A woman who has been depressed for as long as she can remember undergoes brain surgery and is soon enjoying life to the fullest. This is one of the examples of the potential of deep brain stimulation in the documentary Hunting for Hedonia. This technique, in which electrodes placed in the brain send signals to suppress specific symptoms, has been used medically for a number of years, for example in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
The possibilities seem limitless, and that is the main message of the documentary. At the same time, the treatment is not without risks. For example, deep brain stimulation can drastically change people’s personalities. Haselager: “This has occurred in only a few cases so far, but it is precisely these examples that should lead to a critical examination of the technology.”
Haselager is concerned not only about the health risks of this technique, but especially about the ethical dilemmas that can result from its widespread use. “You don't have to be a conspiracy thinker to realise that this technique can come close to mind control. I can understand that a practitioner would use deep brain stimulation as an emergency measure to alleviate severe depression, but not that they would use the technique simply to improve someone's mood.”
‘Pacifying’ teenagers?
To be clear, Haselager is not an opponent of the technology itself, but he does oppose a one-sided focus on its positive aspects. “You have to discuss the advantages in the light of the disadvantages, and not the other way around. Now it is about treating diseases, but who decides, now and in the future, what we define as a disease?”
In the documentary, the scientist Robert Heath is praised by his students as a hard-working and charismatic pioneer in the field. “But he is also a controversial figure who fell into disrepute in the early 1970s, partly due to his experiments to cure homosexuality. What if this technique becomes available to do that, to ‘pacify’ rebellious adolescents, or to get political opponents back in line? This is a dormant risk that will increase if we use the technology more often without considering these possible consequences.”
Justifying imperfections
Another possibility for the future is to use deep brain stimulation for non-medical procedures. According to one of the scientists in Hunting for Hedonia, the question is not if, but when, people can improve their personality with this technique. “In this way, offering a potential treatment creates a demand for it, comparable to what happened with plastic surgery. With that technique as well, the treatments were initially purely medical. Should we want someone who is rather passive by nature to be able to decide to become more assertive through brain stimulation? In this way, the notion of perfectability is enhanced, possibly to the point where people have to justify their imperfections.”
“Incidentally, the discussion does not have to be exclusively about possible dangers, as in some articles in neuro-ethics journals, but you definitely need to have discussions about the risks before the technique becomes more widely used,” says Haselager. “Those discussions should be step 1, not step 7.5.”
Photo: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay.