Can Your Brain Invent Happiness?

Who or what controls the little workers that throw the happiness chemicals into your bloodstream?

Can Your Brain Invent Happiness?

If you could motivate them to just do things to make you happy, would you do anything else?

This reminds me of those people on the spaceship in Wall-E.  By the way, if you haven’t seen that movie, then you are missing out.

Is this what we want?

Dial H for Happiness: How Neuroengineering May Change Your Brain.

My knee-jerk answer is, “Well, yeah, sometimes it is.”  Unfortunately, I also worry that this is the slippery slope the drug dealer exploits when saying the first one’s free.

The technology is getting close.  One researcher at MIT wants to creat an open-source project so that we can all be involved.  Maybe the first one is free –

Boyden’s lab has several plans for this technology. Smaller, cheaper and more hackable versions of TMS machines are being built. They’ve put together an open source TMS project that might allow anyone to start an at-home DIY brain hacking lab. Boyden tells me that his own TMS machine is a working prototype for an affordable, wearable unit that could go into much wider use in regular therapy offices, or even at home.

Then there is that other consideration.  Many people, when they know they can get what they want from sex, cocaine, marijuana, or whatever just stop doing the other things that take work to create a satisfying life.

Boyden theorizes that TMS could someday be a “prosthetic for creativity,” based on its ability to increase concentration and risk-taking. That is, if people can get past how strange the whole thing seems.

Is happiness or creativity at the cost of our illusion of free will valuable?

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. — Albert Schweitzer

I am not so sure.

What do you think?  Is a valued life worth doing the work?

Mike

Photo Credit by LugoLounge

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