As you all have probably seen, this story is at the very top of the Google News health section:

Doctors hope to switch off brain’s craving for tobacco

quote:

Smokers who suffer damage to a particular part of the brain can give up quickly and easily without feeling any urge for a cigarette, according to research that promises new approaches to treating nicotine addiction.

A study of smokers who suffered strokes has shown that part of the brain, the insula, appears to be intimately involved in their addiction, indicating that it could be targeted to help people to give up the habit.

Patients who had strokes that damaged the insula, which is thought to be involved in emotions and cravings, lost the urge to smoke immediately, and many have not touched a cigarette since.

The findings suggest the possibility of helping smokers to give up by manipulating the insula to kill their addiction, without causing the extensive brain damage of a stroke.

Drugs could be developed to alter its activity, or it could be disrupted using magnetic fields. Another technique called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkinson's disease and depression....

In related news, researchers at UCLA have discovered that amputation of the hands results in complete elimination of the incidence of hangnails. Also, new findings at the World Health Organization indicate that removal of the sex organs drastically reduces the risk of unwanted pregnancies, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

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in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkinson's disease and depression....

Somewhere out there, Hitler is smiling with glee.

yes he is, he hates the competition tobacco represents for thought control. He hates how tobacco controls it's addicts better than he ever could.

LOL! They've proven that brain damage can make you quit. Is that what happened to you, Know It All?

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Originally posted by claude zachary:

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in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkinson's disease and depression....

Somewhere out there, Hitler is smiling with glee.

Yes he sure is. So is Dr. Mengele. He just loved doing those human experiments. Remember the twins? This sort of thing was right down his alley. Watch out folks, they're coming to do a lobotomy on you.

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Originally posted by ladyteal:

quote:

Originally posted by claude zachary:

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in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkinson's disease and depression....

Somewhere out there, Hitler is smiling with glee.

Yes he sure is. So is Dr. Mengele. He just loved doing those human experiments. Remember the twins? This sort of thing was right down his alley. Watch out folks, they're coming to do a lobotomy on you.

Need to add this: The SHEEPLE will be lining up in the thousands. NOTE: I AM NOT A SHEEPLE!!!!!

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Originally posted by Robert A Cook:
LOL! They've proven that brain damage can make you quit. Is that what happened to you, Know It All?

Hey Robert! haven't seen you on before, just couldn't resist could you?

We've all agreed not to respond to trolls, although yours was a VERY GOOD response.

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Originally posted by Robert A Cook:
LOL! They've proven that brain damage can make you quit. Is that what happened to you, Know It All?

ROFLMAO

Geez Robert, been in jail for the past year or two or what? LOL

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Originally posted by Robert A Cook:
LOL! They've proven that brain damage can make you quit. Is that what happened to you, Know It All?

Woh your quick! No getting past that needle sharp wit. I have always said cold turkey no aids is the way to quit, please keep up.

They will come find you if they want you teal.

Oh no smallbird, that was suposed to be a secret, you let the cat out of the bag now. I'll have to increase my post rate to counter that, now I know. Like I didn't? Some of you tried too hard to make sure you posted after me in relation to a post before mine. Father was a glass blower I think.

Yeah, I saw this in the news yesterday.

The particular area of the brain in question, the insula, seems to have alot to do with how we process information and fine tunes our aesthetic sense as to what we find pleasurable.

Check out the Wikipedia article on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_cortex

It occurs to me that screwing with your insula may not only remove your ability to enjoy smoking, but may remove your ability to enjoy the way a musician hits that one particular note on the piano keys that resonates off to the next note, thereby connecting the whole thing into a symmetry that gives you the full experience of a song you love.

Don't worry, once you don't like the song anymore, you just don't like it anymore and you'll be none the wiser. Forget the enjoyment of experience and the sense of nuance that's been stolen from you. That means nothing. Nothing good ever came from that. No genius has ever hitched their inspiration on such delicacies of experience.

Our brain is, really, all we are. Screw with it and we're something else altogether.

In the early seventies, a guy in Dallas, who'd been completely normal before, went to the top of a building with a rifle and started shooting everyone in sight. A movie was made about it, with Kurt Russell playing the guy in question. When they autopsied his brain, they found that he had a tumor growing in his brain that controls feelings of anger.

A good brain surgeon could probably also make you forget your daughter or spouse or mother existed.

This finding illustrates something that is fundamentally wrong with public health and anti-smoking: it says, unequivocally, that any day above ground is better than a day beneath ground, regardless of the experience in between. In other words, it's better to spend your life as a slave and live to be 100 than live your life to 70 and experience all that you can grab out of life.

Anti-smoking seems to think that range has no meaning. They think autonomy has no meaning. If I quit smoking, is some member of ASH going to show up at my funeral to highlight the accomplishments of my life if I die at 80 instead of 68?

If I quit smoking today, and one year from now, someone runs a red light and kills me, do a get some kind of "good guy" bonus card I can trade in?

Our society is now being run by forces that are so destructive and unhealthy in their constant obsession over fear of the inevitability of death that it's absolutely insane.

This isn't what life is for.

Are you a Beatles fan? Well, you don't NEED to be and that can be changed. Stop listening to The Beatles, or we'll stop you. For that matter, don't listen to music. You don't need music to survive. If you think so, you're addicted to music.

Stupid.

Beatles music kills now? Is anyone sugesting using this as a quit smoking tool?

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Our society is now being run by forces

not me, I was banned.

