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RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance sharp-shooting ability. At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of
by louprado 10y ago
RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance sharp-shooting ability.
At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of loss when the tCDS system was no longer available to her. She sounded like a drug addict that pines for that feeling of their first high and then risks spending their life in vain trying to recover that feeling.
If your life literally depends on a skill and supervised tCDS can improve it, then the reward may outweigh the unknown risks. But for other tasks/skills, it is difficult to justify.
Edit: typos, clarity
http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana
- spdustin 10y agoA quote from the reporter's blog [0]: "When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up." I'll be honest, that is a pretty compelling testimonial for many folks. [0]: http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-through-electrochemistry/ http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-th...
- djtriptych 10y agoSimilar feeling to transcendental meditation. You can change your brain..
- kbenson 10y agoFrom that blog post: And then, finally, the main question: what role does doubt and fear play in our lives if its eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we’re freed from them? If we all wore these caps, would the world be a better place? That's a really interesting thought. Not so much "would the world be better", as there is a presumption present in that question that more rational decision making is necessarily better, but if tDCS works similar to how it did with her with other people, we might have a way to study rational decision making in groups in interesting ways.
- srtjstjsj 10y agoIt's a leap to say that suppressing doubt and fear makes people more rational. It could just as well make people more impulsive.
- kbenson 10y agoI'm not sure it is that much of a leap. That's not to say that a person will be rational by suppressing those emotions, but as long as the emotions are suppressed, but not the information about any situations that led to those emotions, the person may be able to more objectively assess a situation. That is, there are assumptions involved, but I think a case could be made that emotions are a way to bypass rational thought when it's less efficient, useful (too slow for the situation) or lack of information (or lack of our own capability) causes us to fall into local maxima thinking (e.g. love, distrust of the different, etc). If tDCS helps test this in some manner, that would also be good. We of course need a lot more information on what tDCS actually does first though. It's entirely possible that the described effects are not what is happening at all, just what it feels like. Measuring the state of the mind is weird.
- qrybam 10y agoIt's also a leap to say the world would be a better place. One person's version of rationality can be quite different to another's. Imagine of someone feels that the only rational thing for them to do is to do something "normally rational" people would find irrational- like kill your neighbour's dog because it's bark is keeping you up at night, but social pressures, anxiety and fear actually keep them in check from the perspective of the whole population. Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off?
- kbenson 10y agoWell, rationality doesn't exist in a vacuum. Those societal pressures are taken into account in a rational choice. > Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off? Possibly? If your goal is the ultimate advancement of the self, then sociopathic tendencies might yield the best results. We've evolved to have strong emotions regarding our offspring and those of our tribe, because that's proven a beneficial strategy for the species, but that is, in some respect, to the detriment of the individual. Most of us are fine with this decision, because of our feelings regarding our and our future offspring, but if you have no care for family, friends or the species as a whole, then gaming the system for your own advancement is probably the rational choice. There are interesting implications to your sentence though. The blogger explained the loss of (generally perceived as) negative emotions, but what if they were not put in a situation to notice, or were unable to because of the condition itself, a loss in what we generally perceive as positive emotions, such as empathy and sympathy? This of course assumes that there was some emotional state change, and it wasn't a placebo effect.
- onetwotree 10y agoThat's exactly how many addicts describe their first experience with drugs and/or alcohol.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up Sounds remarkably similar to what happens as a result of various techniques of meditation - but, of course, I've no way to tell whether it's actually the same thing.
- mroll 10y ago> ...then the risk may outweigh the reward I think you mean the reward may outweigh the risk
- louprado 10y agoThanks. I just corrected that.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoLarry Niven arguably predicted the existence of wireheads, although his wires ran directly to the brain's pleasure center.
- praptak 10y agoSuppose you can achieve happiness with a wire to the brain. Is there a good argument against doing this?
- chrischen 10y agoIt would short circuit your normal reward-action feedback loop. We don't live to trigger the reward, we are rewarded to live.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoSo how does addiction work?
- chrischen 10y agoAddiction works like that (what I said above). It's bad because it gives you no reason to do the stuff you'd normally have to do to stay alive or reproduce.
- collyw 10y agoRubbish, most smokers are addicted, and get on with life fine.
- chrischen 10y agoSmoking is different from dopamine releasing drugs. Smoking's addiction mechanic isn't dopamine release. Dopamine is the body's natural pleasure signal and short circuiting that would cause the issues I mentioned.
- steve19 10y agoThey improved her ability to play a shooting video game. Quite honestly, those games ("simulations") are like Counter Strike on adderal. They are nothing like the real deal. They certainly do not teach precision sharp shooting. What they do teach is reaction times and hand eye coordination (see bad guy, point gun, pull trigger, repeat). Let's hope the CSGO community never find out about this and start trying to juice themselves with 9v batteries.
- lurkinggrue 10y agoTypical wirehead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)