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Electric Stimulation as an Alternate to Exogenous Admin of Chemicals?

Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky

Frumious Bandersnatch
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I've been reading studies where electrodes are implanted in rat brains with some precision and elicited are complex behavior patterns, emotional responses, inebriation, excitation, etc.

It is interesting that the more precise the electrode is placed in certain parts of the brain, the more fine-grained the reaction becomes. So, an electrode placed on the amygdala, generally, may elicit a general fear response. But, placed more precisely on the amygdala, may elicit a more fine-grained response, such as merely trembling or just an increase in heart rate.

Is this the future of recreational drug abuse? Will we implant electrodes into our nucleus accumbens, for instance, and experience a dopamine rush. Will we finally isolate where traditional HT agonists are working and implant electrodes that will uniquely stimulate our receptors the way LSD or mescaline does? Can we tweak the stimulation in a way to produce new experiences, new 'psychedelic' states? Will this new technology introduce non-toxic, relatively safe 'drug' experiences?

Oh, and also, this type of thing has vast potential in therapy settings (for recreating experiences, such as select smells (understood through vector spacing), or even putting someone through a pattern of motor movement, etc).

Is this possible or is it just a pipedream at this point?
 
I tend not to believe it. Seems to me that ever more closely targeted drugs have a better chance, simply by virtue of the fact that any invasive, mechanical technique is self-limiting. Aside from some author's fantasy about electrodes implanted at birth, who would submit themselves to this when drugs are really d@mn good (and constantly improving)?
 
It is indeed a lucid thought that one might be able to replicate the positive effects of drugs with electronics one day.

But until i enter a future reality akin to the matrix where i fool my brain so sincerely that a virtual drug will get me high - technologically these days getting high with electricity would be akin to trying to make a renaissance painting with a paint ball gun ......
 
Nice analogy but it might not be as far off as you think. I'm sure many people are aware of many deep brain stimulation therapies. Two of note are for Parkinson's Disease and Depression. In each case electrodes are permanently implanted (e.g. in the deteriorated basal ganglia in the case of PD) and deliver stimulation to release dopamine and stop the tremors characteristic of the disease.
When studying reward and motivational behaviour in rats, electrostimulation of the (dopaminergic) mesolimbic pathway very often replaces traditional food reward, and this has been done as far back as 1959.

Dopamine agonists (meth/amphetamine) could already be feasibly replaced by electrodes in humans, but obviously only researchers have the technology currently.

I can't actually conceive of how qualitatively different the experiences of psychedelics could be with precise patterns of stimulation. Hope I live to see it.
 
theoretically at least electrodes shouldn't be required.

look at a MEG machine which uses magnetic sensors and reconstructs the tiny magnetic signals produced by the movement of ions in firing neurons, so the signals arriving at different sensors can be used to deduce where it came from.

do the same thing in reverse and it should be possible to use many many magnetic generators to induce magnetic fields or electrical fields in precisely targeted areas of the brain.
this has aready been done (crudely) with transcranial magnetic stimulation. indeed some early experiments managed to induce mystical experiences when the field generators were apllied to the temporal lobebut TMS is a crude method using powerful fields from one or two point sources. if this has any future it will be feedback controlled using many magnetic sources a bit like a phased array radar.
then everyone will have one of these machines and the drug dealers will become software vendors..
 
Wow, imagine 'coding' some new high? Now that would be fun...
 
If this subject intrigues you...

You might check out a novel called "Little Heroes" by Norman Spinrad. In this dystopian future, people have an illegal operation performed on their brains...and become "wireheads."
 
The problem with TMS is that it will only ever be used to stimulate surface (cortical) structures and drugs tend to get at more primitive, subcortical areas of the brain. e.g. emotion is thought to have its substrate in the limbic system.

At present there is no way to selectively disrupt subcortical neuronal activity and the effect of disrupting cortical neuron populations is undesirable as it generallly results in deficits (in cognition, language, and motor activity) - effects similar to patients with lobotomies.

Neuroscience is advancing at such a rampant pace now with the advent of neuroimaging techniques that the fundamentals of ideas like this really aren't too far fetched, even if the application to drug culture is.
 
^You're probably right that the technology doesn't exist now, but I think electromagnetic theory has the potential to bring about very directed changes through non-invasive techniques. If you could generate a magnetic field that in turn generates an electric field (basically an electromagnetic wave), it could be possible to specify the arguments of the wave equation such that it would only oscillate with certain neurons in certain ways. Admittedly, this kind of technology is pretty far off, but I think the major limiting factors are precision and accuracy. In other words, the theoretical background exists, and the technology exists, it's just not refined enough to be very useful at this point.
 
