16 ms·
A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time
- krm01 5y agoI wonder how healthy this actually is. Isn’t pain a signal the brain uses to alert you about a detected problem? Just eliminating the sensation of pain could mean your body would be unable to signal an issue that needs to be resolved.
- jakogut 5y agotry: perform_task() except: pass
- juandazapata 5y agoIt is. Excerpt from [1] > An inability to feel pain and temperature often leads to repeated severe injuries. Unintentional self-injury is common in people with CIPA, typically by biting the tongue, lips, or fingers, which may lead to spontaneous amputation of the affected area. In addition, people with CIPA heal slowly from skin and bone injuries. Repeated trauma can lead to chronic bone infections (osteomyelitis) or a condition called Charcot joints, in which the bones and tissue surrounding joints are destroyed. 1: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/congenital-insensitivity-to-pain-with-anhidrosis/ https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/congenital-insens...
- jliptzin 5y agoYou don’t have to completely eliminate it. Maybe someone suffering from cluster headaches only has to go through a migraine level of pain to realize there is a problem, not suffer through childbirth level pain every time an attack comes on.
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoThis is why leprosy is terrible. No pain sensation when body is damaged even by the patient, themselves.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoComplete elimination of pain is probably not a good idea, for sure. But the ability to actively shut off pain once you've acknowledged the problem, or at least numb it down to it not being completely debilitating, could be useful.
- Osiris 5y agoI recently had a very large kidney stone and let me tell you... It was bad enough to make me vomit. In cases like this it would be great to be able to self-medicate the pain. However, I can also see how it could be abused to say "ah, it's not that bad" and not have the problem resolved. In my case, it could lead to permanent kidney damage.
- throwanem 5y agoI had a 5mm stone in late 2018. Even if a therapy based on this research had existed at that time, I doubt anyone would have suggested brain surgery when I presented with an acute abdomen at the ER. Granted I did end up having to have surgery for another stone the following year, but that surgery definitely did not have anything to do with my brain beyond anesthesia. That's not really the end of a human in which urologists specialize, you know? It'd be one thing if I had a pre-existing chronic pain condition for which I'd already had such an implant installed, but even in that case I'd have to have enough access to ongoing care to have someone I could call and say "this hurts in a way that's new." The implant itself would need the same kind of management as does a pacemaker or ICD, I imagine. So it seems not tremendously likely that the scenario you describe would play out in practice. (In any case, I'm good enough at withstanding pain that I waited two full days before deciding it was time to go to the ER, and even at that raised the mild suspicion of the doctor who attended me on the basis of how I wasn't screaming, vomiting, swearing, or otherwise showing much of anything beyond being pale and dehydrated. If it hadn't been for CT results unquestionably showing the calculus, I might've had some trouble with being misidentified as a drug seeker. So I'm not super sure the implant poses much more of a risk for inadvertent self-harm, you know? If I'd been in a worse way than I was, I could well have lost a kidney entirely through sheer stubbornness, no brain implant required.)
- 5y ago
- root_axis 5y agoSometimes this would be preferable to the alternative.
- Tarucho 5y agoAt first I thought the same as you, but for some chronic illnesses as rheumatoid arthritis where there is a lot of pain but no cure, the ability to turn pain on/off as needed (and under proper guidance) is probably something good.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ashes-of-sol 5y agoPerhaps in someone with normal pain response, sure. But there are conditions which result in being in an almost constant state of pain. I could see this being a very useful tool in regaining some quality of life for people trying to manage these conditions.
- BeetleB 5y ago> Isn’t pain a signal the brain uses to alert you about a detected problem? It's a controversial topic, many believe that some of the pain your brain generates is for a problem it thinks you have, but don't. Usually this comes up in the context of back pain. When you start reading up on certain types of chronic pain, there are quite a few "Doctors cannot find any physical problem causing the pain." Usually no treatment works for these people, as there is no problem to solve, except perhaps a brain anomaly. Of course, disabling all pain would be a bad idea.
- iseethroughbs 5y agoThe article speaks about using this as a way to escape addiction to painkillers. Not so fast. Addiction is a phenomenon that predominantly happens in the brain, due to it constantly adapting to find homeostasis. And being unable to perceive pain when you should be is not homeostasis.
- canadianfella 5y agoWhat’s your point?
