According to the journal Nature, the research agency DARPA has funded the development of a system for automatic control of human mood, which scans brain activity in real time and, if necessary, eliminates "unwanted disruptions" that can cause depression.
The device itself is inherently not unimaginable. It is a chip for deep brain stimulation. Such intracranial neuroimplants are already used to treat disorders of motor activity, restore lost functions due to stroke and Parkinson's disease. But any attempts to influence not the physical, but the emotional component previously ended in failure.
The new type of neuroimplants is in the "sleeping" mode most of the time and is switched on only as needed, when "the mood is out of range." As part of the preparation, the experts recorded the brain activity and mood of the subjects in order to correlate the change in brain activity with the deterioration of mood. The data was then fed into a system that was adjusted in such a way that stimulation of the brain regions responsible for mood would start only when it would go beyond the acceptable limits, in other words, it became bad. That is, a minor disorder does not trigger the activation of the chip, unlike a condition close to depression.
According to the developers of the chip, a personalized mood management system can help patients with severe behavioral disorders, as well as soldiers, whom neuroimplants can help to cope with the effects of stress during combat and post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, in the future, DARPA plans to develop similar devices that do not require implantation in the cranium.
Vladimir Kuznetsov