Neuroscience Could Bring Us Eternal Bliss, But Is That a Good Thing?

What if the secret to eternal happiness is a brain implant?

If you’re thinking that sounds like the premise of a Black Mirror episode, you’re not alone. Yet at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference earlier this month, two teams demonstrated parts of a new technology that may one day take us there.

Picture this: a series of tiny electrodes sit silently in various parts of the brain, recording the organ’s electrical activity in real time. The data is fed into a personalized algorithm—a “mood map”—that can estimate a person’s general mood based on brain waves alone.

When the system detects patterns that indicate the onset of a depressive episode, it sends out electrical zaps targeting the brain’s mood centers. Under the watchful eye of the algorithm, the system continues its stimulation until the malfunctioning circuits are shocked back into a “happy” state.

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