sometimes people who get their brains opened for whatever reason agree to participate in studies which actually put electrodes in human brains. sometimes they need to do this anyway, they put the electrode in, send voltage, ask how the person feels. they need to do this to get the electrode to the right area

when pleasure centers are activated, the patients ask the doctor to repeat the voltage again and again

sorry i dont have a source for this. its from my psych class and ive read it in various places. but i think electrical stimulation could be a big future, perhaps we could even bypass tolerance and dependence. we just need to find out how to safely send a precise stream of voltage in a non-invasive manner
 
qwe said:
sometimes people who get their brains opened for whatever reason agree to participate in studies which actually put electrodes in human brains. sometimes they need to do this anyway, they put the electrode in, send voltage, ask how the person feels. they need to do this to get the electrode to the right area

when pleasure centers are activated, the patients ask the doctor to repeat the voltage again and again

sorry i dont have a source for this. its from my psych class and ive read it in various places. but i think electrical stimulation could be a big future, perhaps we could even bypass tolerance and dependence. we just need to find out how to safely send a precise stream of voltage in a non-invasive manner
Click to expand...
http://www.wireheading.com/delgado/index.html
http://www.wireheading.com/brain-stimulation.html
http://www.wireheading.com/pleasure.html

More information can be found on that website. What's most interesting, however, is that in many cases humans do not seem to share the compulsive lever-pressing behavior that rats do, generally having a sense of "enough for now". Perhaps our pleasure centers are not absolute, due to having some capability of behavioral inhibition, but I know not whether this is due to environmental factors or is an intrinsic property of the human brain.
 
qwe said:
sorry i dont have a source for this. its from my psych class and ive read it in various places. but i think electrical stimulation could be a big future, perhaps we could even bypass tolerance and dependence. we just need to find out how to safely send a precise stream of voltage in a non-invasive manner
Click to expand...
No, I don't think so, regards the bypassing of tolerance issues. I only have a basic understanding, but I think whats happening is the neurons (say in the NAc) are being stimulated electrically that are mainly dedicated to dopamine release....these electrons release their dopamine at the synapses and the dopamine binds.....and the pleasure is experienced....

Basically what electrodes are doing is taking the place of exogenous administration of the chemicals we are familiar with....but the 'downstream' effects so to speak will be similar (ie in regards to tolerance, depletion of monoamines, etc).

Am I along the right track here? Thanks for the knowledgeable responses already....I knew you guys (and gals) would have good input that would help me conceptualize the issue better.
 
ziddy said:
More information can be found on th...[url]http://www.wireheading.com/pleasure.html
Click to expand...
Wow... that's the kind of material I find utterly, totally fascinating. Desire rather than pleasure mediated by dopamine? IME, absolutely true. Based on my own experience with dopaminergic substances, nothing else. Dopamine controls desire, motivation and such, not pleasure.

Opiate receptors mediating pleasure? Maybe some kinds of pleasure. It's amazing how these researchers tend to eternally over-simplify, as if everything happening in the brain could be "boiled down" to one or two chemicals. But why should it? The constant reductionism is really annoying IMO.
 
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Possible? I say yes, but it seems as though you would have to wear some sort of (probably) bulky device.
 
Do wireheads dream of digital drugs?

"Have you ever wiretripped?"

This is a line from the film Strange Days, an under-appreciated early 1990s flick based (I think) upon a novella from Philip K. Dick (author of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "A Scanner, Darkly"). While the film can be lame in parts--such as the expectation that we would have full neuromechanical interfaces capable of veridical 'playback' by (cue cheesy voice) "The Year 2000!"--it does have an interesting premise.

This premise is why I got into neuroscience in the first place. The idea of being able to generate your own pleasurable "in silico" experiences--programming and editing phenomenological states themselves to your liking. Alas, I quickly realized that this would never be possible in my (or any of our) lifetimes--technology is simply not advancing quickly enough to overcome the dizzing myriad of technical problems inherent to the idea of a neuromechanical interface. Achieving a fine enough gradient of neuronal control to "replicate" qualia themselves would require simply incomprehensible leaps in the fields of nanotechnology, computational neuroscience and computer engineering. Thus, I got into the next best thing--emotional engineering via pharmacological intervention. Better living through chemistry, not circuitry. But one can still dream, right?
 
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You could probably induce all sorts of weird altered states of consciousness by zapping various nuclei, with different frequencies and strengths of current; however it would be almost impossible to mimic certain drugs; like receptor subtype specific ones, or ones that act of receptors that are activated by a spatially diverse population of neurons.

You could mimic all amphetamines (as mentioned) pretty well just by stimulating the raphe (serotonin), SNc/VTA (dopamine) and Locus Coeruleus (noradrenaline), in various different ratios.

You couldn't mimic opioids with a simple array of electrodes, and endogenous opioids are released from interneurons cells throughout the cortex, basal ganglia, brain stem etc... You'd needs millions of little electrodes; though you could do a pretty good job by hitting the non-mylinated pathway into the VTA that contains opioid peptides.

Hallucinogens, again, no.
Cannabinoids, no.
Dissociatives, no.

But as I say, stimulating various nuclei could produce very weird effects on your consciousness.
 
Is it possible that one could be stimulated in such a way so as to bring up selected memories? Obviously this is a ways off....but is it possible?

Also, don't HT psychedelics just modulate the way the neuron is excited by binding to the receptor and sending a signal to the postsynaptic neuron? So, isn't it possible to zap a neuron at a certain frequency or pattern of frequencies that excites the postsynapticneuron in a simiilar fashion?
 
Great post, ive really enjoyed reading all of this. I've always wondered if this was possible, it reminds me of a matrix / Ghost in the Shell esqe world where there would be bars or shops you would go to to put on a helmet or whatnot and be high for a set amount of time.

that link about pleasure that was left was dope as well
 
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