Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
news.nationalpost.com
news.nationalpost.com
When that happens, the world will change in a very unpredictable way. Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that are part of the drug trade will suddenly have no where to go. All the social aspects of shared inebriation will still be in place but most if not all of the economic aspects will be killed.
I expect my kids will get to witness this change.
In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels).
Serious question. If the friction is removed (illegality is friction) and this process is legal and available what will prevent people from deteriorating into 24/7 pleasure seekers (much like some people get addicted and spend their life in crack houses?)
No doubt a lot will depend on how functional folks can be while 'high'. I have known people who were essentially 'pill heads' or addicted to oxycodone such that they were constantly under the influence but they were still able to do the job assigned to them. (I make no judgement as to whether their performance was improved or hampered by their drug use). Perhaps folks could dial it up or dial it down depending on their need.
But what scares policy maker types is that you have an unpredictable effect if something comes into existence. They will try hard to prevent its creation because of the possibility of bad outcomes even in the presence of the possibility of good outcomes (perhaps you'd have lower workplace rage events if people could dial in a mild soporific state).
A bunch of harmless pleasure seekers doesn't seem like a major issue without all that other stuff.
Doesn't that assume though that the "bunch" is a bunch of the same size?
I would argue that the bunch will become larger that is that more people with a predisposition will get hooked on the high.
Of course we don't know that number. Could be 1% higher could be 20% higher. Compared to the other societal costs people might judge it to be a fair tradeoff. Or not.
The vast majority of the harm illegal drugs do to people is due to the drugs being illegal; it has nothing to do with characteristics inherent to the chemistry of the drugs.
(I recommend the book Licit and Illicit Drugs. You can read it here online: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cumen... )
Coca leaf tea is one thing. What about crack? Don't say it would never have been invented without criminalization; everything is invented eventually.
What about it? Serious drug addiction is a mental health problem. We'll never solve this problem without focusing on it directly. Trying to "get drugs off the streets" is focusing on the symptom, not the cause.
When alcohol was legal SOME people went for the harder stuff but beer was a lot cheaper and more common; under prohibition, whiskey was cheaper than beer. If you are selling an illegal product, your legal risk is generally proportional to the volume of product being smuggled or kept so you want to maximize the number of effective doses per unit volume. The economics thus favors high-concentration forms of whatever drug. It also favors faster, more intense highs, in that if people are going to all that risk to get something they want to be sure the payoff is proportional and can't afford to wait around for the effect. So cocaine becomes more available relative to pot, and becomes available in more concentrated and more convenient forms as technology permits (versus the old way of making tea from cocoa leaves and using it as a pick-me-up beverage)
So yes, "crack cocaine" was the result of prohibition. Yet even crack could be used responsibly - it's exactly like regular powder cocaine or caffeine in that regard. But responsible use is more likely if it's legal.
To be honest, whiskey is expensive only because it is a branding and social experiment that was successful, not because of the cost of manufacturing it.
It's really hard to quantify what effect has been of this. Bolivia by all metrics is an underdeveloped country. Has this contributed to it or not? No way to really know..
Also I'm not convinced about the social effects of heroin. I think it DID have effects on society and that's why it was eventually outlawed.
I haven't yet gone through the book you linked, but it appears from a quick glance at wikipedia that chronic cocaine usage does bring with it some fairly bad physical side-effects. Are you saying that chronic usage will be rare if cocaine were legal?
You seem right however about heroin: "Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin does not cause many long-term complications other than dependence and constipation." I had no idea!
With heroin, the physical harm is almost ENTIRELY due to illegality - when a heroin addict can get the drug cheaply and in a known dosage and use it safely, they don't really have a problem. Our moral puritanism says being addicted is JUST BAD so we pass laws that CAUSE most of the harm we attribute to the drug.
Cocaine isn't quite like that. If you take a lot of cocaine it can cause nasty psychological symptoms - paranoia during use, depression between uses. On the other hand, cocaine is quite a lot like caffeine (and other stimulants) in this regard. Too much of any psychoactive drug is bad, but in moderation it's safe enough and has often been used by truck drivers who need to stay awake. Or people who need to be extra creative (eg: Robin Williams)
Even for this drug, the net harm of illegality almost certainly exceeds the net benefit. One could imagine a world in which making cocaine illegal stopped anyone from doing cocaine, but that's not the world we actually live in. The world we actually live in, it's generally accepted that our last two presidents used cocaine in school - it's not really fair to throw people in jail and take away their kids and their stuff because they were poor and used cocaine while people who are rich and use cocaine just get away with it. Which is what the current regime seems to amount to.
The Less Wrong community has been discussing questions related to wireheading for years now. To get a taste for their discussion on the subject check out the post at http://lesswrong.com/lw/1oc/you_cannot_be_mistaken_about_not... (where the above quote comes from) and everything it links to.
Edit: Figure out how to do it with other sorts of drugs, like non-recreational stimulants, and I would be all over it. Caffeine that I can turn off when I get home? Yes please.
