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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.
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.