Inside The Medical Treatment That Allows You To Plant Feelings Into People’s Heads

Published September 22, 2016
Updated September 21, 2016

"Mind control" is in its most sophisticated form yet -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Man Head Connected Wires

Wikimedia Commons

Ever wish you could get inside someone’s head? Scientists have been working on that for years, and it’s been getting some extra attention lately.

In a therapeutic process known as neurofeedback, researchers can plant feelings that didn’t previously exist into the minds of participants, using it to treat various mental disorders, from insomnia to migraines to ADD, to name a few.

What Is Neurofeedback?

Neurofeedback, also known as biofeedback or neurotherapy, is a process that enables people to alter their own brainwaves. Scientists at Brown University recently used the process to manipulate the emotions of participants, resulting in their development of either positive or negative feelings toward photographs which had elicited no emotional response just days prior.

While this may sound an awful lot like mind control, it’s more scientific than science fiction. Measuring brain activity in real-time, the process relies on reinforcement to teach participants to regulate their own brainwave patterns, in an event referred to as “self-regulation.”

Despite researchers manning the controls, the participants surveyed generated these new feelings entirely on their own, making this relatively new technique more like brain-training than brainwashing.

author
Krissy Howard
author
Krissy Howard is a New York-based freelance writer. She regularly contributes to Runt of the Web and her original humor has appeared on The Hard Times, Reductress, and The Hairpin.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.