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Firing a Laser Into Your Brain Could Help Beat a Drug Addiction
An anonymous reader writes "The prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex in the human brain is thought to play a key role in drug addiction, and researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse wanted to see if manipulating cells there had a positive or negative impact on that addiction. They got some rats addicted to cocaine but not before loading them up with light sensitive proteins called rhodopsins that were placed in their prefrontal cortex, attaching to the neurons there. By shining a tuned laser light on to the prefrontal cortex, it was possible to activate and deactivate the cells. By turning them on with the laser, the addictive behavior of the rats was removed. Turning them off, even in non-addicted rats, saw the addictive behavior return or introduced."
Could also cure breathing.
Most of the stuff on
The original article clearly was not read. These rats had their genome changed to have more rhodopsins in their prefrontal cortex. This will not happen with humans in advance of any drug addiction issues (it would have to be done with the sperm/egg?). tldr; not going to happen.
Would work for sure.... probably want to carefully define "cure" however.
"I don't know where you get your delusions, laser brain." - Leia Well, now we know Han was trying to kick and lasers were his methadone. .. And, from the footer on /. right now..
"It's easier to take it apart than to put it back together. -- Washlesky"
... a use for my Wicked Laser. Oh wait, which one should I use? Teh green one? Teh blue one?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Lobotomy was used once as a remedy for many things...
Folks changed after that. Some think to the better for society.
Depends on perspective.
So, this might be an end to nicotine/cigarettes ?
I'm just mentioning it. Since people obviously think that "drug addiction" means "cocaine/heroine addiction".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Addictive_potential
How many people are cocaine/heroin addicts and how many are nicotine addicts ?
Firing lasers while stoned - whoa man!
The War or Drugs will be stopped once and for all when this laser comes out.
The War on Drugs could be stopped by making drugs legal.
Be seeing you...
Let's take heroin addiction for example. You know how many heroin addicts that get clean, yet go back to using the heroin? Pretty much all of them. Turning off the "addictive" cell won't change that. It's not about the addiction, it's about the high. It's about how the drug makes you feel.
Be seeing you...
From the Journal of Mad Science: A Cure for Addiction
Crazy they called me! CRAZY! But it is not _I_ who have surrendered the war on drugs! I know drugs - and the only real cure is PAIN. And the best PAIN? Direct laser to the brain!
Now, I know what you're all thinking! Dr. Madd, you're thinking, the brain doesn't have any pain receptors! You're thinking I just want to cure addiction with death! Ha! Death is no cure - it is FAILURE.
For you see - this is not some fleshy-burny laser, oh no! This is a laser set to trigger two particular threshold states in the neurotransmitter pathways... specifically, the pathways relating to heat, and cold.
And as any CHILD knows, both of those combined equate to the sensation of PAIN. Raw, sweet PAIN - far sweeter than any drug. Such an all-encompassing PAIN.
Such ecstasy an horror is unleashed, that the mind scrambles through everything it can, just to make sense of it. The end result is usually one of two things - a hyper-receptive state, where the ... subject is willing to accept instruction in thanks for the experience, or a simple silence that at least commits no more crimes such as seeking out drugs.
Such a cure! Were I a less modest man, I would call it a REVOLUTION in treatment!
I expect to be able to roll out full production within the next two to five years, and am highly interested in investments.
-Dr Maddeus Maddington Madd III, esq.
could be tested immediately in humans
Better still, just pick up some homeless drug addicts from the streets, inject their brains with genetically engineered chemicals and fire electromagnetic radiation at them. This would represent enormous savings in medical care for drug addicts, and the best part is, the more you do it .. the more you save!
Time for the medical industry to get a bill drafted.. call it the "Cocaine User National Treatment of Substances" act. The genetically engineered chemical* would be far cheaper than the combined medical, social, environmental, law enforcement, organisation, legislational and incarceration costs of the war on drugs over the last 50 years and it's a realistic solution to the massive problem of drug addiction in the United States. 9 out of 10 doctors agree with the contents of the pending draft legislative framework for guided treatment of repeat abusers.
*patent pending
So now there's a medical use for those frickin' sharks with laser beams! The only confound while doing the longitudinal study will be whether the rats were scared straight from addiction by the laser beam or by being confronted by the shark in the first place. So an extra experiment will have to be done using sharks that do not have laser beam capabilities.
;>)
Now the only problem is in getting the tiny little scuba suits for the rats, or the very large land-shark suits for the sharks (that have the appropriate wavelength-transparent ports [quartz glass? sapphire glass?] to let the IR laser through)...
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So this is good for investigational experiments, but I don't see how it would be useful for clinical and therapeutic uses in humans unless you insert the optogenetic materials into the brain regions you're interested in ahead of time.
just ask Luis Wu...
