Happiness is a Warm Electrode

[drummer]

SHOCK TRAUMA Diane Hire, shown here in profile and x-ray, is among the first depression patients to receive deep-brain stimulation, a procedure in which two electrodes are implanted in the head.

Happiness is a Warm Electrode
The most promising new treatment for severe depression isn't a pill. It's a permanent implant that shocks the brain. Is this what joy looks like?

By Gregory Mone | September 2007

In the middle of room #11 in the Cleveland Clinic's surgical center, Diane Hire lies on an operating table, the back half of her shaven head hidden behind a plastic curtain. Four pins, one driven into either side of her forehead, the other two in back, hold a titanium halo fast to her skull. An anesthesiologist, several nurses and her psychiatrist cluster around the bed.

Behind the curtain, neurosurgeon Ali R. Rezai surveys Hire's brain, white and snaked with thin red arteries, through a pair of small holes he's drilled in the top of her skull. Because so few pain receptors are located in the brain, only local anesthetic numbs Hire's head. She is awake during the procedure—or as awake as she can be. For the past 20 years, she has suffered from severe depression, a crippling strain of the disease that afflicts as many as four million people. Years of therapy, at least 10 different drugs and six courses of the whole-brain shock technique known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) all failed to bring Hire lasting relief. Her final hope is this operation, a radical form of neurosurgery called deep-brain stimulation, or DBS. Whereas ECT—a treatment that's been demonized in movies like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest but is still used on roughly 100,000 patients a year—floods the brain with electricity from the outside, this technique delivers a smaller dose of better-targeted current to an area of the brain believed to be a key regulator of mood. Wires thread beneath the skin from their place in the brain and plug into two battery-run stimulators implanted in the chest. About the size of an iPod nano, each stimulator constantly pumps out current, bathing a small region of brain tissue in electricity. If ECT is the equivalent of slapping defibrillators against a heart-attack victim's chest, deep-brain stimulation is the pacemaker that prevents the attack in the first place.

On the operating table, Hire closes her eyes. Rezai slowly inserts a wire as thin as a fishing line through the left hole in her skull, using the halo as a guide. His team has already mapped out his route using a precise 3-D reconstruction of Hire's brain compiled from 180 MRI scans. His target is a chunk of neurons associated with energy and mood. After the tip of the wire is in the right spot, he repeats the process on the other side. Within 90 minutes of the first cut, Hire has two electrodes lodged in the center of her brain. Now it's time to charge them up. On the other side of the curtain, Donald A. Malone, Jr., Hire's psychiatrist, tells her that everything's ready. Malone has a clear, soothing voice and a comforting, boyish face. He's the kind of person you'd want to talk to if someone was about to shock your brain.

At his signal, two volts of electricity, enough to power a wristwatch, course through the wires and radiate outward from the tip a few millimeters in every direction. Millions of neurons bask in the electricity, and the effect is fairly immediate. Hire feels warm at first, a bit flushed.

And then it happens. The room looks brighter to her. The faces, the big, circular lights overhead, the ceiling—they all seem clearer. Malone asks her how she feels. "I'm really happy," she replies, clearly surprised. "I feel like I could get up and do all sorts of things." But even more telling than her words is the look on her face. For the first time in 20 years, with a halo bolted to her head and two freshly drilled holes in her skull, Hire smiles.

Continues > http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/7fe10...ecbccdrcrd.html

[subgenius]

this is for real i am assuming. omfg. How many times can this be done before things begin to fry. seems to me to be nothing but a temporary fix. If she's stupid enough to do this then go to it. She will be the first person to crumple to a heap when they figure out this doesn't last long, in my opinion of course. F'n guinea pig. I wonder what all those super duper fantastically happy folks who got voluntarily implanted with an RFID are thinking now that the cancer thing came out. just thinking that this may be related to a lack of female hormones.....is it just me...

[ephilution]

First we had instant happiness through a pill, but that didn't seem to do it entirely and so now we get instant happiness through an electrode. Hence we have not one but two methods of facing our inherently depressing servile state with a smile and even a cheer. What a lovely world we live in, Aldous "Brave New World" Huxley would've absolutely champagned it.

[jack]

I watched a doc on this some time ago.
The depressed house-wife would be temporarily confussed and then feel better, but it didn't last. She had to keep having more treatments.

a kinder, gentler, voluntary lobotomy

[nukunuku]

god damn people are stupid

like Einstein said, two things are endless, the universe and human stupidity, and im not sure about the universe