Note that there's nothing expensive about drugs, I remember reading that the cost of manufacturing a gram of cocaine is about 50 cents
the one common element is that all "highs" are caused by ligands with very specific molecular properties binding to neurotransmitters. a headband will never be able to bind to a neurotransmitter.
Hiker and Voger's work [1] (and a bunch of others, just look for DBS and dopamine) which looks at Dopamine response and Gandiga and Hummel [2] who look at tDCS and whether its effects are effective in neuroretraining, or in the case of our hobbyists, enhancing existing neurotraining.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.10297/abstrac...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245705...
the second study is completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make. not trying to be mean but i just don't understand how a study about the efficacy of tDCS in studies is related to possible recreational effects from tDCS/DBS.
LSD breaks down almost instantly in the body yet the effects continue on for 10-12 hours. Receptor binding might be a trigger for these states but it's a stretch to say it's central to the bio-molecular cascade that then produces these states.
I'm long on tie-dye. People will still enjoy advertising what sort of highs they enjoy.
It worked extremely well. I feel that I typically have a very hard time concentrating on learning new skills due to day-to-day constant context switching (I'm a Sysadmin/Devops by day).
I use Modafinil to focus and tCDS to boost my skills acquisition/retention rate. I haven't done any sort of study on myself to measure control vs tCDS time, but I definitely "feel" an increased rate of moving up the skills ladder (in this case, learning French, Spanish, and Russian).
For example, one of the potential drawbacks from focus drugs is that you lose creativity. What makes you sure your were getting a net win?
I'm very skeptical that there is really such a thing as a free lunch when it comes to synthetic cognitive enhancements.
That being said, I do believe physical fitness, diet, and adequate sleep seem to be massive cognitive enhancers when correctly applied.
I selected a provider (who ships from India) based on reviews from this sub-reddit. They accept my payments in bitcoins.
I haven't noticed a loss in creativity, but I think creativity in itself is something extremely difficult to measure or quantify. I attempted to join experiments being done by several labs across the country (with regards to tCDS), and was declined by all. It was then I went on to do it myself.
I agree with your last statement completely. I work no more than 8 hours a day, get at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night now, and eat in a much more healthy fashion.
I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Siever is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the tCDS doing anything or not.
Further scientific study in this field should be very interesting indeed.
The era of personalized medicine is just beginning and these sort of devices seem unusually well-suited for that sort of approach.
Now imagine a drug which has this effect: half the time it makes people better (often quite a bit better). 30% of the time it has no effect, and 20% of the time it has a NEGATIVE effect - it makes people WORSE along the metric being measured.
(one example of a treatment that has this sort of outcome pattern: exercise. If you measure blood pressure or cholesterol levels, it helps many but hurts some (about 12%) and has no effect on others(about 20%))
A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders.
In contrast, a "quantified self" personal science study where somebody carefully tracks their statistic and tries out an intervention while doing some A/B comparisons, is likely to discover whether they ARE or ARE NOT a positive responder. If they ARE, further experimentation can help find the best dose regimen for their particular situation.
(of course, if we knew and could measure exactly which factors make some people positive responders and others negative responders, then we could test in the traditional way. But until we DO know that, studying at the individual level is often the best or even the only available way to figure out how to help individuals.)
As for my "IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent" bit, I'll just note that big controlled studies are sometimes abandoned when an intervention is SO successful it is deemed unethical to deny the treatment to the control group.
It'd also find a higher standard deviation in the experimental group, which, especially if the data had been graphically plotted, would trigger an f-test to check for increased variance. Finding the increase would then become the main result and one could start looking for predictive variables. (F-tests might not be statistics 101, perhaps, but it's 102.)
> As for my "IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent" bit, I'll just note that big controlled studies are sometimes abandoned when an intervention is SO successful it is deemed unethical to deny the treatment to the control group.
Usually after checking that the interim data is statistically-significant enough, assuming this wasn't built into the study design from the start as an adaptive experimental design...
"Spicy pepperoni pizza late at night gives me heartburn; I feel better when I stick to milder foods."
"My stomach hurts when I eat cheese."
"I feel great when I get around 8 hours of sleep, I get grumpy when I only have 4 hours and I feel groggy if I stay in bed for more than 10 hours."
"If I drink caffeine after 7pm, I have trouble getting to sleep."
"Gin makes me sick, but vodka is fine."
Somehow, all of those seem like PERFECTLY REASONABLE statements, even though they are anecdotal and based on a sample population of one. Nobody says this is invalid information because it wasn't double-blind and there was no control group. Nobody ever says, to paraphrase the upstream comment I responded to:
> I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Joe is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the {pizza, cheese, caffeine, sleep...} doing anything or not.
Right?
But if Joe says: "When I zap myself with tCDS it helps relieve my depression", he DOES get that sort of complaint!
Why is that? Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"? Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?
There is a weird and (I think) inappropriate double standard at work here.
When we do double blind placebo controlled studies we find that knee arthroscopy for some conditions is no better than placebo.
> Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"?
