I’ve been kind of amused by the thought over the last week that one of the artifacts of understanding brain function from a metabolic/genetic level is that we are going to cross the rubicon into an era of truly customized drugs. And seeing how much our brains heavily bias toward good/bad things, once we understand the metabolic levers that produce specific effects on an individual level we will be able to craft “perfect” highs and lows for each individual.
Far beyond the simple generic brute force clobbering that current options offer now, we may be able to craft experience that are literally indescribable due to their internal complexity.
Imagine a custom anti-depressant that instead of just clobbering down the ventral stream of the brain, actually makes you over-bias the dorsal stream/pos valence stream for specific types of behavior (e.g. all social experience get hyper positively valenced). It’s an era of customized Soma packaged as the end of pain.
Not only can we craft the “perfect” high, but we likely will be able to modify nearly all behavior on a granular basis to produce desired results. Imagine “personality in a pill”, which literally transforms an individuals base metabolic/behavioral response into a conformant idea of what they (or their hierarchy) desire it to be.
This feels a lot like Damocles sword hanging precariously above our heads, offering great potential for our species but bound only by a thread consisting of societies good will/respect for autonomy.
Actually, I shouldn’t be so pessimistic about this. While the applications are scary, it also means the alleviation of many type of chronic nervous system conditions. For example, something like this could very well be the end of conditions like MS. It’s a pathway to first effective treatments for degenerative and accumulative nervous system conditions from ALS to Parkinson’s.
For conditions which have poor astrocytic function like some phenotypes of “autism”, this is a pathway to dramatically increase the quality of life for many individuals. Pushing even further, many genetic conditions could be “cured” of “negative traits” including trisomies. The amount of human potential we could unlock is kind of staggering. Just being able to do general phenotyping of “ADHD” and creating peptide treatments for those would end up massively impacting the around 10% of the population (for better or worse).
But back to the custom highs and lows, and the idea that we may be able to create a high or low that is unique to individual genetic makeup, a high or low that literally no other individual can experience. What would such a world even look like, and where would we even go from there?