The Reinforced Mind

Here is a story about a video game therapy that helps severely injured people regain motor control.

This is not just giving someone a joystick and having them practice basic motor skills. It involves a feedback system that lets a player see when they are producing the proper type of brain wave associated with a certain movement. One of the more intriguing parts of the column comes near the end:

Last year, Margaret MacDonald, a San Jose, California doctor, focused her practice on neuro-feedback after her son's attention-deficit symptoms improved within three months of using CyberLearning's system.

She starts patients with 20- to 25-minute sessions at least two times per week and recommends that they work with a trained professional to ensure they are reinforcing the right brain wave activity to produce the desired result.

"This isn't something you can just play with .... You could train the wrong thing and cause someone to become more anxious and irritable," she said.

You can reinforce emotional states with this thing? How cool is that? You could also train soldiers to be more aggressive, impotent men to be more aroused. Why not train people to hit certain states of conciousness? Buddhist monks could attain enlightenment more easily, religious Christians could train for rapture. Artists could tap deeper levels of intuition and creativity. Instead of blowing $500 a week on a cocaine habit, just fire up your Xbox and hit the same kind of high.

Sometimes it seems like the futures depicted in books like John C. Wright's The Golden Age or David Zindell's The Broken God aren't that far off.