It isn't okay to tell people to do exercise to treat their depression unless you have some kind of evidence to back that up. The evidence is weak, and the effect is small, but more research needs to be done. (http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004366/exercise-for-depressi...)
It is not okay to tell people to go to bed earlier to treat their depression unless you have evidence to back that up. I can think of a bunch of pros and cons for going to be earlier. I wouldn't voice my uninformed opinion in a national newspaper, and I wouldn't want that national newspaper to trumpet my uninformed opinion as a facty truthy comment.
> Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?
My position is that he doesn't know any of those things, not that he can know two of them but not the last one. Especially things like your gin / vodka example: I'd want evidence. Get a bunch of people in a room. Dip the rim of some drinking glasses in gin, and fill the glasses with cold tonic water. Observe. They're not drinking any alcohol, but they do have loosened inhibitions.
So far I've just spoken about the need for a trial. Good quality trials are always needed. Cognitive biases are very strong, and very hard to protect against, and can cause people to undergo lengthy, risky, poor quality "treatment" that just doesn't work. (There are many good books about this. "Bad Science" is a good quick read.)
Let's look at some other flags that might cause us to want better data, rather than just accept his word.
He sells the device for $600. Right there is a big flag.
Either he knows it doesn't work (I don't think this is the case) and he's a scumbag, cynically exploiting people. Or he really does think it works, and he wants to help people. Either way, better data is a good thing. Better data helps us stop the scumbags, and better data helps people like him sell the device and treat ill people.
The only problem is the DIY crowd. A 9V battery is not exactly under regulation. What people do with their body is their problem.
Tell that to the people behind drug laws, and abortion laws, and sodomy laws, and, and, and...
Sounds like an urban legend, but if you read the back and forth on it, it's rather interesting.
induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field,
If I could double my cognitive ability for 5 years, then die from an unknown complication with this type of therapy, I would do it without blinking an eye.
If not, that's an awful lot of life to give up. What utility do you expect from doubling your cognitive ability? (Are the people you observe with far more cognitive ability than you always more happy/effective?)
You're also giving up value from the potential that the enhancement-without-death will become available in year 6.
http://velonews.competitor.com/2013/06/news/new-report-prese...
Erdős took amphetamines for the last 25 years of his life (he lived to 83)
So the question is rather where you want the current to go exactly, but if "reversing" the polarity is bad, it's safe to say EVERYTHING is bad. (Unless you don't mind destroying a part of the brain to get to another part.)
Forget about the journals, forget about peer review, just have evidence. Anecdota have proven to be very unreliable in critical testing scenarios.
"Publish or perish" has replaced the gold of gold standard with tungsten, with everyone related aware of it, but no one doing anything about it.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-...
Thanks for correcting - it was much worse than I remembered.
The bigger issue is potentially getting skin burns by not getting the circuitry hooked up correctly. Or maybe frying your electronic gadgets if you have a magnetic stim device. I guess maybe you could theoretically trigger seizures if you have epilepsy, but in that case you'd be seeing a doctor regularly anyway and wouldn't have to DIY these things.
I'll wait until there's more evidence before I break out the soldering iron.
I know this thinking can be dangerous and contains serious ethical problems, but the factual side of your statement I just can't agree with. Not without more to convince me.
Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch.
The catch may well be trivial from our modern perspective, in the same way that staying up late or using stimulants and so burning some more calories is a trivial catch from the modern perspective ("'oh no', said the fat American man, 'you mean X might cause me to burn some more calories? how awful'"), but until the catch has been identified, tDCS has not been fully understood.
I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway.
I accept that the verdict is still out on tDCS, but am clamoring to reach that verdict.
This is a fairly cynical point of view. But safe. We are not talking about medicine, we are talking about messing with otherwise perfectly healthy people.
Off the top of my head, vitamins and vaccines are the only side-effect free wonder drugs for healthy people. Similarly, clothing is the only body augment to fit this category. (And even then we get it wrong sometimes. Lots of examples from women's fashion in the past and currently the debate about shoes's effects on the knees/back.)
Vaccines have well-characterized death rates and is why things like the smallpox vaccine stopped being administered as soon as possible even though it'd be comforting to have built-in immunity against that nasty biowarfare possibility; and some vitamins have been shown to increase mortality in RCTs.
That's obviously wrong, because the brain is so metabolically expensive that if it was not pulling its weight, it would long ago have shrunk considerably. More intelligence is always better - if the intelligence is not too expensive. (I cover this in the link.)
We make our body better all the time, sometimes there are adverse effects, but that's just more to work on
Evolution is a process, not an endpoint - - it seems highly unlikely that no further improvements to the human body are possible.
That makes a great bumper sticker, but I don't buy it.
Evolution isn't directed. Humans are the product of something that happened to survive in some very specific circumstances. Lots of other things did too: sloths, flies, sea sponges. I'd rather be me than a sea sponge. Maybe there's a potential X that would rather be an X than me.
There are no evolutionary pressures on "I'd rather be".
http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics
For example, evolution could easily have failed to make enhancements that would burn too many calories, because food used to be scarce.