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Brain Stimulation For Entertainment?
An anonymous reader writes: Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been used for years to diagnose and treat neural disorders such as stroke, Alzheimer's, and depression. Soon the medical technique could be applied to virtual reality and entertainment. Neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks writes, "it's quite likely that some kind of electromagnetic brain stimulation for entertainment will become practical in the not-too-distant future." Imagine an interactive movie where special effects are enhanced by zapping parts of the brain from outside to make the action more vivid. Before brain stimulation makes it to the masses, however, it has plenty of technical and safety hurdles to overcome.
What happened to stimulating the brain via the old fashioned method by having an exciting, provocative story populated by diverse and interesting characters? Have Hollywood fallen so far that the only way they can stimulate people's brain now is by the direct application of voltage?
Nuh uh. I don't trust any entertainment company enough to allow them to zap my brain. Not in a million years.
One word: wirehead.
More like: Before brain stimulation makes it to the masses, it has plenty of technical and safety measures to override.
-kgj
... the porn industry.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Is everyone ready for sex and the three seashells?
For $9.99 per month, you can add the sensation of flavor to your government-supplied gruel.
A higher quality version of that memory you are trying to access may be available. Rent for $5.99, buy for $19.99.
Pay $5 to climax. Supersize your orgasm for $3 more.
In the Year 3000!
In the Year 3000!
here, hold my transcranial magnetic stimulator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ..."
"Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that supernormal stimulation govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of animals. In her 2010 book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose,[9] she examines the impact of supernormal stimuli on the diversion of impulses for nurturing, sexuality, romance, territoriality, defense, and the entertainment industry's hijacking of our social instincts. In the earlier book, Waistland,[2] she explains junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats and television as an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action. Modern artifacts may activate instinctive responses which evolved in a world without magazine centerfolds or double cheeseburgers, where breast development was a sign of health and fertility in a prospective mate, and fat was a rare and vital nutrient.
http://www.healthpromoting.com... ..."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. As Dr. Fuhrman reports in his excellent volume Eat to Live, these artificial products, and others like them, comprise a whopping 93% American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes up to 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they would literally suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In a college course called "Physics for Artists" at the U of IA back in 1974, I pursued the frequency following effect of strobe lights as an adjunct to art displays to induce the desired state of consciousness. Fortunately the EEG technology was too expensive to complete the project for my college sophomore budget -- fortunately because it is the kind of thing that if shown in a public exhibit could definitely cause seizures. Milder forms are already probably being used in theater with rhythmic light and sound, but attenuated in a studied manner.
Seastead this.
It's definitely a consideration, the question is whether it's a giant downside, or the absurdly amazing upside:
If your neurology-fu is good enough, you should be able to produce a stimulus of essentially unimaginable desirability. After all, while we (currently) have to do various things in order to experience pleasure, 'pleasure' is something that the brain does, not something we absorb from a wife, 2.5 children, and a golden retriever in the suburbs.
If you could bring to bear all the available apparatus devoted to the experience of 'pleasure' you could skip all the grind and go right to the reward.
Aside from the practical problems of getting people to work when they could be experiencing timeless ultimate bliss, I suspect that this prospect will strike many as somehow creepy or dishonest.
On the other hand, what innovation could possibly contribute more to the happiness of mankind than a direct supply of dis-intermediated happiness, delivered fresh and pure right to the brain?
"When the message came, it found Tedesco in his usual character. He was lying on the air-draft with his brain pleasure centers plugged into the triggering current. So deeply lost in pleasure was he that the food, the women, the clothing, the books of his apartments were completely neglected and forgotten. All pleasure save the pleasure of electricity acting on the brain was forgotten."
Actually, no. The brain is unclocked, making "speed" (frequency) analysis difficult, but as I recall neurons are only able to fire somewhere on the order of a few hundred Hz to a few kHz. The incredible data processing capacities likely originate from the the massively interconnected parallel design, rather than raw speed. In terms of total "switch" transitions per second I believe we hit human-brain-comparable supercomputers almost a decade ago. To the limits of our feeble understanding of the brain, of course.
As for "banging on the brain with a hammer" - I'm inclined to agree with your description, but that's hardly slowed humans from doing just that with alcohol and other drugs for millenia - to say nothing of the booming market for prescription psycho-pharmaceuticals, many of which are recognized to have potentially serious but poorly understood side effects..
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I've participated in some TCS experiments back in college. Unless they discover some new way to do TCS there is no way anyone is ever going to find the technology usable in an entertainment environment. Remember that in order to cause the neurons to discharge magnetically you have to send a strong enough magnetic field through the skull and through a certain amount of liquid. In addition, the field has to be changed constantly as well.
For anyone that has never done TCS, what this effectively results in are constant static discharges on your scalp and this happens at a fairly rapid frequency. Plus, depending on the location of the magnets, the magnets might also be causing muscle neurons to discharge as well, so your face will be constantly twitching. All of this leads to a fairly tiring experience.