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From The Atlantic:
It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?”
Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feelings of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line?
The authors were asking this question because of a patient who wanted to decide the matter for himself: a 33-year-old German man who had been suffering for many years from severe OCD and generalized anxiety syndrome. A few years earlier, his doctors had implanted electrodes in a central part of his brain’s reward system—namely, the nucleus accumbens. Electrically stimulating the patient’s brain had worked rather well on his symptoms, but now it was time to change the stimulator battery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:25AM
My father, for one. He did the typical mid-life crisis thing, got divorced when I was 16, remarried a medicated woman 10 years younger than himself... after awhile he decided to go on the meds himself, and he was "happier" nothing bothered him minute-to-minute, but on the long horizon he was hating the decisions he was making, spending themselves deep into debt buying pretty things that weren't really necessary and were ultimately hurting their long-term comfort and control of their lives. After a couple of years on the benzodiazipemes he made the decision to wean down and eventually quit them, it wasn't easy for him. We haven't talked about it in years, but I think his wife is still on the Lithium.