Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
If I recall correctly, yes. There was some work on electrical stimulation on spinal injury patients, and one slightly wrong setting would give women orgasms. Oops. :) The doctor is selling the device, now named "Orgasmatron", for women who can't climax. Of course, it costs a fortune, but hey, for mind blowing orgasms on demand, some people would pay for it.
I've known some women who report similar results with a "TENS" unit. That's external stimulus, but the same idea. I have a TENS unit for my back, and it creates a pretty weird sensation. Well, unless you consider involuntary muscle movements normal. I don't know what the placement of the electrodes is, for an orgasm. I know what makes my back feel better though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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
There was some work on electrical stimulation on spinal injury patients, and one slightly wrong setting would give women orgasms. Oops.
I believe that there are a whole lot of people who would not consider this an "oops" by any means.
This ain't rocket surgery.
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)
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)
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 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...
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've known some women who report similar results with a "TENS" unit.
I'd like my orgasmatron to go up to "ELEVENS" personally.
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.
You city folk crack me up. If you've ever seen Bull semen collection...
You would realize that TENS units are for wimps. You'll want a cattle prod.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Obligatory xkcd.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.