What are DREADDs?
Dreadd (pronounced “deer” or “day”) is a term used to refer to any type of neural implant that can change your brain chemistry in such a way that it makes you feel fear or anxiety. These implants have been around since the 1960’s but they were mostly limited to military use until recently. Nowadays there are many different types of these devices available. They are all designed to be used on humans and they’re generally quite safe for most people to use.
The main reason these types of implants are so popular is due to the fact that they can be used for so many different things. Some of the most popular reasons for using a dread include treating anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and to assist people with addictions. They can also be used for much more experimental purposes, such as creating super-soldiers or to help with memory creation in some way.
All of these different implants tend to be referred to as “dreads” since they all have some type of effect on your brain.
For most people who use dreads, the implants are meant to be a tool to help them. However, there are also a large population of people who use them in order to get a psychoactive high. This tends to be one of the most popular uses of implants.
Some people also use dreads with the intent to hurt other people, such as criminals or enemies of a certain government. Due to the fact that these implants are so new, their long-term effects tend to be unknown, however, they’re believed to be quite safe when used for a short period of time in low doses.
Dreads are also a fairly expensive technology. Depending on where you get them and what you plan to use them for, the price can range from $100 to over $10,000. For reference, most therapeutic implants that are prescribed to patients would fall into the lower end of that price range, while most recreational implants would be closer to the higher end of that spectrum.
There are many different types of dreads and they can be made out of various materials, with each type of material having its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Most of these implants tend to be better than older, less advanced models, but many consumers are willing to spend more money to get an implant that they believe has fewer side effects or that will last longer.
A large part of the appeal of dreads is the fact that they’re implants. Implants are seen as a way to improve or change a person in a way that no other technology can. Humans have a history of altering themselves, from tattooing themselves to drinking potions made of various herbs.
With dreads, people are able to extend that tenfold since these implants affect the very way people think and feel.
An ever-growing industry
The market for dreads is a very profitable one. Due to the nature of the technology and how new it is, there is a large amount of money to be made. Even though most implants tend to be quite expensive, people are generally willing to pay large sums of money in order to get their hands on the latest and greatest models.
This makes the market highly speculative, which means there are large rewards for being one of the first people to jump on a trend and large risks involved with being too slow to adapt.
The market is not only large, it’s also highly competitive. With how much money is involved, many different companies are constantly trying to invent the best implant possible. Some companies even specialize in certain types of implants, such as natural or synthetic fibers.
Due to the nature of these implants, a lot of them are meant to be put in specific areas of the body. Some implants can only be used in certain areas, while others can be used in multiple places. Certain implants can also only be used by specific genders, age groups, or races.
There are certain religions that are known to frown upon implants, as they feel people are being persuaded to change what a “God” created.
Sources & references used in this article:
- DREADDs for neuroscientists (BL Roth – Neuron, 2016 – Elsevier)
- DREADDs (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs): chemogenetic tools with therapeutic utility (DJ Urban, BL Roth – Annual review of pharmacology and …, 2015 – annualreviews.org)
- DREADDS: Use and application in behavioral neuroscience. (KS Smith, DJ Bucci, BW Luikart… – Behavioral …, 2016 – psycnet.apa.org)
- CNO Evil? Considerations for the use of DREADDs in behavioral neuroscience (SV Mahler, G Aston-Jones – Neuropsychopharmacology, 2018 – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- DREADDs: novel tools for drug discovery and development (HM Lee, PM Giguere, BL Roth – Drug discovery today, 2014 – Elsevier)
- Silencing synapses with DREADDs (H Zhu, BL Roth – Neuron, 2014 – Elsevier)
- The use of DREADDs to deconstruct behavior (PD Whissell, S Tohyama, LJ Martin – Frontiers in genetics, 2016 – frontiersin.org)