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diegocaleiro comments on Human Minds are Fragile - Less Wrong Discussion
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People with amygdala damage are well represented in the serial killer population. there's a catch that people who become serial killers through these sorts of trauma frequently do not "want to" be serial killers, they just are. They find their own actions morally reprehensible. One place to look for cases like these is the Human Aggression lectures on Sapolsky's course on human behavioral biology. Probably Antonio Damasio has info in his giant brainscan database as well.
Just because a lot of people with amygdala damage are serial killers doesn't mean that everyone or most of the people with amygdala damage are.
I don't think the evidence to which you point proves a claim as strong as the one you make in the post.
Magnetic though?
I can't find any studies that look into the effects on mood specifically, but I found a related paper where they applied a magnetic field to the amygdalae of rats to increase the frequency of seizures. The idea of magnetic stimulation to parts of the brain causing altered states is in the public consciousness thanks to the God Helmet, though that applied a magnetic field to the temporal lobes to induce altered states and failed replication. That is likely why magnetic fields were used as an example.
Yes, I intended to show that a relatively non-invasive technique may be sufficient to drastically distort the mind. The same point could be made with blood clogging, eletric overdrive - seizures - or a small tumor, if history shows that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation was a placebo after all.
While placebo effects may account for some of the proposed therapeutic uses of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), there is now little doubt that TMS actually does affect neural activity in highly constrained fashion. To me one of the most convincing demonstrations is the ability of TMS to reliably evoke motor responses in specific finger muscles via stimulation at varying locations over motor cortex.
While finger twitches are not so impressive in terms of potentially major consequences, speech arrest (TMS over left frontal cortex) is far more striking, if very temporary. TMS, applied at unacceptably high levels, could definitely "distort the mind" just as direct application of a comparable electrical field would - or for that matter injury or surgery. However, existing literature on focal lesions is not as clear-cut as your post suggests: our predictive power at the individual level is still very low even for highly well-known conditions.
I do agree with the central thesis: human brains are fragile and certain networks, if damaged, can have extreme consequences. But they're not so predictably fragile.
upvoted.
But, but... people who want to do things that they feel are morally reprehensible are not reflectively consistent, and certainly people who imagine things like imminent end of the world. I thought CEV-type approaches only rely on reflectively consistent people to learn from.