Dopamine, attention, working memory, neuronal groups and the prefrontal cortex

YouTube video messed up, use this one http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=591916852334

Funky quotes

"We're not playing"
-- Craig Venter on accusations of playing God, 2008

"We slaughter our finest impulses every day"
-- Henry Miller, 1949

"You should try the cheap substitute, it's pretty good"
-- Daniel Dennett on free will, 2008

"To be honest I hope we never get too good at this."
-- Neurosurgeon Patrik Blomstedt talking about deep brain stimulation, 2008

"the moral issues surrounding biotechnology are so primitive compared to the complexity of the phenomena"
-- Robert Harrison, 2005

"externally controlled shaping of appropriate behaviors might be accomplished through using pleasure-yielding stimulation as a positive reinforcement for wanted responses"
-- Robert Heath, 1972

"I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."
-- Heather Whitestone (Miss Alabama 1994)

"The slippery slope I think is a very unhelpful metaphor. When you're thinking about slippery slopes you need to know how slippery they are, what the coefficient of friction is and indeed what way they're pointing."
-- Raymond Tallis on assisted dying

"See that thing in this image that looks like a Martian vehicle descending by parachute to the surface of Mars? That's the Phoenix lander, captured in mid-drop, still glowing from entry into the atmosphere, by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. How badass awesome is it to be a human? Super badass awesome."
-- Cory Doctorow, 26 May 2008

"This is really a profound challenge to the way most of us think about ourselves. I mean we we we think there is some core to who I am, to who you are, there is something essential that is continuous that kinda defines who we are. You're saying, from this scientific perspective you're mapping out, that that's an illusion."
-- Steve Paulson in conversation with James Hughes about transhumanism

"However odd or uncomfortable the idea of engineering the human brain might seem, if yours is broken enough, the philosophical arguments cease to hold any water: you just want it fixed." .. "What bit of themselves would each of us wish to control? Where would we direct our own transcranial magnetic stimulator, if we could? It's a terrible responsibility to shoulder. What is the mind that's choosing the shape of its own brain?"
-- Quinn Norton, 2009

Wolfram Alpha

I just woke up and realized Wolfram Alpha went live during the night. I don't know what to make of this search engine that isn't a search engine yet. But I asked it for the chemical structure of dopamine and I got it. And how could you not love its error message:

Big words

existential density
natural selection
a conscious chaos that won't let go

new desire
a new desire, worth living and dying for
a war of words
bare bones
brain bled dry
icy sun rising

it won't stop till you wise up you know
accept it
it's the purest rage of frustration you've ever felt, nothing more

pointless behaviour and moral ignorance
dopaminergic logic
the instinct trickling down your spine
and in the woods, animals eat eachoter

but
emphasise the creation of positive feedback loops
stop stressing
it is warmer on the other side
nothing can be red and green all over, yet this is irreducible to logic

what's your configuration?
why this obsession with relative inferiorities; with desires turned into systems?
you're a healthrisk
you're social sugar

resuscitation
sexual attention
expression of affection and psychadelic drugs
anatomy of the medial forebrain bundle

listen, it's simple
stay optimistic
try new things
and exercise self-control
the world, my friend, is an extension of the breast: it was Socrates who erected the idea of a different world; an anti-monism; an appearance-reality split

but i digress

scientific expressionism
flattening our subjectivity; our private religion
man as a meaning making machine
an intellectual smuggler
profoundly disrupted by technology
seeking physical and spiritual release

and that is the intellectual and moral spirit of the age
a neurobiology of meaning
skipping from urge to urge
impulse to consume information; calories; dopamine - it's all the same
a crowded skull
a brain distrustful of its own frontal lobes

frontal lobes... I look forward to a day when amygdala, frontal lobe and midbrain will be as familiar to people as heart, lung and liver; when people know their DNA, brain structure and chemical profile as they now know shoe size, blood group and favourite food

emancipation from folk psychology
embracing disenchantment
true self-governance
and never again accepting a normative value as a fact

indeed

imagine how the world will change as we gain more controll over the chemistry of our own minds

What we need to accelerate biomedical research and fight aging

A few hundred years ago I could not have been born. I was massive - 4.9 kg - and the birth eventually turned caesarean and took many long hours. I owe my life to medical science. One day, 11 years later, I was out biking and realized for the first time that the annihilation following my death would be infinite. Now, 25 years after my complicated birth, I think a lot about whether medical science, rejuvenation research of the SENS variety in particular, will save me a second time.