- bawolff 5y agoIt definitely didn't work well in that star trek episode where garak gets addicted to his pain implant. https://youtu.be/ESo8MM01Qv8 https://youtu.be/ESo8MM01Qv8
- Jarwain 5y agoCouldn't this cause addiction to the implant instead? Or really nasty "withdrawals" if the implant is removed? Wouldn't be very different to opioids or painkillers; just different mechanisms if action for similar phenomenon
- alisonkisk 5y agoFTA: > What’s especially neat is that the stimulated brain region normally doesn’t generate any sense of euphoria, the downfall of opioids. This means it’s likely to decrease the chance of addiction. And because the system only stimulates the brain when it detects pain signals, it lowers the chance the brain adapts to the stimulation.
- hn8788 5y agoYeah, seems like you could get "spoiled" by it and lack the mental resiliance to tolerate any pain if it's removed.
- maybeOneDay 5y agoI think it means avoiding prescription of addictive substances rather than helping addicts. Unless I'm reading your comment wrong?
- warent 5y agoI always feel so confused by--and skeptical of--these kinds of brain implant technologies. It says: "The chip then automatically triggers a light beam to stimulate the region, activating neurons that can override pain signals." Isn't that potentially stimulating millions or even hundreds of millions of neurons? We don't know what each individual neuron is doing. How is it possible to do this without causing bizarre malfunctions of the brain at best, or completely lobotomizing someone at worst?
- mrtksn 5y agoIt sounds like they depend on the smoke test, doesn't it? Despite the huge advancements in biological sciences, when I get interested in something and read about it I would encounter the "We don't know why exactly it works but it works" much more often than I am used to. It feels so wrong.
- meepmorp 5y agoLife follows a simple set of rules with an extensive set of exceptions.
- wallacoloo 5y agoNitpicking here, I would tweak the wording: > Life follows a simple set of heuristics with an extensive set of exceptions. And that's OK: heuristics allow a person to intuit some high-level behavior without having to derive it from the lower-level rules (laws). It's readily admitted that the heuristic isn't 100% accurate, and when it's inaccurate you fall back to that explicit derivation process. From the outsider view of biology, there appear to be many heuristics for which we don't know how to derive from the underlying laws. Chemistry, at various points in time, has had similar issues, but over time we've expanded the amount of things we can derive from underlying physics. Biology, I hope, will follow in time.
- letswim420 5y agoDon't have access to the PDF but they might be using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics This requires genetically engineered mice, which is why they only have this working for mice?
- xwdv 5y agoI wonder if there’s any point in using this for military applications.
- polypodiopsi 5y agoZynically this instantly came to my mind, too.
- isuckatcoding 5y agoHave you watched the Manchurian Candidate?
- qayxc 5y agoPain is a vitally important function of the central nervous system. Children born without the ability to feel pain (congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis/HSAN IV) rarely live to puberty. There's very little to be gained from an implant that continuously supresses pain in an otherwise healthy person. It dramatically increases the risk of dying from preventable infections or permanently damaging tissue, bones and ligaments due to overburdening, untreated lesions or fractures. It'd basically decrease combat readiness in the long run.
- silverlight 5y agoReminds me of The Terminal Man
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoReminded me of Darkman, personally.
- jacobwilliamroy 5y agoYesterday I visited a friend with late stage cancer. He hasn't eaten or drunk anything for a few days. He doesn't really talk or move around anymore. I was just thinking a system like this would be perfect for him, if he could activate his morphine pump every time he feels pain. It's hard for his family to tell when they need to push the morphine button right now because he's non-verbal.
- jcims 5y agoI don't know how well you know his family, but it would be good for them to get some advice from others that have been in that situation. I was in their shoes last year and it was incredibly stressful. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective.
- bserge 5y agoLate stage meaning incurable? If that's the prognosis, why not just end their suffering?
- nceqs3 5y agoEasy to say when you are not the one with cancer.
- voidnullnil 5y agoGuess how can I tell this thread is bait without even opening it.
- deeviant 5y ago> For now, the device has only been tested in rats. Right, I'll be sure to check back in 10-15 years.
- collyw 5y agoThat's better than the covid vaccines!
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoIs this supposed to be a joke? The vaccines had extensive human and animal testing.
- Caylio 5y ago"extensive"
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoMore than almost any other vaccine in history, despite the scare media from universally politically aligned fringe sources
- 5y ago
- sturza 5y agoIf we're not in pain, we're not alive.