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Dude! You think cocaine is not addictive? You're completely wrong. It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway. I link you to wikipedia's article on cocaine because the medical articles I found are behind paywalls and you might not be able to get to them unless you're on a university network that has medical journal access like UCSD does: Data from The Lancet suggests cocaine is ranked both the 2nd most addictive and the 2nd most harmful of 20 popular recreational drugs.
another quote from the same article:
It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway.You are wrong. Cocaine IS addictive.
If the laser was over a couple of kilowatts I guarantee it would solve the problem of drug addiction. Duh!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I heard that death is also an effective treatment to ingrown toenails.
Actually, the target and rhodopsin chosen causes stimulation of normal functions that atrophy in an addiction state. Nothing gets suppressed or removed.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Think about nicotine style consumer addition on things that are normal and legal. Genus! They can move beyond the current list of salt, sugar and fat without have to bother with laws against opiates or stimulants. If you consider how much drug companies are raking in with "legal" oxycontin/oxycodone, other market segments would go crazy for that kind of "customer loyalty".
It wouldn't be a stretch to see soft drink makers use this to bring consumers back to sugar laden beverages. Sales have been dropping, and this could reverse the trend. Corporate manipulation at it's finest. The US is wonderland if you can use "campaign contributions" and PACs to keep those pesky regulators out of your hair.
Why is Snark Required?
Caffeine dependence goes away after a week or so. Many people are so tolerant of caffeine that the stimulant doesn't give them much more energy than they'd normally have in a day; it's just that you get it more rapidly and can control when it's available.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Hollywood?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Also possible to use high speed metal projectiles.
Moving from NYC to Shanghai cured my taste for blow. First month here kinda sucked but not s bad as getting my skull open and having lasers pointed at my neocortex.
Genetic engineering and laser is not how we end this problem. End the "war on Drugs," end the "war on Terror". Use the trillions saved to educate people and provide rehab. Our economy would be stronger, schools better, streets safer, and Mexico could get regain control from the vicious drug cartels.
...for sharks to operate these lasers will commence shortly ....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
So you are saying that cocaine is addictive the same way sex is addictive? You are an idiot. Stop spreading war on drug FUD.
I don't know if I would be classified as an addict, but I used blow on the every weekend and occasionally to get by at work for about 5 years. I moved cities after a nasty breakup and had to go cold turkey on both. I missed the sex more than the coke. The war on drugs is a sham.
"The medical community is wrong because my anecdote"
Sure thing bro, I cured my amputated leg with homeopathy by the way.
You're not captain obvious, you're captain misunderstanding-the-whole-fucking-concept.
The laser doesn't destroy any chemical reaction. It simply excites neurons that have a regulatory effect on addiction, the same effect could likely be had with electrode stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, only that the optogenetic approach have much better targeting resolution and neuron selectivity.
Now I know how to help all those sharks on drugs (lab animals from my other evil experiments)....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy [with a laser]...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Considering how sex is one of the few things that can motivate even animals to kill their own kind for "no good reason" (i.e. neither food nor defense of their own life), I'd say that sex is one pretty powerful motivator.
It would be interesting to see whether animals would also kill each other to get another load of some drug after you get them addicted.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, then what made them go back for the drug? They must have gotten some kind of beneficial effect out of it. Animals don't tend to do pointless things without a good reason.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would be interesting to see whether animals would also kill each other to get another load of some drug after you get them addicted.
With a spare arena, and some guns, or simply knives and axes, experimentation on this matter could even help solve 'the meth problem.'
Sex is a hugely powerful motivator but few higher species will kill each other for mating. Most will carefully regulate their "fighting" to be mostly display and instinctively know when they are outmatched and stop aggression and retreat. It is not in the species' best interest for lots of their own kind to die in such activities.
A simple .22 will do the trick as well!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Animals don't tend to do pointless things without a good reason.
Really?
Do not look into laser with remaining brain.
Which. technically, solves the addiction problem.
Brilliant!
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
a .45 will do the trick as well
Turning them off, even in non-addicted rats, saw the addictive behavior return or introduced.
Well that must be some kind of special hell - being addicted, but not knowing to what.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
am i the only one that chuckled when they read this?
Like you need a hole in the head.
"Keep an open mind. Just not so open that your brain falls out"
So they sensitize an active portion of the brain, flip open the skull and zap the brain.... OUCH.
Oh wait the brain has almost no pain cells so this is OK.
