From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 11:58:31 MST
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 09:30:11AM -0800, Ramez Naam wrote:
>
> From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> > I've never heard of this result. Got ref?
>
> Lee, I think you may be referring to work done in the 1950s and 60s by
> Jose Delgado. Delgado reported that he could relieve extreme pain, as
> well as many of the symptoms of schizophrenia, by stimulating the
> "septal pleasure centers" electrically. He describes this in his book
> _Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society_
>
> However, in that book he never talks about the patients having the
> ability to self-stimulate.
It could be Robert J. Heath in New Orleans; he did similar stuff, and I
seem to recall that he did experiment with self-stimulation. But I do
not recall any pain treatments, mostly attempts to deal with violent
outbursts and psychosis.
> Eliezer, I'm not sure if you were asking Lee about this result in
> humans or the result in rats. The result in rats was produced by Olds
> and Milner in 1954. Rats will indeed self-stimulate to the exclusion
> of food and water, even up to death. (They do the same thing with
> cocaine and amphetamines.)
Actually, the self-stimulation to death factoid is not really true. It
depends a lot on the experimental setup and in most cases they make a
tradeoff. See the work of Peter Shizgal, e.g.
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000740/
"On the neural computation of utility: implications from studies of
brain stimulation reward"
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