Posted by fachad on February 11, 2003, at 20:56:14
I think some here may find the material at these sites to be interesting. I've included brief excerpts to give an idea of the feel of their content. They are heavily documented with links to abstracts of research articles.
Biopsychiatry.com
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/"There's clearly a strong causal link between the raw biological capacity to experience happiness and the extent to which one's life is felt to be worthwhile. High-minded philosophy treatises should complicate but not confuse the primacy of the pleasure-pain axis. So one very practical method of life-enrichment consists in chemically engineering happier brains for all in the here-and-now. Yet how can this best be done?"
THE HEDONISTIC IMPERATIVE
http://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible...The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture."
Opioids.com
http://opioids.com/index.html"A significant minority of the population only feel truly well on opioids. In effect, they self-medicate, taking responsibility for their own mental health in defiance of medical orthodoxy"
These sites are all related and put out by a foundation calling itself BLTC, which I'm guessing stands for "Better Living Through Chemistry" ;-> hehehe. There is a bit of that "academic druggie" feel (a la Timothy Leary) to the sites, but as I said earlier they are heavily documented with links to abstracts and solid, conventional research articles. I think they contain much useful information, as well as thought provoking implications of current trends in psychopharmacology.
poster:fachad
thread:140654
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030208/msgs/140654.html