- echelon 5y ago> If we're not in pain, we're not alive. That's a silly assertion. Pain isn't a hallmark of life--physical, mental, or otherwise. There's no 'merit' to it. There are plenty of organisms without pain receptors that are definitely alive. Pain doesn't correlate with how alive we are or the worth of our lives. Chronic pain sufferers would certainly rather not have pain.
- collyw 5y agoIt's often said about suffering, which pain is a subset of.
- bobmichael 5y agoYour assertion is equally as silly though. Pain is not necessary for life, but it definitely has a lot of merit as a survival mechanism and danger signal.
- austinjp 5y agoBuddhists might disagree, although there's a distinction between pain and suffering. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
- sturza 5y agoI think of pain as A signal, not the only one. So, to correct my assertion, i would say that we're not alive with the set of signals we have now. Then i would consider that alive means that we experience the same signals. BUT that means that a blind person is not alive. My initial statement is not accurate now.
- Sr_developer 5y agoHell no! Pain is one of the biggest causes of human suffering. Having said that, until something better is "invented" pain is absolutely necessary, all those people who cannot feel or have a high tolerance to pain are always hurting themselves involuntarily. You lose your feedback signal.
- papito 5y agoThere is a neural disorder where people can't feel pain, and it's hell. You live your life wrapped in protective gear.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoI'm sure there's a middle ground between our default level of evolutionary baggage and no pain at all though. I wouldn't mind keeping burns and broken bones being painful, but I'd love to do away with minor annoyances like stinging nettles, wasps, and things like that. Also being able to turn off pain to a specific problematic area would be nice too, I have a permanent headache from a neurological issue and it'd save me a lot on the quantities of CBD that goes into keeping that at bay!
- shkkmo 5y agoI think the useful distinction is between acute pain, which is generally very useful, and chronic pain, which has huge negative effects with no known upside.
- icelandicmoss 5y agoAgree. I recently read Pain is Really Strange (Steve Haines) and it was such a perspective shift on my understanding of how different the two are. (The illustrations are fantastic as well.) https://uk.singingdragon.com/products/pain-is-really-strange https://uk.singingdragon.com/products/pain-is-really-strange
- anotherman554 5y agoImagine if you could turn down pain like hitting the snooze button on an alarm. "Yes, I know my bone has been broken and I'm working on addressing it, please snooze all pain signals from that area for an hour."
- omgwtfbbq 5y agoDon't think thats the intent here. Rather to help treat people with debilitating chronic pain.
- varispeed 5y ago> What’s especially neat is that the stimulated brain region normally doesn’t generate any sense of euphoria, the downfall of opioids. This means it’s likely to decrease the chance of addiction. Ok, this is such a nonsense. Addiction is not caused by euphoria - it's caused because people can't stop taking it because of nasty withdrawals. Now, when you are using it for chronic pain, you don't usually feel any euphoria, but pain relief. I've been using prescribed opioids for years and I am really anxious about doctors falling for this kind of messaging. If I had my prescription stopped, that would be the end of life for me.
- eplanit 5y agoAnd next comes automatic detection and nullification of thoughts and feelings?
- hirundo 5y agoIf this technique can relieve pain it can likely also cause it, and also cause pleasure. So it has the potential to become a technology for human puppetry. Or for self abuse, as in Larry Niven's wireheads. It isn't hard to imagine various modern regimes willing to implant control devices into prisoners, criminal or political.
- lumost 5y agoThere are a lot of regulatory concerns with these technologies due to this fear. Deep Brain Stimulation implants see the patient growing steadily accustomed to greater levels of stimulation - withdrawing the stimulation triggers deep existential depression. This isn't as significant of a concern with a patient who has chronic untreatable major depression. But there is a legitimate fear that these implants could be used to disastrous effects on healthy individuals.
- after_care 5y agoWe can already cause pain or pleasure easily. This isn’t anything new. Think about how long the history of torture is.
- hirundo 5y agoThat's like, we can already print books, so digitizing them isn't anything new. Or, we can already walk from San Francisco to New York, a transcontinental railway isn't anything new.
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoSo your suggestion to make this seem safer is to say "it's like torture so we already have it?"
- 29athrowaway 5y agoJust by controlling pain you can control a person. If you implant a chip into a person that can remotely cause pain, you now have an electronic torture device, a torture device that does not leave marks.
- codeulike 5y ago... in mice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
- 411111111111111 5y agoDid you expect them to start testing it on humans before mice?
