Re: transcranial magnetic stimulation (was Uploading and Nanotec

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
19 Apr 1998 20:06:15 +0200


Nick Bostrom <bostrom@ndirect.co.uk> writes:

> > Unfortunately, the pleasure centers (ventral tegmental area, septal
> > region, nucleus accumbens et al) are very deep inside the brain, so to
> > stimulate them you would have to stimulate most of the brain - with
> > nasty effects.
>
> Would it in principle be possible to arrange the magnetic fields in
> such a way that the flield strength is only significant in the
> nucleus accumbens, say, and perhaps in some regions were the
> stimulation doesn't have any effect?

Tricky. I'm not good enough at physics to say for certain, but it
looks like a very complicated problem; you want to add together a lot
of dipoles (possibly time-varying) so that the induced current given
the electromagnetic properties of the head become large in only one
small area. It might be doable, but it would be a hack.

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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