Chemical modification of behavior isn’t exactly a novel idea. It’s currently the backbone of psychiatry, the idea that we can chemically induce desirable behaviors with an “anti-depressant” or “anti-psychotic”. And sometimes it even works!
I was reading about a new class of weight loss drugs including Tirzepatide (which is getting fast tracked as a breakthrough drug although that should be taken with a grain of salt these days) which actually work to control pretty granular behavioral responses like hunger.
We’ve used drugs to control behavior for everything from sexual activity (chemical castration to PDP-5 inhibitors) to straight up “happiness”. Now that we are finally getting a better grasp on the metabolic interactions which generate behavior, we are on the verge of a whole new level of behavioral modification through metabolic manipulation.
More than gross system wide level responses we have now, we may be able to convert someone who doesn’t like chocolate into a chocolate fiend by identifying the peptide/protein groups associated with that particular behavioral response. Imagine a therapy pill which re-weights the association of a peptide/protein/receptor of an engram along a positively valenced path rather than a negatively valenced one?
Whoa.
The bonkers thing is that we may be able to do all this non-invasively through an assay (well I guess the blood draw isn’t really non-invasive). If we find abnormally high levels of a particular peptide, we can probably safely assume that it’s associated with our target behavior. We can even measure the changes of that peptide production by inducing the behavior “naturally” and doing a series of before/after testing.