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A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

singularityhub.com

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Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#51

Post by qayxc »

xwdv wrote: post #5

I wonder if there’s any point in using this for military applications.

Pain 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.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#53

Post by jcims »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #17

Yesterday 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.

I 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.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#54

Post by xkcd-sucks »

warent wrote: post #3

I 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 m…

>The BMI decodes the onset of nociception via a state-space model on the basis of the analysis of online-sorted spikes recorded from the anterior cingulate cortex (which is critical for pain processing) and couples real-time pain detection with optogenetic activation of the prelimbic prefrontal cortex (which exerts top–down nociceptive regulation). In rats

>Example ChR2 expression in the prelimbic PFC. Highmagnification (100x) view of the expression of YFP-ChR2 in the prelimbic PFC demonstrated the co-staining of pyramidal neuron markers (CaMKII) with YFP. Arrows point to examples of co-stained neurons.

(from abstract and supplementary info, scihub is kind of down)

On their own (generally speaking!), very few neurons "respond" to low intensity light. "Optogenetics" stuff like this inserts a gene encoding a light sensitive ion channel in order to make cells responsive to a specific wavelength of light.

So there's two types of targeting here: Targeting gene expression to a certain population of cells, and then spatially targeting a group of those cells with the light - Blue light doesn't travel very far in tissue. (Also targeting multiple cell populations within a region using multiple colors of light + differently sensitive proteins).

Of course your comment still stands - Presumably not all the CamKII-positive PFC neurons are involved in nociception, and rats can't talk about their conscious experience so the answers there are limited to what questions researchers chose to ask using the limited tools available.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#55

Post by after_care »

BizarroLand wrote: post #48
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain is far more robust than often assumed. Read up on Anatoli Bugorski for example. He had rather significant brain damage yet there was virtually no damage to his intellectual capacity. He did suffer from seizures after the accident, but that’s about it. These kinds of implants have serious risks including infections etc, but for people with long term chronic pain there are few options.

I've seen a few instances where pain management becomes the overall deciding factor in peoples' day to day life. "I can't go to work and feed my family because everything hurts so bad" can become a common statement for these people. In addition, addiction to painkillers, spending a huge percentage of your income at compounding pharmacies, and turning to illegal and possibly dangerous drugs to save a buck or to fill t…

I’d also like to add that this new technology could actually have an impact on a smaller percentage of the body than pharmaceuticals do.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#56

Post by wallacoloo »

meepmorp wrote: post #22
mrtksn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It 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.

Life follows a simple set of rules with an extensive set of exceptions.

Nitpicking 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.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#57

Post by etrautmann »

warent wrote: post #3

I 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 m…

Yes, but there are surprising cases where broad stimulation is effective, like deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease or cochlear implants. It’s surprising that you don’t need perfectly targeted stimulation patterns to achieve a therapeutic output, but often times it does seem to have a benefit.

We think you can do much better for many applications with targeted stimulation, and that’s the direction that many of these implant technologies are heading. I’m a Neuroscientist working on BCI

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#58

Post by cglong »

This reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. The teenager has an implant that causes stressors to be blurred out, preventing anxiety.

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.

If this was implemented broadly, it'd very quickly lead to reckless/dangerous behavior.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#59

Post by lumost »

hirundo wrote: post #37

If 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.

There 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.

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