The part that worries me are the modern, often abused, drugs that reform the structures of the brain. To fix this, well this is not a fix.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Laser shots to the brain for addicts are a case of applying too much technology. Even a Colt 45 is a waste of effort. It is my thought that a guillotine can repair a lot of jerks and do so with almost no investment or maintenance at all.. It doesn't even need to be sharp if the blade is heavy enough. Then again a sledge hammer is even simpler. It is a cure. It is inexpensive. It solves a social nightmare. It is an object that inspires others to reform. And if we ever get smart enough we could compost these addicts for some kind of fuel. Or at least start large alligator farms so that we could grow some nice leather by making use of the corpses. And as far as chilling out there is nothing chiller than a corpse at room temperature. Never heard one moan about stress or bad memories even a tiny bit.
>"Feeling the high won't destroy your life. Feeling a constant need for getting high (addiction) will destroy your life."
Actually, for mind/reality-altering drugs (which excludes caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc) the actual high *can* contribute to destroying lives. While high, judgement and functionality are so severely impaired that there is a huge risk of injury to one self and to others. And all the while, the person is completely unproductive- can't work, can't learn, can't do much of anything useful to society or for themselves.
So yes, the need for getting high does contribute to "destroying your life", and can be the longest part of the destruction, the actual high contributes too.
Sorry, this is total bullshit. For example, let's look at opiate drugs like heroin, which all act similarly upon the brain. It has been shown that as long as the opiate addict has a steady high-quality supply of the drug, very little in the way of harm occurs either physically or mentally. There are many famous historic examples of high-functioning opium addicts, the poet Coleridge is perhaps the best known example. More importantly, and more recently, experiments in Switzerland and elsewhere have demonstrated that when you allow heroin addicts access to cheap and legal heroin, they tend to obtain and hold down jobs, and in general simply get on with their lives. Heroin addiction is no bar to achievement. Any basic pharmacology textbook will show that aside from being highly addictive heroin has virtually no long-term physical side-effects, which is in stark contrast to a legal drug like alcohol. It turns out that virtually all the negative effects we tend to associate with heroin, all the physical and mental deterioration that comes to mind when one hears the word heroin, that's all caused indirectly or directly by the legal prohibitions imposed upon the user and upon society. If you use unclean injection equipment in filthy surroundings, are constantly in and out of prison, go through withdrawal every few days because you lack the money or access to the drug, and the drug itself is polluted with manufacturing impurities plus whatever unknown and dangerous cutting agents were added, well of course, you're bound to see some deterioration. None of that is caused by the drug itself, however. Do some historical research, before heroin and the other opiate drugs were made illegal there were indeed cases of addiction to be found, but no more than we see today, and perhaps a lot less. What there wasn't, strangely enough, was much of the kind of societal harm that drug prohibition is supposed to prevent. Look for examples of criminals supporting their habit through crime, drug-fueled violence, you won't find any of that. In those days most heroin addicts were bored housewives, unassuming little old ladies who purchased their "tonic" cheaply at the nearest drug store. No crime, no deterioration, minimal harm to society. Then prohibition came along... And all the havoc and death and destroyed lives and emotional pain that you see today, it all flowed directly from that. Opiates by themselves simply aren't all that destructive. Until you make them illegal.
What happened here is that the animals were put under stress, and tried to develop some kind of behaviour they hoped would result in the stress to go away. From their point of view, it "worked". It's self conditioning, not "pointless".
Quite the opposite, from the pigeons' point of view, what they did made the food appear. They tried to appease their "god" if you want, so he would give them food.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are so wrong it isn't funny. I know several high functioning Heroin addicts who do not blow all their money on their drug of choice. One of them owns and runs a company of over 500 employees.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
The easy answer is precision.
Electroconvulsive therapy is the mental / medical equivilent of pounding on the TV to "fix" it, and is a last ditch treatment used when the simptoms cannot be treated any other way.
It, as the name implies, creates a seizure in the paitent by applying voltages across rather wide areas of the brain. Originally uncontrolled voltages (because it came through skin, bone, etc) into, nearly random brain tissues (because it was applied in ignorance, through multiple barriers, with no guarentee as to where the potentially (and often actually) damaging current went. Just as pounding on older electronics minutely shifted ALL components, sometimes cleaning a little bit of oxidation, or closing a curcit board crack, allowing current to flow where it had been blocked.
Today, the seisures are usually limited to purely electrical storms in the brain, and usually do not present themselves as convulsions, or uncontrolled muscle spasms.
I assume that the procedure has improved over the years, but I do know for a fact that ECT, to this very day, often destroys short and mid-term memory. Who knows what subtler damage it can cause?
On the other hand, Stimulating one, or a small group of cells, is nothing like ECT.
In fact brain surgeons will stimulate small pockets of brain cells before and during surgery (invoking memories, sights, sounds, tastes, sensations and smells) to minimise the chance of damaging or removing cells unrelated to the surgery. Something like that could never be done with ECT.
THINK! It's patriotic
... with lasers in their brains!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)