Have you ever seen "A Clockwork Orange", the lead character loves Beethoven but is conditioned to get deathly ill at the instance of hearing it.

If we allow the pleasure of smoking to be removed from our lives we must realize that we are also removing all pleasure from our lives. Perhaps, antis don't have any pleasure in their lives, other than to demean us.

Excellent example, Bruce. Exactly.

A fantastic film. What would you think of his treatment if you were the woman he raped? The man he bashed etc?

I don't believe this condition is being considered as a quit smoking tool but who knows how it may help in the future in understanding the workings of the brain.

Bingo, Bruce. Good one.

smallbird: "Hey Robert! haven't seen you on before, just couldn't resist could you?"

Hi, Smallbird! Actually, I'm an old member who just hasn't been on this board for awhile. But this idiotic news story about the insula being the "seat of addiction" inspired me to look in again.

This is what I just got through saying about it on a different message board:

* * *

Three days later, and this is still in the top three "Health" stories on Google News, now with 475 related articles showing. The headline now at the top of the list, A stroke of good luck for smokers, I find to be in particularly bad taste, but maybe that's just me.

A stroke of good luck for the Pharmaceutical Industry would be a better title. My suspicion is, they're already testing chemicals that affect the insula, and will be releasing news about pending FDA approval any week now.

We don't know how the brain works. We don't know what consciousness is, or when it comes right down to it, how any psychiatric medication works. We can trace some of the incredibly complex chemical cascades that occur coincident with even our most basic urges/functions/perceptions, etc., but we don't have the slightest notion of how these cascades form thought, much less consciousness.

To say "Scientists find source of nicotine addiction," (the title of yet another article on this subject) is grandiose hubris on the very face of it. First off, nicotine "addiction" is not an addiction, in the classical sense. The very term has been removed from the DSM-IV, largely due to the efforts of the anti-tobacco extremists. Anybody who's ever seen the floor crawling, puking, shaking, screaming, life-threatening effects of heroin withdrawal knows the difference. Second, to say scientists have found the "source" of anything in a specific brain region is simply stupid: it's like pointing at a cluster of neurons, or a single neurotransmitter like dopamine, and saying, "That's where love is." Ridiculous.

This story has more to do with further de-normalizing a specific behavior, and hinting at a "cure" for something that isn't a disease, than it does with science. There is no science here: only voodoo, propaganda, and potential big bucks for future therapies nobody really needs.

* * *

I thought WinstonSmith's comments above were very, very good. Straight to the point, Winston!

squeezer: "Geez Robert, been in jail for the past year or two or what?"

Don't look now, Squeezer, but it's been more like four or five years since I've posted here. What can I say? Time flies when you're having fun!

I wasn't in jail; I got married, which (metaphorically speaking) might come down to basically the same thing; I'm not sure. I disappeared into a hole for a few years (obvious symbolism very much intentional). I was divorced about a week ago, am now seeing a lovely lady named Christine, and probably am in danger of disappearing into a hole again. LOL!

Maybe if I had a blood vessel blow in the right part of my brain, I'd stop doing that, too!

quote:

Originally posted by Robert A Cook:
As you all have probably seen, this story is at the very top of the Google News health section:

Doctors hope to switch off brain’s craving for tobacco
[QUOTE]Smokers who suffer damage to a particular part of the brain can give up quickly and easily without feeling any urge for a cigarette, according to research that promises new approaches to treating nicotine addiction.
The findings suggest the possibility of helping smokers to give up by manipulating the insula to kill their addiction, without causing the extensive brain damage of a stroke.

Drugs could be developed to alter its activity, or it could be disrupted using magnetic fields. Another technique called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkinson's disease and depression....

Deep brain stimulation! To "cure" the desire to smoke. This remark is an insult to everyone's intelligence (first) and a horrific disrespect for what open skull brain surgery involves (second) and ultimately disrespect for those unfortunate people with Parkinson's or epilepsy or other brain disorders who have no alternative than this kind of heroic surgical intervention to obtain relief from REAL problems.

I am SO tired of the "victim" class that seems to think any minor discomfort THEY experience (even discomforts they could avoid like not going places where smoking is permitted if they don't like the smoke) justifies MAJOR taking of rights from others and/or the use (abuse) of medicine to manipulate others to bring everyone into line.

Welcome to 1984!

gnatyo: "...Deep brain stimulation! To 'cure' the desire to smoke. This remark is an insult to everyone's intelligence...."

Call me cynical, but I'm beginning to believe that when dealing with the public as a whole, no low estimation of intelligence is low enough. It's like the old saying goes, "Think about how dumb the average person is; now consider that fifty percent are dumber than that."

The concept of the "Big Lie," usually attributed to Joseph Goebbels, actually comes from a U.S. Office of Strategic Services report that described Hitler's psychological profile:

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His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

A variation of this was put forward by Fritz Kippler, one of Goebbels' propagandists:

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First, reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that even the most feebleminded can understand. Second, repeat the oversimplification over and over.

Do you believe people should be allowed to spew toxic, cancer-causing smoke whenever and wherever they please, or do you believe children have a right to clean air?

You're either with us, or with the terrorists.

Wow! Do you think someone in high office at this time has studied the OSS report? Should we be concerned about Homeland Security monitoring at this site?

I'm not being facetious! This scary stuff!

smallbird: "Do you think someone in high office at this time has studied the OSS report?"

I think people in power have been studying Niccolò Machiavelli for the last 500 years, and the writer of that OSS report was either naive, or pretending to be.

Hitler wasn't an isolated headcase. Far from it.