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Must Breaking Up Be Hard To Do?
Breaking up is hard to do - but does it have to be that way? Can modern technology provide help to the lovelorn?
But oxytocin is important for all relationships, not just romantic love. You might cure your broken heart, but is it worth impairing all your other relationships?
Young's team has also shown that blocking corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a hormone involved in the stress response, stops the depressive behaviour that prairie voles exhibit when their partner dies. Young doesn't recommend blocking CRF for unrequited love, but he says it could be helpful to relieve the depression that comes with persistent grief.
Should we expect to see quick-fix solutions offered off label or in some anti-love black market? "I think there would be a real market, but I certainly don't recommend it," says Young.
Other groups are trying to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder replace a memory with another that is less emotionally fraught. "Hypothetically, you could imagine a similar therapy being used to dampen the memory of love," says Fisher. One day it might even be possible to use brain stimulation to decrease activity in the ventral pallidum, to speed up the healing effects of time, she says.
I must confess to readers that, when I started this site, I sometimes doubted whether or not I should bother typing an author's most unusual and frivolous "inventions" into the site's database. I soon learned, however, that even the most unlikely idea might actually become reality.
In his 1965 collection The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, Stanislaw Lem writes about a monarch with a problem - an unrequited love. Does this age-old problem have a technological solution? Of course it does!
Read more about this idea at If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup; via New Scientist.
The prairie vole is famously monogamous – it forms one life-long bond. However, when Larry Young at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, injected female voles with a drug that blocked either dopamine or oxytocin, they became polygamous. "This suggests you might be able to block oxytocin and sever a long-term attachment," says Young.
He set up his equipment in the magnificent royal gardens and in three weeks had converted the Temple of Contemplation there into a strange edifice full of metal, cables and glowing screens. This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency - given a constant concupiscence coefficient - of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress...
(Learn more about Lem's femfatalatron)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/18/2014)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'Whisper Mode' ala Blue Thunder Researched At Bristol
'Forest Lawn.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
Bespoke Environment Music From AIs
'Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two words.'
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
NASA Wants Self-Driving Or Remote-Controlled Vehicles For Lunar Astronauts
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
Elon Musk Says Robotaxis Will Be Ready This August, 2024
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Moonwalkers AI-Controlled Electric Shoes
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
Steve Jobs: 'Capture The Next Aristotle - With AI'
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
No Tips! Robotic Food Delivery In Phoenix
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
Electric Catamaran 'Explorer Eco 40m' Has 'Solar Skin'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
Orbital Mechanics, The Liftoff, The Turnover, The Retrograde Burn
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
