being helpful members of society or even family.
Right... just like everyone who enjoys alcohol, gambling, tobacco, etc. also invariably stops being a helpful member of society.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I don't know about anyone else but every person I know who uses drugs on a regular basis is a complete moron and doesn't have anything better to do than getting doped up and hanging out and talking with their friends for hours about nothing.
Most people you know who you say "do drugs" are probably doing pot, which yeah, is not very conducive to doing much productive in most fields anyway. Caffine is the most widely used stimulant, so I'd argue that most of the people you know are people who do mild stimulants.
It's worth pointing out that according to one poll 20% of our scientists already take "brain enhancing drugs," like ritalin. From personal experience I can tell you at least 20% of graduate students in the sciences and many more senior scientists do recreational drugs too, That portion that uses recreational drugs doesn't completely overlap with the portion that use brain enhancing drugs, and neither are the least productive portions of scientists.
So that's probably why we're stuck in the stone age, our scientists are too busy being morons and getting high. Or maybe you just don't really know what you're talking about.
Let's just start with part of the headline material:
" 'The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson's Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time..."
This (and TFA) is from "James Kent is the former publisher of Psychedelic Illuminations and Trip Magazine. He currently edits DoseNation.com, a drug blog featuring news, humor and commentary."
Hardly your neuroscience expert, or even much of an educated amateur. Educated enough to be dangerous to his own reputation perhaps. We can hope.
Where Mr. Kent goes wrong is in thinking the stimulator used for Parky's can stimulate other parts of the same structure (within a "few millimeters), the Substantia Nigra, which produced dopamine which is also released in cocaine use, and that this is the reward center, so that doing so makes one feel high.
The common misconception is based on the "reward" aspect, and confusion of cause and effect with respect to drug use. The reward system operates in the manner of conditioning or learning, in that its output helps to produce the association between a behavior and a reinforcer. Let's just assume for maximum illustration that the reinforcer here is a cocaine high. We have the drug taking behavior, and we have the cocaine high resulting. The dopamine system puts on the brakes with respect to ongoing seeking/investigating and lets the organism maintain focused attention on the object that produced the positive feeling -- it makes reinforcement possible. Note that it does not cause the high, the reinforcer does that. There are many reinforcers that can make learning occur, and most of them do not cause any sort of high. Just because cocaine causes a release of dopamine does not mean this is the source of the high. No, this is the source of the powerful reinforcement that causes addiction to start. Dopamine does not act as a "reward", it allows a reinforcer to do so effectively regardless of any psychotropic effects. It is the cascade of various neurotransmitters that causes the high. Evidence of this is found in the effect of pramipexole (Mirapex) on people. It is a selective dopaminergic and does not cause any high. But it does (at a high enough dosage) cause obsessive/compulsive use and behaviors much as an addiction and related activities.
Moving a Parky's stimulator will not produce a high, but it might produce the problems related to addiction.
I've previously pointed out the lack of facts in h+ articles, and the preponderance of fiction. This article starts out with the latter. Check the rest of it for yourself to see if there are any reliable facts actually taken from known science, or whether they are other common misconceptions put to service to fill white space.
As for cognitive enhancing drugs, amphetamines and such are behavior boosters, not capable of producing long term cognitive enhancement, unless by enhancement one means seeking more of the same. Cognitive enhancing drugs (nootropics) have been around for over 50 years. The first, hydergine, is the red headed step child of the man who called LSD "My Problem Child", Albert Hoffman. There are many such drugs in use throughout the world except for the US where they are allowed only in the cases where they will not help -- severe progressive dementia. In contract with the very lucrative drugs typically used as congitive enhancers, nootropics have very little side effects or interactions.
In the cases where cognitiion enhancement is possible, anything related to intoxication is contraindicated and counterproductive. Confusing "reward" with getting high, when it is intended only to related to learning reinforcement is key to understanding this. It is also key to determining whether the source is intent on getting smart or getting high, because the latter refuse to give up on the misconception.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
God forbid the terminally ill miss out on reading one last novel before they die Medical_cannabis
I don't know about anyone else but every person I know who uses drugs on a regular basis is a complete moron and doesn't have anything better to do than getting doped up and hanging out and talking with their friends for hours about nothing.
