Neuroscience is only getting started

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

A cure for addiction?

At present, there is no reliable treatment for addiction. However, inhibitory closed-loop deep brain stimulation of the reward circuit might increase cognitive control in patients suffering from addiction.

Electrical inhibition of deep brain structures has been performed since neurosurgeons began doing stereotactic surgery aimed at the thalamus and basal ganglia (Kiss et al, in press). The procedure involves placing one or several implants with their electrode-covered tips in pathologically hyperactive brain regions. Current at inhibitory frequencies is to disrupt or normalize neural activity in the region. The operation takes 8-12 hours and costs ~£25.000. 1-3% of operations result in serious complications. Since 1997, 40.000 patients have recieved a Medtronic's Activa System - the most widely used deep brain stimulation (DBS) implant (Schwalb & Hamani, 2008). Many disorders, including Parkinson's, essential tremor, dystonia and obsessive compulsive disorder are characterized by hyperactive brain regions. Deep brain stimulation is replacing lesioning as standard treatment for these disorders, is EMA and FDA approved and is 'very benificial' in 80% of cases (Gritsun et al, 2006).



I suspect a DBS electrode placed in the human reward circuit could be trained to detect, extracellularly, the unique pattern of spikes, or even the readiness potential, of an unwanted behavior, such as a cue-induced or spontaneous drug-seeking behavior, or consumption of a drug (indicated by a sharp increase in firing frequency) (see Lee et al, 2008, for the latest in closed-loop DBS).

I also think such an implant could be programmed to disrupt activity in the reward circuit upon detection of an unwanted pattern of activity, through application of current at inhibitory frequencies. This should reduce the probability of the behavior being fully expressed or repeated.

This is not suggested as a method for law enforcement or rehabilitation of criminals, although such use is a possibility that should be discussed and probably prevented. Rather, it is suggested as a voluntary cure for addiction. Many addicts experience a profound desire to abstain from their drug of choice but find themselves compelled to increasingly frequent drug-seeking behavior and use. They should have the choice of simply turning their addiction off available to them. Moreover, deep brain stimulation is already being applied to the human reward system (nucleus accumbens) in successful attempts to use current at stimulating frequencies to treat depression (see image below). Furthermore, such implants should make decent iPlants, and patients suffering from addiction may be particularly well-suited for behavioral programming.

Image from Schlapfer (2008) Deep Brain Stimulation to Reward Circuitry Alleviates Anhedonia in Refractory Major Depression


Related material: Deep brain stimulation and exercise

Easter is over, piglet be gone, back to work

Richard Harrison, 1910 - A conversation with Thomas Harrison (iTunes U, 1h3min). This is without reservation the best, most in-depth conversation about this crucial point in history that I've ever come across. The focus is on expressionist artists and authors, and Richard and his brother Thomas have no illusions about the explosive irrationality and the dark that the people of this time finally probed, and saw in themselves and in the future. I have no difficulty understanding why some of Harrison's listeners write that their sanity depends on his show (listen live on Wednesdays 00:00 GMT). Googled 'scientific expressionism', thinking maybe, maybe, but all that comes up is a 2004 exhibition that I don't have access to.

Let me quote you some Nietzsche while I'm at it. From Ecce Homo, written one year before his mental breakdown, two years before his death, ten years before the publication of the book, and twelve years before 1910:

"I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man. I am dynamite."

In other news, here's the best article I've read on the China-Tibet-Olympics issue: Why China might have Olympic regrets (Dominic Lawson, The Independent). And while I'm on about things I'm ashamed to say I didn't know: the number of civilians killed in the 1989 Tianamen Square protests is a three figure number. That's a big number and an instance of Lawson calls "the Chinese Communist Party's almost pathological inability to cope with any genuine form of political opposition". I've yet to find a good analysis of the reasons for this allergy.

Hu Jintao's new year's speech:


Hu Jintao on the road:


And some utterly unrelated schadenfreude:

Piglet approaches

John Micklethwait 'The View From Abroad: Is America Broken?' (iTunes U, 1hr22min). A very interesting UC Berkeley interview with the still quite new editor of The Economist, John Micklethwait. A must for those who read the magazine. Towards the end of the talk John says that even though China's behavior in places like Sudan is outright criminal, it's important to keep in mind that they are building infrastructure (roads etc) at a time when Western countries are still only talking about doing so. The coming China-US/Europe standoff looks more and more like one of ruthless productivity versus ineffective humanism. Bring it on.

Margret Anderson 'The Re-Discovery of the Irrational- Fin de Siecle Pessimism and the Birth of Psychoanalysis' (iTunes U, 1h17min). An excellent lecture on Fin de Siecle mentality that took me further towards understanding my own hangup on this period. The mentality wasn't an extension of the Enlightenment faith in reason and freedom, it was a rejection of it, but one that, although rejecting of the idea that reason overcomes instinct, nevertheless applied that reason, dare I say ruthlessly (Schopenhauer's eastern influences come to mind), in its epic anti-Cartesian de-throning of humanity, which, through the fundamental realization that unconscious forces are responsible for most of what we do, culminated in psychoanalysis. "Suspect the reasons that people offer for their conduct". (But what about the wars, were they unavoidable, will this mentality always end in hubris?)

Margret starts by exemplifying with art from the time (e.g. Munch's Madonna) focusing on the antagonism between the sexes but also on the early liberation of women through Victorian puritanism. Then goes on to discuss Freud and his predecessors (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) at somewhat excessive but still interesting lenght.

In other news, power-generating knee and Google, Microsoft, IBM et al have all joined the OpenID initiative that started in June and aims to eliminate the need for separate logins on different webpages. Good good.

Finally, McCain is winning the republican primaries in the US. Here's a less than brilliant but informative debate on him and his politics (FORA.tv, 1h8min).