Anubis wrote:
This is not a good thing. I don't believe people will refrain from using this for evil.

EmotionallyDisturbedParakeet wrote:

Uhh yeah I have every intention for using this for evil as soon as I get mine.

I'm not totally understanding what signals the dude is sending to make it manipulate the screen. It seems like he's imagining his right arm to move, they recorded those brain waves so they know what that 'signal' looks like to 'move right' and so on and so forth.

Seriously sucky he can't feel anything from the shoulders down. Really hope Musk can make him not paraplegic in this patient's lifetime.

[IOD]Snips wrote:
Many people near the end of their life will experience weeks, months or even years of ugly 8/10 pain where the pain you're receiving such as a pinched nerve or cancer side effect makes you wish for death as it feels like you're being burned or crushed nonstop. Even the strongest pain killers on earth suffer fast diminishing returns as they "shift" your focus away from pain temporarily getting weaker over time.

And yet my doctor has had me on the same dosages for nearly a decade, and he knows I've been on stronger stuff. I know what works "for me"...

I can tell you, if something like a "brain implant" could make me ignore the pain, I might actually consider it. The thing is, your brain interprets both pain and pleasure in the same location. So making you unable to feel pain, also negates the ability to feel pleasure.

Ask me how I learned that.

EmotionallyDisturbedParakeet wrote:
I'm not totally understanding what signals the dude is sending to make it manipulate the screen. It seems like he's imagining his right arm to move, they recorded those brain waves so they know what that 'signal' looks like to 'move right' and so on and so forth.

Seriously sucky he can't feel anything from the shoulders down. Really hope Musk can make him not paraplegic in this patient's lifetime.

[IOD]Snips wrote:

I'm afraid to ask! haha.

Well that's something I hadn't considered. I mean if it made you numb while turned off, perhaps both the pain and pleasure after turning it back on later would intensify both sensations as you've grown used to feeling nothing over time.

I don't know, if I had third degree burns on 80% of my body or huge sections of muscle incorrectly removed resulting in a sensation that I was standing in a fire, I'd give up sex or any other pleasure to turn off pain that I couldn't do anything about.

Yeah with this implant unlike typical medications it wouldn't make you "ignore" the pain like other options today, the actual signal would never arrive so it's flipped off completely. Now you are sparking more questions, would it be possible to flip another switch to "increase" the pleasure & pain? Suddenly foods, touches & sensory stimulations are beyond your wildest dreams. But then the drawback is that's too addicting & life isn't worth living unless living with this mode on, and suddenly a papercut feels like a sword injury.

[IOD]Snips wrote:
I think across humanity the "sensitivity" to stimulus (colors, pain/pleasure & many other things) is a wide spectrum that almost nobody thinks about. People that were born with 80% color loss automatically assume the rest of the world has a similar experience when looking at a sunset. Afterall if you've never seen billions or trillions of colors, you can't imagine what the rest of the world sees.

For pain, I would be so curious if the nerve endings or section of the brain could be analyzed & then digitally graphed to create a score across massive parts of the population. The typical pain scale used today is a personal one with 0 being zero pain and 10 being the absolute highest limit possible.

If we took the pain chart used today 1 through 10, many people experiencing a 7 or 8 due to their genes/body/brain in one person would be considered a 3 or a 4 in somebody else. It would not surprise me to learn that if your consciousness could be swapped with somebody else, in your new body a skinned knee or small scissor cut may produce more pain then what a gunshot might have provided you in your original body for pain.

[IOD]Snips wrote:
Yeah Iggy, like I understand temporary pain is good, and if you used technology to remove awareness by removing pain entirely, that would put yourself in danger. The incredibly rare condition where some people were born unable to feel pain have to check themselves for scissor or pen stab wounds anytime they're forced into a crowd such as the airport or subway. Have to check their eyes in the morning to make sure they didn't tear their retina on their eyes. As they can't feel pain so they're living in constant fear compensating for the lack of awareness due to no pain by obsessively self checking their body.

I have a bad pain tolerance, perhaps I'm more sensitive to pain then most. It's just if I had long lasting pain that couldn't be helped or assisted, I would flip that magical switch to OFF if I was safely watching TV at home or sleeping.

Ignorant_Florist wrote:

That's something I've tried (in vain, I might add) to people, even in the medical field.

I have a high pain tolerance, because of my personal experience. Getting the shit beat out of you as a child helps build a pain tolerance. For me, a "10" on the pain scale actually happened when I ordered a dentist to pull an abscessed tooth from my head with zero Novocain. I was already in a massive amount of pain just from the infection and swelling. But I have to admit, when he clamped that tooth, even with my eyes squeezed shut, my "vision" went absolutely white. But just as quickly, with two quick twists of the tooth, and an audible "pop", the pain was instantly gone. I've used that experience as my "10" on the pain scale. As I tell them at the doctor's office, I'm usually hovering around a 6-7, but even those have variables involved. It's like a sliding scale. Sometimes it's a "soft 7", sometimes it's a "hard 7".

But yeah, I've known people who couldn't take what I would call a "5" without passing out from the pain.