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DARPA Jolts the Nervous System With Electricity, Lasers, Sound Waves, and Magnets
the_newsbeagle writes: DARPA is sinking some cash into the buzzy new research field of "electroceuticals," which involves stimulating nerves to control the activity of organs or bodily systems. The newest techniques have little in common with electroshock therapy, which sends a strong current broadly through the brain tissue; today's cutting-edge methods can target individual neurons, and turn them "on" and "off" with great precision. Under DARPA's new ElectRx program, seven research teams will explore different ways to modulate activity of the peripheral nervous system. Some will stimulate neurons directly with electricity, while others will take more roundabout routes involving light, acoustics, and magnetic fields.
Maybe MK-Ultra brought into the digital age?
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Well. This, um, definitely doesn't sound like just the thing to add a scientific flourish to our assorted black sites and torture dungeons. Definitely not.
come do me first motherfuckers!
Be careful what you wish for.
"Or you will live out your life in a pain amplifier!"
DARPA Jolts the Nervous System With Electricity, Lasers, Sound Waves, and Magnets
Did they test it on sharks? Inquiring minds want to know.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That is all this is. They are taking money at gunpoint from the people to give to corporations.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A guy in dark shades and a black suit shines a red LED light into your eyes. It flashes and your asshole stops working.
"No need to come with us. Just drop by our office when you're ready to tell us everything and we'll fix that right up."
Wear Thync for minutes, feel the effects for hours. A soothing neck massage. A splash of cold water. A kiss from someone you love. These are common examples of how nerves signal the brain to change the way you feel. Thync works in the same way using signaling programs we call Vibes.
Of course, it's not FDA-approved because it's not a medical device.....
....both solely exist to allow the 1% to siphon the wealth of this nation from the rest of us while their media minions keep us fighting over such inconsequential things such as homosexuals marrying each other. I mean seriously, who in their right mind really thinks it is good idea to force men who want to have sex with men to marry women, or women who want to have sex with women to marry men? Talk about crazy!!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
This isn't even particularly cutting-edge tech... I'm going to try to keep this relatively simple, so analogies are not precisely right, but close enough for this...
Think of the brain as a computer that has to stay on, always. It's also a bit of an old system, and as a result the system's developed a bit of personality & the people who knew why some of its design is the way it is have not only moved on but are so long gone nobody's too sure how to contact them. This is also the only way to find out why certain parts of the design are weird the way they are--there might have been documentation, but it's going to be faster to just recreate it...
Electroshock is, basically, a brute force reset of the system. We don't know (quite) why it works, but it does. It isn't really ideal, since generally you only want to restart a single service, so to speak, but trying to figure out how to manage that would require the aforementioned documentation. Certainly, the fact that some of the server clusters have names vaguely associated with what they do is pure luck--no, seriously, a lot of the brain's anatomy was named with no reference to what it actually does, and this makes memorizing neuroanatomy along with what the parts are known to do what hell.
We have already through FDA approval a few methods (since '97, maybe earlier) that use some of this to help people, though, which are a bit less brute-force and get you the benefits without the side effects--or, in some cases, substitute for blown neurocircuitry like with Parkinson's Disease. That we can do this at all, we know from electroshock--which in a modified form is still in use, and horrifically enough is still the best treatment we've got for certain forms of depression.
Anyway, deep-brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation are both pretty good for depression--and there's some promise that they'll help with seizure disorders and migraines (which might be a kind of seizure disorder anyway).
Really, the question I have is exactly what DARPA is trying to do. Are we going for a new era where interrogation is done by improving significantly the lives of interrogation subjects? That would...actually be really effective, and the information more reliable than you'd get from torture.
This is the Obama administrations DARPA. The same guy who said that NASA's job was to tell arabs how they contributed to space exploration (they didn't or they would be there). There is therefore a 50/50 chance that this is the worlds dumbest stunt, and not actually about developing anything strategic at all.
This might be torture. It might be crowd control. It might be remote diagnostics for political folks - you would be amazed what they do with a stool sample. It might be for remote tracking, or hiding remote tracking signals in a natural looking signal envelope. It might be battlefield diagnostics with automated triage.
Given the mentally-ill nature of the grand fromage (demonstrated above) ... I think it is trying to make better intimate robotic automata for the next sexual revolution.
full of everything from quack zappers to the Universal Frankenstein "machine." they can immediately learn what doesn't work, and save a tubload of cash.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just to say that you have a job stimulating organs.
Some recently approved cancer treatments (particularly: for inoperaable brain cancer) are basedt on a recent discovery:
- The electric fields from changing magnetic fields interfere with chromosome segregation during mitosis.
- The affected cells generalluy do one of two things:
- Complete the division with missorted chromosomes - then both offspring cells commit suicide.
- Give up on cell division - then the new diploid cell commits suicide.
Cells not undergoing mitosis keep perking along just fine. (Perhaps this is why large-range electric fields aren't present in cells except during division: Electrical effects occur across membranes or in very close range between molecules - because the use of the fields in the chromosome segregation mechanism means any newly-evolving "feature" that involved long-range E-fields would kill the cell partway to evolving it.
This is great for brain cancer treatment: Essentially nothing is splitting except the cancer cells. Maybe you lose some nerve stem cells and have slightly lower brain plasticity over the coming decades - but that's a heck of a lot better than dying in agony and gradually-increasing dimentia over 6 months to a year.
But start poking at brains with this in the long term - especially brains of people under 21 or so, when the brains are still doing substantial interconnection and cell division - and you might start seeing some nasty damage.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
DARPA Jolts the Nervous System With Electricity, Lasers, Sound Waves, and Magnets
Is that list exhaustive? Or has "5$ wrench" been edited out?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The age of the tinfoil suit.
Electricity, lasers, sound waves, and magnets.
Did I hear brown sound anyone!?