Have it on my desk in a week, and I’ll co-sign and approve the test site.
This could explain why zombies want eat our BRAINS.
He said red maples, not sugar maples. Completely different.
Besides the need to drill a permanent hole in the skull, there is the fact that test subjects would rather push the button and get stimulation than eat, drink, mate or avoid danger. In Larry Niven’s fiction, the operation is fairly common. One man is murdered by making the wire for his dowd (the device that actually delivers current to the brain) precisely too short for him to reach food and water. He dies of dehydration.
Considering what people will go through for crack, PCP etc do we really want to unleash a stimulus that is by all indications more pleasurable?
Nitpick: That’s droud.
[sub]get the science fiction right, and the science should take care of itself[/sub]
Huh? ECT? Transcranial magnetic stimulus?
Like trying to repair a wristwatch wearing boxing gloves and a blindfold.
ECT has a phenomenal success rate for certain kinds of mental illness, far far more than drugs. It is true that its mechanisms are not well understood (IAMND), but it works; the cranial magnetic stimulation has less of a track record.
FWIW, I was hospitalized for a month for clinical depression, after every known cocktail of drugs was tried. Long story short, ECT saved my life.
Which would entail changing output levels of a lotta neuro-widgets across a large chunk of the brain, which ECT would be perfect for. The gentlemen in this thread, however, are looking for something that would cause them to be “totally trippin’ balls, bro” which would require a much finer level of control and precision.
Niven didn’t have to look for story ideas very far : the experiment did happen in the 50s. First with rats : stick an electrode in their nucleus accumbens, hook it to a rat-sized lever, and the rat will pass out and die of hunger and exhaustion before it lets go of the lever.
Then on people. One guy reportedly hit the “pleasure” button 1500 times inside an hour. According to the doc in charge of the experiments, however :
ETA : I still kinda want one of those now, though…
Radiolab may not be the most scientifically vigorous TV/Radio program in the world, but I don’t see how they can be accurately described as “usually broadcast[ing]…woo”.
To me “woo” means junkscience, pseudoscience, magical thinking, beliefs and ideas that exist beyond the observable, physical world. I don’t see how Radiolab supports any of this in any way (though I’ll admit, the guy who sold his feces with worms as a cure for allergies was a bit strange).
Can anyone explain this chain of jokes, beginning with “Snout. Xmex-like snout” ? (I like that one, whatever the hell it means.) I know it would violate the universal laws of esoteric humor (about which a thread is hopping right now), and kill it.
It’s from the book, Qadgop the Mercotan, by Sybly Whyte.
Note: The book Qadgop the Mercotan, by Sybly Whyte, does not exist.
Yet.
It exists in L-Space.
How did the Brits get so good at this stuff?
Well, not to bring down everyone by returning to the subject of the thread, . . . well, there is this.
Human growth hormone exists in the body. HGH is used as a drug. Ditto a couple of dozen other natural drugs, and, in fact hundreds of synthetic molecules use to provide the same chemical actions provided in healthy human bodies.
Changing the rate, balance, or recovery rate of the presence of chemicals is how many drugs work. In fact, some cases the drug specifically binds to another molecule to prevent its ability to link to chemical receptors in the body. Changing the chemistry has an effect, hopefully an beneficial effect.
Tris
I agree with your description of “woo”, and while Radiolab doesn’t openly promote it, a lot of times they imply they believe in it, operating in “just asking questions” mode sort of like I would imagine the Discovery channel does if I were to watch it, as if pseudoscientific explanations are as likely as mainstream scientific ones.
It’s sort of like the inverse of a normal scientific program. The timeline of a normal scientific program would be something like:
– Statement of the problem
– Investigate a pseudoscientific or traditional solution
– Show why this is wrong or unsatisfying
– Show how a scientific solution is discovered.
Radiolab seems to work out like this:
– Statement of a problem
– Interviews with experts declaring the standard accepted scientific solution
– Show why this is wrong or unsatisfying
– Show why the answer may be a new, obscure, untested or unscientific solution.
Then they just end, not backing this up with scientifically satisfying answers (to me at least), implying that the possible far-out solution is the most likely.
It seemed that the worm therapy might have been an exception to this. After all, the program itself wasn’t really making a claim, and unlike many people I do believe that the plural of anecdotes is evidence in some cases.
But I was listening throughout the segment for the hook (no pun intended), and at the end I found it: the guy was selling the worms. BAM! 15 minutes of interesting third party anecdote ruined by conflict of interest.
ETA: they could also do with about 1/3 as much “entertainment-style” editing. It wears thin after a couple minutes.