Brain implants that adjust mood and sleep could become as normal as cosmetic surgery. People already spend thousands on temporary psychological fixes, so a permanent, tunable implant would be an obvious upgrade. Pacemakers show how invasive devices shift from shocking to standard.
Like, why would you have a hole drilled in your skull so you can move a cursor on a screen? Like, I can do that with my mouse and pretty good at it. Yeah. Um, so yeah, of course it seems crazy, but I mean, I don't remember exactly what the numbers are, but the number of people that have elective plastic surgery for what is ultimately a psychological benefit, right? And in most cases it's like a temporary bump and then you kind of level back off to where you started and hedonic treadmill kicks in. Um, But plastic surgery is a huge industry, single-payer driven. So people are paying out of pocket for surgeries that give them a minor psychological bump. So if you have a device that can be implanted one time and not only provide you a minor psychological bump, but a permanent knob on tunable mood, better sleep, improved depressive or anxious symptoms, name it, right? All of a sudden that seems to actually be like totally reasonable. The same thing happened with pacemakers.
