Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Feelings

I had this long debate with myself this morning, and we (we refers to me and I) started with this one umbrella topic which spawned numerous sub-topics and ended up talking about feelings. Or more precisely, emotions. I (we) saw this documentary about how people measure emotions. Most physicians use ECG responses. Emotions are consequences of hormones secreted from various parts of the brain so they would just localise the area corresponding to an emotion and observe the neuron activity in said area during stimulation.

I found that ridiculous. I mean, it's great that they have found a way into understanding how the brain functions because we know we all could benefit from a cure for Alzheimer's. But the fact that emotions are being put under the microscope makes me feel uneasy. If serious money is being channelled by big companies into research on human emotions, I would like to know why. These companies, no matter how charitable the image they try to project, surely await a greater profit from the results of this research. If they finally found the exact formula for the stimulus that triggers crying in humans, how are they going to exploit this knowledge to their benefit? And at whose expense?

Will we end up being puppets whose emotions can be controlled by global think tanks? If microwaves from mobile phones can alter your brain functions, is it possible that the human brain can actually be remote controlled? Or are they doing it already as we speak?

I can't answer any of these questions, and in a way, I don't really want answers to them. I just like to ponder on them until I move on to something more exciting and I'll forget all about them, you know, the way a cat ferociously plays with feather until he sees a moving laser light and forget the feather ever existed.

One thing I am fairly certain though: one of the best feelings in the world is when you find out the person you like likes you back.

Okay my code has finished compiling so I've got to get back to work.

1 comment:

Hakim J said...

Who knows what 'they' will do with the technology to alter our emotions! Although, whatever is done, unless there's something to do about it, we can still live in our blissful ignorance.