Aside from the doped up part, this describes almost every non geek I know. Oh boy, hours of talking about the weather, american idol and gossiping about the neighbors!
Everything will be taken away from you.
I admit, that this sounds religion-motivated, but that's hardly a drawback of an argument...
Sure it is. Arguments typically need to be backed up by evidence. An argument based on religion, which is by its very nature a construct of faith that's not backed up by evidence, is fundamentally an appeal to authority (the religion's higher power) or an appeal to the populace (lots of people believe it, so it must be true). Appeals to religion as evidence for an argument are especially problematic when discussing governmental policies in the United States, where a law must have a secular legislative purpose (as per the Lemon test). If the only justification for a law is religious, then it fails this prong of the Lemon test and is unconstitutional.
At any rate, I would have one bit of advice for you: please consider whether your desire to frown upon or ban such "unearned" pleasures is a function of some actual, real harm you can perceive, or is just a gut reaction to something you personally find distasteful. If it's the latter, I would implore you to consider that banning things you personally find abhorrent is the exact reason why we get laws like the CDA (and, more broadly, censorship laws in the US in general) and why we from time to time end up with attorneys general attacking "smut peddlers" in the courts.
The Freelance Wizard
Yeah, all those stupid potheads. They can only ASPIRE to sit on their ass and post to slashdot. You, however, have truly have conquered life, and anyone who chooses another route certainly must be a moron.
Why do you think that you are qualified to give an opinion on drugs when you don't seem to know the difference between cocaine and heroin? Although they are both class A drugs they are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their effect on users. Trainspotting would have been a very different film if it was about a bunch of Scottish coke fiends. I'm curious as in most other domains in life opinions not backed up by any solid experience in the area would be seen as largely superficial.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I don't know about anyone else but every person I know who uses drugs on a regular basis is a complete moron and doesn't have anything better to do than getting doped up and hanging out and talking with their friends for hours about nothing. I fail to see how this will be useful for anyone else because I doubt you would want to sit around and read a novel while you are high whether its from drugs or some brain simulation. Now won't you kids get off my lawn so I can sit here peacefully and read a book on my vacation.
Do you live in the bible belt, perchance? Maybe that's why you equate drugs with "doped up". As others have pointed out, caffeine is a very widely used stimulant and unless you're a Mormon (or was it Jehovah's Witness?) you likely partake of it as well. There are drugs that give you razor-sharp concentration. It's the same stuff that your body naturally produces, the only difference is that most peoples' bodies aren't consistently producing them. Would you want to read a book if you took concentration-enhancing drugs? Many students use those drugs to facilitate studying. The military uses other drugs to keep pilots alert -- I've heard it's the drug commonly referred to as "speed", but I'm guessing it's either a specific enhancement drug that acquired that name or, at the very least, probably not the street-level stuff.
Other drug users partake because their body doesn't produce (or utilize) sufficient levels of dopamine, serotonin, and so on. You'll have heard of them: those who have been diagnosed with depression. It's not their fault their bodies produce insufficient amounts of the substance. Using drugs to enhance their body's ability to generate them (or increase utilization of existing levels) makes them not want to kill themselves.
So enjoy your lawn. I hope your concentration isn't too distracted by everyone trampling all over your lovely grass. Maybe between distractions you can get some reading done.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I have deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants for dystonia, and they're hit or miss. Maybe you get some sort of high, maybe your arm goes rigid, maybe you see spots. And for twenty hours of brain surgery, awake--well, I wouldn't have done it if I thought I had any better options.
The state of the art with this is nowhere near reliable enough to do for nonessential reasons, even if you have some of the best doctors in the world. And the expense--well, if it had been out of pocket, it would have cost me >$300k.
Or, you can just go score some coke, if you're into that kind of thing.
'In knowledge is power, in wisdom humility.'