Can You Overdose on Happiness? - Issue 60: Searches
▻http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/can-you-overdose-on-happiness
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 written by two Germans and an American, and they were grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feeling 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?What happiness looks like: Deep brain stimulation involves the implantation of electrodes in the brain, linked through the scalp (top) to wires (right) leading to a battery implanted below the skin. (...)