Happiness Through Technology

Pleasure and happiness are fundamental motivators for our lives. We need a certain amount of pleasure or rewards from our daily activities, else the pleasure deficit can cause depression. Babies are known to have stunted growth if they didn’t receive enough physical stroking soon after birth.

Technology and the pursuit of happiness

Several experiments show how powerful our reward pathways in the brain are. When laboratory rats were trained to stimulate themselves by pushing a lever that would activate the electrodes implanted in reward areas of the brain, they were found to ignore food, water and sex and even swim across dangerous moats and complex mazes just so that they could stimulate their pleasure pathways and they would do this innumerable times until they passed out from hunger or exhaustion.

Image via ESB

You can learn more about it in the following video:

Neurotransmitters of different chemical nature are involved in pleasure and reward. Scientists have been able to reproduce “happiness” in humans by releasing these chemicals into the pleasure centers of the brain.

At present, there are medical applications for the nascent technology. An Ohio farmer was able to alleviate the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disorder by implanting electrodes in his brain to stimulate the brain. You can learn more about this by watching this video.

In the future, it is possible to have human counterparts of the euphoric rat by the genetic engineering of the neural systems and by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), but will this psychochemical intervention lead one to a lifetime of orgasmic bliss and nirvana?

Think of this as a thought experiment: you have a device which you can strap on and manipulate to get any kind of pleasure. What will be your reaction? You can express your reactions as comments.

You can find a discussion of this topic on The Hedonistic Imperative.

Science treats human beings like a machine with levers that can be manipulated. It doesn’t take into account the incredible power of the mind and its inexhaustible source of strength. You can see what a person with an indomitable spirit can achieve, in the video below:

Humans need social interactions. People who are isolated socially die prematurely. Studies show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain. Too much of  focus on self, that is “me”, instead of “we” goes against our biology and makes us unhappy. Which is what makes push-button happiness difficult to achieve.

In the next article, we will see how Matthieu Ricard , the “world’s happiest man”, has been able to achieve through meditation or mind control, measurable effects in various areas of the brain.

Read my earlier article: Can You Synthesize Happiness?