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Scientists Boost the "Will To Persevere" With Current To the Brain
schliz writes "Stanford scientists say they could help boost people's motivation to overcome difficulties by electrically stimulating the anterior midcingulate cortex in the brain. The study involved two patients, who described the 'will to persevere' beautifully. One said it was like driving into a storm front and knowing that he had to get through. From the article: 'Stanford University neuroscientists passed a small current through an area in the part of the brain that deals with error detection, anticipation of tasks, attention, motivation, and emotional responses. Both patients involved in the study had epilepsy, and already had electrodes implanted in their brains to help doctors learn about the source of their seizures."
a) I recall there being experiments in the 1980s where rodent brains were wired to where the mouse would press a bar to get a jolt to its pleasure center, and it would procede to bang that bar until it passed out.
b) The news and hospitals are filled with people who have already proven that psychoactive drugs such as PCP and angel dust, and of late methamphetamins, will have a "will to perservere" at whatever they're doing (be it tweaking with the heat sinks on a stereo or trying to release demons from one's brain with a hand drill and a piece of metal coat hanger) that lasts for days or until incidental death, whichever comes first.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
You could make a film about a pile of dead body parts assembled into the form of a man being shocked by lightning and being given the will to live. You could even add some wanton violence and philosophical questions of existence to make the story interesting.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
-- W.C. Fields
With that in mind, is it a good idea to get people to continue to engage in futile endeavors? Who says quitting is always a bad thing.
P.S. I started to write this as a joke, but now I'm not so sure. For all we glorify perseverance, sometimes it's idiotic.
What if it just makes them persevere at attempting suicide?
robocop was somewhat like that with more the body fully intact and no lightning.
You didn't see the old documentary?
Pain the helmet black and your soldier's reaction to dismemberment becomes either "'tis but a scratch" or "that's just a flesh wound", and he keeps on fighting.
You zap me, and sure, I'll be motivated to do whatever the hell you're zapping me to make me do.
Everyone knows that 'willpower' is an intangible substance that some people possess more of, because they are better, and other people lack, because they are bad. I don't want to hear any more of this materialist nonsense. The rest of the universe may be causal; but human behavior isn't, because something!
I like your point. I remember once reading about a guy trapped high up on some huge mountain somewhere, maybe Everest, about to die in a storm. One of his last acts was speaking via radio to his wife, who had just had a baby. And I thought, what the hell are you doing on that mountain with a wife and newborn at home?
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That's so wonderful, is there anything else we can do to enhance incoherent thought process?
While scientifically interesting, I can imagine a dystopian future where employers mandate their works to wear special "brain helmets" so that they are fully focused on the task at hand...
Why would you want to connect your brain to the Internet? Far too great a risk of an NSA virus.
What you want to do is place your brain in a networked, Earthquake-proof, fire-proof enclosure, with an Infiniband connection to a Linux server. This would then be linked, via an OpenBSD firewall, to the Internet and also to some sort of ROV that can act as a relay between brain and body.
Meanwhile, your skull would contain an embedded computer, a massive multiplexer/demultiplexer to link up the nervous system and a very high bandwidth microwave link to the ROV.
It would reduce bandwidth requirements and latency if the motor neurons remained in the skull, with the rest of the brain transmitting only executive instructions and not specific nerve impulses. Those could be generated more locally. Split brains are found in squid, so we know this kind of isolation is possible. You'd also need a smaller computer, as it would largely be relegated to providing network security, error correction and data compression/decompression. This means you could increase the number of motor neurons, increasing the sophistication of muscle response.
From the brain-at-home POV, removing motor neurons means reducing distances between the other parts of the brain, reducing response time. (Since microwaves are a fair bit faster than electrochemical chains for transmitting data, latency due to distance is insignificant. You would be limited by signal strength and error correction codes, but the radius would be far beyond typical distances travelled by westerners anyway.)
Dissecting the brain further, with no executive functions in the skull to contend with, eyes could be larger, giving you higher resolution at the same number of distinguishable colours, or more colours at the same resolution. This would require the optic centres to be cut out of the brain and enlarged accordingly. Unlike those parts dealing with memory, the structure of the visual cortex probably won't vary much. By replacing the synapses with optic fibre, you can reduce latency, reduce errors, increase resilience to aging, reduce space requirements and eliminate tau protein knots. The reduced space means more visual cortex for the same response time, letting you process every scrap of available data rather than wasting it as the brain currently does.
Much the same applies to hearing and sense of balance. You could probably double your frequency range and your ability to distinguish tilt.
You may be more restricted in movement, but you would exchange it for superhuman senses and superhuman reflexes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thirty years and hitting the sauce, not the best of odds, but hey, go for it. (I was lucky, back mid-Eighties after twenty years of hard drinking; about the only thing that hadn't been adversely affected was my liver. Go figure.)
"I don't think I'm smarter than the average person, just smart enough to observe our species' behaviour.. and despair." If you can provide for your physical needs, then it's just an uncomfortable state of mind. If your situation is worse, then it gets really annoying, trending to flat-out bad, going by personal experience.
Like many a tool, if what these guys have found gets used, some of the uses will be ungood. But for someone caught up in a situation that by most lights just needs for them to apply a little extra oomph, might be a good thing - with consent, of course.