Three times a day I take a medicine called levodopa. I take it because my brain doesn’t produce enough dopamine; without it, my hands and feet tremble and I find it hard to get my body to do what I need it to do. These are symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and mean that many of my dopamine-producing neurons are dead. But, thanks to levodopa, I can feed my brain artificial dopamine.
This is a small drug that we discover that occurs naturally in the bean plant, photographed here (the fact that nature produces the precise molecule in this missing plant in my brain leaves me stupid). In the twentieth century, we understood how to chemically produce the compound, which allowed us to mass produce it and distribute it to Parkinson’s disease patients worldwide. The fact that we understood all this is a testament to our ingenuity and intelligence. If someone was diagnosed with Parkinson’s just 60 years ago, no doctor could do anything for them. I owe my ability to serve this plant and the human intellect like today.
But that’s not enough. Every time I take this drug, it floods my entire brain with dopamine; It produces a fresh effect and makes me more alert and focused, has negative effects on any medication you take, from THC in marijuana to caffeine in coffee, there are chemicals that join receptors in your brain, this stimulates or inhibits neurons, which has a cascade of other effects. One is that when taken regularly, the brain produces more receptors for the drug; that’s why tolerance is increasing. It may not sound like something so bad, but it adjusts the chemistry and design of your brain.
While the change in design that the effects of too much caffeine would possibly not be as destructive, other drugs, such as artificial dopamine, may be. Most people who take levodopa for many years begin to revel in a side effect of the drug called dyskinesia which makes it very complicated for their body. To combat this side effect, we have other drugs that further adjust your brain, which in the end leads to more drugs to combat the destructive effects of the previous drug. maximum of your day putting pills in your mouth and the disease becomes incredibly difficult to control.
In addition, each person’s brain is stressed and, as a result, the effects of the drugs produce a slightly different reaction in each of us. For now, the pharmaceutical industry is based on a single currency for all, and we even get to the point where we can have a personalized technique for the treatment of diseases, which will continue to be so.
But the biggest impediment to detecting diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease is the amazing complexity of the brain itself. As James Watson put it, “the brain is the last and largest biological frontier, the maximum complexity we have discovered in our universe. It contains billions of cells interconnected through billions of connections. The brain stuns the mind.
So what needs to be done? Well, chances are that the mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration, which everyone will suffer to some extent, are too complex for us to perceive. The number of points to consider to make sense of such diseases is incredibly long, probably too long for a human, or even a human organization, to perceive it. Although we have gone far enough in the remedy of these diseases and have exciting new treatments on the way, there is no cure on the horizon and the truth is that we would possibly not be wise enough to perceive those things.
The same can be said of a series of riddles that we still face. Ultimately, the explanation for why we can’t figure out how to deal with climate change, or what the origins of the universe are, or even how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occurred, is that there are limits to what we are capable of doing. and for some problems, such as the latter, there is the added difficulty of having too much human stupidity along the way.
That’s why creating synthetic intelligence can also be a smart thing in the end. Just as each and every parent expects their children to be smarter than them, the hope is that if we give birth to a form of synthetic intelligence, they will be wiser than us and could possibly solve many disorders in the world. We can’t do that.
And we would probably be much closer to creating AI than many other people think. . .