In The Simplest terms, What is "Pleasure"?

[LSLGuy]

@ralph124c

This is sort of like “aversion” therapy. If drug addicted people could be given a drug that would stop the original drug from causing pleasure, would the addiction stop? Again, my idea is not to substitute one addiction for another-it is to get the original addiction removed. Why inject a possibly dangerous drug if you can flip a switch?

You’re not listening Ralph. Flipping a switch would have almost exactly the same adverse consequences on the addict.

Folks who have the mentality to become drug addicts today would immediately become electrostim addicts if it became widely available. And would be equally unable to work, participate in a family, or do any of the stuff we associate with being a productive member of society. We’d have all the same public health / social problems and the individuals would have almost all the same chronic individual health problems.

And of course any attempt by gov’t to regulate the supply of such machines would simply create a black market for them. No different than the current black market for drugs.

You need to attack the problem one or more layers upstream. Stop the underlying desire for the effects of altered consciousness. But good luck with that. Almost no-one is addicted to hitting themselves with a hammer. But some folks enjoy that. And some of those become addicted to it.

Desiring to stop addiction is tantamount to desiring to stop enjoyment. Once nobody can experience pleasure in any way, then human nature would be addiction-proof. But not before.

[Wesley_Clark]

http://neuroscience.mssm.edu/nestler/brainRewardpathways.html

Reward system

I’d be lying if I said I understood that stuff, but I think those are the agreed upon brain areas. Happiness is something other than pleasure (among other things, happiness has to do with more activity in the left prefrontal cortex and less in the right. Neuroticism is the opposite).

A risk of stimulating the pleasure centers is that people will lose the pleasure that comes from things like eating, sex or socialization. That is probably partly why drug addicts lose so many social relationships, the parts of the brain that are supposed to be rewarded by healthy friend and family relationships are being rewarded by the drugs instead. An electrostimulator would probably do the same thing.

[Blue_Blistering_Barnacle]

@Haldurson

Niven wrote about ‘wireheads’ who were people who would starve themselves to death while hooked up to an electrical stimulation device. He also wrote about a weapon called a Tasp (I believe) that remotely stimulated a target’s pleasure center in order to disable him or her. They were incredibly illegal in Known Space, because anyone hit by a Tasp was more susceptible to becoming a wirehead.

There is actually experimental evidence for this phenomenon, at least with animals. I think it was with mice – they’d actually starve themselves or electrocute themselves in order to receive pleasurable stimulation.

@rowrrbazzle

Also the stories of Larry Niven.

And this article: The Curious Case of a Woman Addicted to Her Brain Implant

Larry Niven wrote all this stuff ages ago. I think Niven is hugely underappreciated, hardly ever mentioned in any newspaper or magazine sci-fi reviews. (But often mentioned on SDMB, Yay! Dopers!)

[LAV25]

I remember seeing a film clip from the…50s? 60s? Grainy black and white, anyway, where there was a middle aged woman who had had wires put into her brain, perhaps it’s the same as the above-mentioned “Curious Case”. Anyway, she and the doctor joked about the one wire that “went all the way down,” presumably stimulating the portion of her brain connected to her genitalia. She just kept grinning and pushing the button…