Sciences from genetics to pharmacology to artificial intelligence have run into the quagmire of complexity. How can we model and manipulate complex systems when the numbers of variables are enormous and the combinatorial possibilities seem endless? How can we search and find genuine cures for cancer and HIV when the little buggers are the playground of evolution itself? How can we interfere with the aging process when the ways in which aging is expressed in the body could fill an encyclopaedia?

The solution will probably involve a concerted move to vast, quasi-open repositories of research data that can be crawled by statistical algorithms (Anderson 2008, Halevy et al 2009). But good research data is expensive and progress is slow. High-throughput research centres are rare. If you agree with me that drastic methods are called for, here is my suggestion:

What we need to accelerate biomedical research and fight aging

1. Safe and inexpensive brain surgery

To do better biomedical research we need better control over the chemistry of our own brains. Specifically, we need safe and inexpensive application of deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants to the reward circuit of anyone who wants it. This sounds daunting but fortunately it's happening already. DBS to the reward circuit turns out to be an extremely effective treatment for various psychiatric conditions: in February of 2009 Medtronic received FDA approval to use the procedure to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, and clinical trials for depression, potentially a much larger patient group, are well under way (read the press release here). More generally, DBS is becoming standard treatment in late-stage Parkinson's disease, dystonia and tremor. The most popular implant - Medtronic's Activa system - has been applied to more than 40.000 patients since 1997, and DBS is currently being explored as a treatment option for everything from epilepsy and chronic pain to anorexia and obesity. The risk of serious complications such as hemorrhage is currently at 1-3% and the cost of the procedure is at €30.000 (not counting the cost of regular follow-ups). By comparison, plastic surgery generally cost ca $3.000-6.000. Give it a few years.


2. Widespread use of enhanced motivation through deep brain stimulation

Electrodes in the reward circuit can generate highly rewarding brain stimulation (RBS) in rats and humans alike (Wise 1996 , Heath 1972). In human patients, this is carefully avoided - DBS implants in the reward circuit are used merely to normalize brain activity (Schlaepfer et al, 2008). In rats however, RBS has been used as a powerful operant reinforcer to motivate animals to perform various behaviours, such as run on treadmills, lift weights and learn new skills (Burgess et al 1991, Garner et al 1991, Hermez-Vasquez et al 2005). There is every reason to assume that the same kind of training could be utilized by human beings with DBS implants in their reward circuits.

If brain surgery could be made as safe and inexpensive as plastic or dental surgery, I believe millions would opt for an implant that gave them the artificial incentive necessary to enjoy challenging behaviours for several hours every day: RBS for every stroke on a rowing machine; RBS for every correct answer on a maths-tutorial; RBS for learning a new language or skill; RBS for drug-free urine samples; RBS for anything you normally wouldn't know how to get done. Given the enormous health-benefits of regular physical exercise, it is quite possible that RBS-driven exercise would pay for itself on a societal level and eventually be recommended by doctors. How would you spend two daily hours of artificial motivation?


3. RBS-driven research centres and biomedical outsourcing

Obviously, a project as ethically charged as this one would require legislation and policy to prevent abuse. Hospitals and private clinics would carefully regulate which behaviours were allowed artificial reinforcement: physical exercise, sure, as long as there's a time limit; academic learning, maybe, as long as there's no way to cheat. I believe a third form of behaviour - RBS-driven research - would also be permitted. That is, it would be possible to set up research centres, similar to blood banks, where volunteers with DBS implants could come to participate in basic biological or medical research, using pedagogical instruction (e.g. JoVe, bioscreencast), with RBS being delivered at key points in the protocols to drive enthusiasm for mundane and repetitive tasks: RBS for getting the PCR going; RBS for having pipetted all the antibodies onto microarrays; RBS for getting the samples from the freezer; RBS for each classified blot; RBS for each autoclaved tray of equipment. You get the idea.

Such research centres, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers world-wide, working a few hours every week, would allow something we could call biomedical outsourcing - industry, hospitals and academic institutions could request large quantities of data without having to organize and finance the necessary research. 100 volunteers working four hours per week could save an institution more than a quarter million euro every year and would free scientists up to pursue more challenging tasks. With a sufficient number of volunteers, research would accelerate dramatically, particularly in fields such as biology where much of the practical work is monotonous and requires little or no understanding of the broader purpose of the techniques involved.