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Paper short abstract

Neural stimulators for mental health—from vagus nerve devices to deep brain stimulation—are rapidly proliferating. Emerging closed-loop systems promise to detect and modulate neural states in real time. This paper explores how STS can intervene in this emerging technoscientific project.

Paper long abstract

What is happiness? Across philosophy, biomedicine, psychology and other disciplines, happiness has been understood and measured in different ways: as pleasure, flourishing, neurological states, or life satisfaction. Against a global backdrop of intersecting crises in mental health, pharmacological dependencies and side-effects, and stretched healthcare systems, neurotechnologies are increasingly seeking to intervene directly in the biological and affective processes through which human experience is produced.

A growing range of neural stimulation technologies are now being developed and marketed to address wellbeing. These include transcranial stimulation devices, vagus nerve stimulators, and deep brain stimulation systems operating across healthcare and commercial markets. Electrical stimulation has long been harnessed therapeutically—from the use of electric fish in ancient medicine to twentieth-century electroconvulsive therapies—yet contemporary neurotechnologies are beginning to pursue a new technical paradigm.

Research groups and companies developing closed-loop neurostimulation systems combine biosensing, algorithmic interpretation, and targeted stimulation in adaptive feedback cycles. Rather than delivering fixed therapeutic interventions, these systems aim to detect and respond to neural states in real time.

This paper examines these developments through the figure of the “happy cyborg”—an emerging sociotechnical configuration in which wellbeing becomes an object of continuous technological modulation. Anchored in the critical posthumanities, the analysis foregrounds biohybrid (human–technology) assemblages while asking how technological efforts to modulate moods interact with ideas of flourishing, identity, and biopolitics. Drawing on the proposed humanities-led project Augmented Wellbeing, the paper explores how historic, ethnographic and speculative STS approaches might be combined to intervene in the development and governance of closed-loop neurotechnologies.