The branches · 4 of 7
Mood and drive
How we feel, what we want, and whether that can be set on purpose.
Mood, motivation, fear, pleasure and the will to act. An upgrade here changes how a person feels or what they are driven to do, by a drug, a device or a procedure, on purpose and for a reason the person chose.
4 upgrades
furthest stage reached: in clinical use- A psychedelic therapy is approved for prescription
Psilocybin, the active part of certain mushrooms, and MDMA, given a few times under supervision with talking therapy, have in trials lifted depression and post-traumatic stress that nothing else had shifted. On 1 July 2023 Australia became the first country to let specially approved psychiatrists prescribe them, outside any trial. Other regulators have so far declined. It is on this branch because the change it makes is to how a person feels, on purpose and at their request.
- A brain implant lifts severe depression
Electrodes placed deep in the brain and driven by a pacemaker-like unit in the chest, the same hardware used for Parkinson's disease, aimed instead at a region that is overactive in depression. In the first six patients, four whose depression had resisted everything else got markedly better, and some described the change in the operating room. Later, larger trials were mixed, and twenty years on no regulator has approved it. It is a first human that has stayed one.
- A closed-loop implant detects a mood state and corrects it automatically
The step beyond stimulating a region all day: an implant that listens to the brain, recognises the pattern that comes with a bad state, and stimulates only then. In 2021 a San Francisco group reported one woman with severe depression whose implant detected her own signature of low mood and responded to it, and whose depression lifted within weeks and stayed better. It is one person, which is what a first human is.
- A treatment removes a specific fear memory on purpose
A memory, when recalled, becomes briefly unstable and has to be stored again; a drug given in that window can stop the storing. In rats this erased a learned fear in 2000. In 2009 a Dutch group did it in people: volunteers taught to fear a picture of a spider, given a common blood-pressure drug after recalling it, stopped flinching at the picture the next day and did not start again, while still remembering that the picture had once come with a shock. Later work extended it to people with a real spider phobia. The effect is real in the laboratory and has not become a treatment.