- codeulike 5y agoNo but I expect the 'in mice' to be part of the headline because its quite an important detail
- adtac 5y agoIt sounds very obvious, but there are some macroscopic medical phenomena that apply only to mice and small rodents. For example, I recently learnt that you can freeze hamsters and then "thaw" them in a microwave and they'll just wake and continue to live normally; this doesn't seem to work with humans unfortunately. Just imagine the applications, you wouldn't even need a regional hospitals; just freeze everyone and send them to a centralised mega hospital and ship them back when healed. (As an aside, this was one of the first ever uses of a microwave.)
- cglong 5y agoThis reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. The teenager has an implant that causes stressors to be blurred out, preventing anxiety. <spoilers> During a fight, she starts hitting her mom and, because of the involved stress, she's unable to see the physical damage she's causing, ultimately murdering her. </spoilers> If this was implemented broadly, it'd very quickly lead to reckless/dangerous behavior.
- canada_dry 5y agoEliminating pain != eliminating stress Though more broadly your point is likely correct that it will change some people's behaviour to do dangerous/stupid things because there's no negative feedback.
- aaronAgain 5y agoPlease don't conflate pain relief with impossible-to-avoid-murdering-your-mother-when-you-feel-better syndrome. /s Seriously, if I wasn't in as much pain as I am in then I would be out hugging people. Not hiding in my house, sitting on my hands to numb them and so I avoid touching a mouse for fear of searing pain for several days. I promise I won't lead a (further) reckless life just because my idiopathic pain of 20 years is gone.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoHow is it perceived? As a cessation of pain? Or like early users of morphine described, "There's a pain in the room somewhere but I'm not sure it's mine."
- nszceta 5y agoThe Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event. Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice. https://www.hedweb.com/ https://www.hedweb.com/
- imwillofficial 5y agoLeave it to modern man to think we can rearchitect something so fundamental as pain and pleasure in the human experience without disastrous results.
- educaysean 5y agoLet's think about the internet. Let's think about how it enables us to achieve instant communication all around the globe and freely share and distribute knowledge too great to hold in one's brain. I'd say the modern men are more than capable of overcoming biological barriers once thought to be fundamentally impossible to achieve. It might be a fairly rough road to get there, but I'm certain our understanding of how our brains perceive pain and pleasure will be dramatically different in a 100 years, and it'll be for the better.
- imwillofficial 5y agoAt what cost? What are the second order effects of the glorious revolution?
- bigmattystyles 5y agoAs someone with very mild / low-intensity chronic pain, this is promising. My number one fear, limiting me, is that it will get worse, despite medical assurances that it's unlikely. Tech like this could remove that fear and let me live my life (though with my personality, I have no doubt I will find something else to fixate on). I'm working on it with current approaches, but CBT and ssri's only work so well on me. I won't touch opiates with a ten foot pole, though for now, I don't need them. If I ever did, I'm sure my tune would change really fast. I have also been hopeful of CRISPR targeting of pain, mimicking those with a genetic congenital inability to feel pain. https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/04/01/could-crispr-gene-editing-technology-be-an-answer-to-chronic-pain/ https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/04/01/could-crispr-gene-e... I am watching the progress, but when you suffer from pain and the anxiety from it, nothing comes soon enough. I'm also just a layman - if anyone here knows more and can comment on it, that would be cool. Last, be weary of snake oil when it comes to any medical condition. Many are unscrupulous.
- heavyset_go 5y agoOpioid receptor modulators are being researched as an avenue for treating pain[1]. They don't cause opioid tolerance or addiction, but do offer increased pain relief, and some are available today like CBD, THC and other cannabinoids. They seem kind of promising for pain that's alleviated well with opioids versus non-opioids. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/118/16/e2000017118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/16/e2000017118
- mactournier 5y agoDeep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has some well-known benefits in short term, in diseases such as Parkinson's (ref https://www.nature.com/articles/s41582-019-0145-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41582-019-0145-9). Although, long term effects tend to fade in a lot of cases, and some patients have permanent neurologic damage after the procedure. Although exciting, there are a couple of non-surgical treatments to pain that have to be tried before invasive approaches.
- yewenjie 5y agoI'm curious, what are the preventive precautions to be taken to minimize the chances of chronic pain altogether?
- bootmagic 5y agoSounds similar to what Saluda medical does.
- l1n 5y agoSource paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-021-00736-7 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-021-00736-7
- dizzystar 5y agoThere are people who are unable to feel pain. By all accounts, they live a tough life.
