On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 02:55:32AM -0500, Tiberius Gracchus wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2001 00:07:58 -0700, you wrote:
> Interesting article:
>
> For decades, doctors have used pacemakers to regulate the heart. Now
> they're implanting similar devices into the brain.
Wired is somewhat after their times; the first experiments with brain
pacemakers were done in the 70's. Although it is cheering to see that
functional electric stimulation of this kind has now been approved.
I somewhat disagree with the claim in the article that Parkinson's,
depression, OCD and tinnitus are really the same disease because they
all seem to involve neurons getting caught in rhythmical activity. That
is a bit like saying the common cold and brain tumors are the same
because they both give you headaches. In some of the above cases the
problem might indeed be that you develop an undesirable attractor state
in the neural dynamics, but in other cases these rhythms are simply the
result of dysregulation or as in the case of Parkinson, the death of
certain cell groups leaving others unbalanced. Whether the pacemaker is
a good treatment for all the above remains to be seen; while I think it
might be great against certain kinds of epilepsy (where it could act as
a kind of defibrillator for the epileptic locus) and helpful when an
area gets overly inhibited, it is not obvious that it can help for
example OCD.
What would be really interesting to see is treatments against obesity
this way - if we can start to control the hypothalamus, then things
could get real fun. The ethical implications of such regulation of deep
motivational systems are a messy can of worms.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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