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posted by janrinok on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the cheatcodes dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:56PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:56PM (#673163) Journal

    Yeah...why is everyone not on heroin? The answer is that human culture is self-regulating to this kind of threat.

    No, the answer is that heroin doesn't just make you happy. It makes you unhealthy, prone to severe legal trouble, and broke — all of which tend to you make you very unhappy.

    The reasons for all that are well worth discussing; some are primary effects - the direct result of the drug - and some are social - taking away the liberty to make choices for yourself for whatever justification might be fielded.

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