- mpg33 5y agoWhat about panic? Could you disable the amygdala real time?
- pmoriarty 5y agoThere's research that suggests that physical pain is closely related to (if not identical to) emotional pain. If such implants will be able to eradicate physical pain in humans (so far it's only been tested on rats), will it also eradicate emotional pain? Ethical questions immediately crop up, since it's possible that experience of pain in oneself is necessary to develop empathy for others, and without empathy you could get sociopathy or at least less compunction against hurting or killing others. The military would probably love this.
- ryanmarsh 5y agoRemove the pain signals from a human and they will literally rip their body apart. Ask me how I know.
- m0llusk 5y agoThis sounds like a really bad idea. Controlling pain, maybe, but even than raises issues of what exactly is pain and what is control. What people are not seeing here is that pain is a generalized concept in the brain. The pain of loss, the pain of remembering, and so on are also pain and without that pain we are at risk of losing our humility and humanity. I have some personal experience with this in an ex-friend who takes a lot of pain killers and has done a lot of terrible things to me and others apparently in part because he feels no pain over anything he does and hence no guilt. Possibly there is more going on there, but his successful avoidance of pain seems to be a significant contributor to his alienation from society. Life is suffering. No suffering, no life. Putting bounds on that might make some sense, but eliminating it could erase much more.
- buu700 5y agowho takes a lot of pain killers and has done a lot of terrible things to me and others apparently in part because he feels no pain over anything he does and hence no guilt Out of curiosity, what is this conclusion based on? Going off of only what you've said here, insofar as there is a relationship between the painkillers and his antisocial behavior, I would be more inclined to believe any of the following before the idea that a lack of pain somehow directly harmed his morality: * The condition at the root of his pain also has negative neurological/mental effects * The fact that he suffers from serious chronic pain (as opposed a lack thereof) impairs his mental state * Side effects of the painkillers (as opposed to pain relief in and of itself) contribute to his ailing physiological/neurological/mental health
- m0llusk 5y agoGood points and it would be difficult to rigorously say either way. What I would add to this is that all these other factors were in play and then after the painkillers came in everything changed and he went off the deep end. If nothing else this is a point worth at least brief consideration. This is not about whether or not I rigorously tracked my ex friend's descent into evil, it is about whether or not being relieved of pain is the consequence free or limited consequence option that it is being portrayed to be. We used to think polluting wasn't a big deal and we used to think that toxic fire retardants in clothes and furniture wasn't a big deal. As it is if you offer me no more pain ever again medical treatments then I will refuse that.
- 0xF57A 5y agoPain has been localized to a particular region of the brain? When? I’m sure that the location of pain processing in the brain has been known for a long time. Opto-genetics has been around a long time too. I’m sure that this has already been done. Just like neuralink and neural pixels. Every time you mess with the brain you are messing with a tuned system of interdependencies. There will be counter-intuitive consequences from doing something like this. It might interfere with your ability to go into shock after injury. It might perturb fundamental bits of your brain resulting in psychiatric injury. The only way to find out is to try it. Sign me up. There will be winners in the basket of simple electrode interventions.
- ctvo 5y agoThis article is so badly written I had to stop half way through. The random double quotes makes it look like a high school student took over the WordPress installation. > This week, a group from the New York University School of Medicine said “no thank you” to medication altogether. > Once it detects an electrical signal that suggests “pain found,” it sends the information to the “sleeper agent,” a computer chip implanted in the front part of the brain. > Yeah, it’s pretty wild. > But it’s a “blueprint” for tuning the brain to ease pain in the future, the authors wrote.
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoThis is called a "droud" or a "tasp," and it is a terrible idea. It's the perfect drug, and you'll lose all the things pain is there for, like protecting you from harm. Wireheads are aka Krokodil users. I'm not anti-drug, but some mechanisms are outside the human's capacity for self control, and pain remediation is one of those. Put it under someone else's control and you just put that person under someone else's control.
- post_break 5y agoI would have loved to have had my mom get this. She had cancer and was in so much pain. When you ask "why the hell do they even make fentanyl?!" well she's one of the reasons.
- Proven 5y agoNow CCP will develop a version that creates pain in real time, as soon as your Social Credit Score drops below 700
- juanani 5y agoI'm sure some yogis have got this thing down to self-control already. The body does this itself, slowly if unfocused. I'm sure tech is the answer though, it is on HN.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoTasp cf. Larry Niven, Ring World, Louis Wu