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.
A 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.
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.
It'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?
Well, 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.
Psychopaths aren't simply a normal person with some morals turned off. They exhibit a number of other differences, including some that you might consider closer to 'brain damage' than 'rational', like an insensitivity to losses or punishment which makes them show worse performance on the Iowa Gambling Task.
I'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.
Just to address the question of elimination of fear and doubt... This is fairly easy to draw out on a line. Alcohol does a pretty good job of eliminating fear and doubt, as well. There are other problems mixed in with alcohol use, but I spent many years drinking, and having fear and doubt removed from pretty much every interaction, every day. You can ask my friends and family what that was like. I agree though that it would be very interesting for studying decision making if tDCS could modify very specific features like fear or doubt from every individual in a group.
> 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.
They 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.
Although the most famous wirehead (spoiler alert) got a wire installed when he was walking through the park, feeling depressed, and someone shot him with a "tasp", which is a device that stimulates the pleasure centers without wires.
That depends. If your end goal is merely happiness then no, as long as you can still find a way to motivate yourself to eat, get enough physical activity to stay alive and provide yourself at least basic shelter and essentials.
If your end goal isn't happiness but fulfillment or meaning or something else that will also trigger happiness then there's an excellent argument against doing that, since it will eventually become all you do or care about.
Are we talking about happiness or pleasure? A days-long orgasm might be an incredible physical experience, but I doubt the feeling would be the same as seeing my daughter walk for the first time, or achieving a long-sought personal goal.
Addiction 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.
Smoking 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.
Heroin (and the fact that it's a scarce commodity due to legislation first world countries) has the self-harm potential (needles can be used by addicts so many times they actually snap/collapsed veins/'cotton fever') along with social negatives (shared needles=>increased rates of transmittance of hep C and other maladies, petty crime, prostitution (which is a-okay by me if regulated, but addicts who resort to sex working as a means to sustain their habit often are subjected to violent situations) organized crime/gang warfare due to the market effects of prohibition effectively making powdered heroin high purity being incredibly valuable in a fairly transportable form). Nasal consumption can lead to deviated septums, decreased nasal mucosa production, etc (not limited to heroin, habitual insufflation of cocaine exhibits the same effects). Smoking heroin off foil surely can't be good for ones lungs, though I'm not sure specifically what pulmonary effects it would yield.
As long as electricity and the components/knowledge is commonly available, those sociological byproducts are more or less eliminated (though the self-injurious effects have analogous deleterious effects one could argue). Unlike heroin, where the side-effects are well-known (about two hundred years of opium usage in the west, ranging from laudanum in the 19th century among primarily the affluent women of society to Purdue's OxyContin(tm)). We know how mu-opioids are structured molecularly, the pharmacological behavior occurs as they bind to (primarily) mu-opioid receptors in the brain, etc). tDCS main risk factor is (as stated in the article) the fact that it's a fairly new science. Even if properly administered by trained neuroscientists/neurologists/technicians within the field, we're not aware of the long-term 10 year side-effects. The risks increase dramatically if an average Joe is half-informed and tries to administer (or modify) tDCS themselves.
If heroin was legal, safe, and free, I still wouldn't use it.
The state I would be in as a heroin addict has a large negative value in my current utility function. This negative value is so large that it swamps the positive value of being happy all the time. I suspect this just means I'm not entirely hedonistic.
I suffered a pretty horrible Smith's fracture on my dorsal radius two years ago, such that the resident at the ER called his attending, who called the ortho specialist and immediately got 30mg oxycodone's 4x daily just as a stop-gap until they could block in a surgeon skilled enough to work on the Smith's fracture. Even through the egregious pain, I could see a: how those without opiate dependencies can find it euphoric and b: how easily an average person could form a habit without noticing it by escalating consumption.
I've used oxycodone for pain, and have occasionally played with higher dosages. I don't find the effects euphoric. More like numbness, but in a vaguely pleasant way. Or at least, not euphoric in the sense that Psilocybe are. But maybe that's just me. I've never had problems with opiate dependence.
Absolutely not my point. In fact, properly administered IV opiates have less long term damages of administered in than alcohol. (Pill-form opiates of the non-paracemetol fashion have no chance of liver cirrhosis, and the withdrawal has no potential to kill you, unlike sucking down two quarts of plastic vodka a day for 2 weeks then stopping cold.)
There were political benefits to scaremongering tons of drugs into illegality, economic benefits of keeping them illegal (should, say, 5mg generic Perocets enter into CVS tomorrow as over-the-counter and/or on-the-shelf drugs, petty theft might go up [much like I'm sure Robotussin is stolen frequently by high-schoolers who can't find someone to buy them booze]) would put tons of people out of work. There goes a significant part of the DEA (from those out in the field to those who push papers) along with the politicians who made their name during the Reagan-just-say-no-years, the extra police who were hired in more-or-less crimeless-suburbia to deal with some 16 year olds half-gram of weed, the attorneys who prosecute them, the defense contractors who make an excess of tanks in order to give those suburban law enforcers tanks[1].
My overall point was that opioids are a magnitude safer than DIY brain-hacking, if only due to the well-explored terrain of the analgesic properties of the narcotic (which, again, was the point of the article). "Even us neuroscientists/neurologists with extensive graduate school/residencies/fellowships and years of experience still don't know what the long-term effects are when we properly administer controlled dosages of current via well-placed electrodes on your skull. Please don't try to 'hack' your brain."
Sidebar, I'm not a medical doctor but every every grandfather, uncle (except one who went into mathematics as I did), and father all have been practicing MD's (including two neurologists), MD/PhDs, or PhDs in specifically drug design for evil-bigpharma). Drug design is basically 'throw a lot of junk at the wall and see what doesn't kill mice, oh god please make it to at least phase 1". Specifically, we're going to effectively look at our understanding of the brain and compare it to the crudity of surgery during the Civil War. The brain is an amazing thing - don't attach electrodes to it and try to modify its behavior until 'brain hacking' has been well-explored terrain.
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