“It's all in your head." You've heard that before, haven't you? Maybe someone was scoffing at a鬼故事或轻描淡写的症状沮丧，，，，paranoia or madness. The message is simple: Your obsession, whatever it may be, has no basis outside your thoughts.
Yet with sufficient scientific understanding, it becomes obvious that everything is "all in your head." We don't mean that the world is one great big illusion, but rather that each individual's pool of consciousness and memory exists solely within the electrochemical processes of the brain. Self is a chemical cocktail imbued with a neurological spark, and consciousness is a peculiar parlor trick stirred up by evolution.
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That person you think you are? Well, it's the product of a constantly changing equation made up of 95 to 100 billion neurons, along with synapses, neurotransmitters, genetic coding and a string of memories tailing back to the murky depths of childhood [source:Williams]。Alter any factor in this equation just a little, and you change the final sum. In fact, you do a little self tinkering every time you so much as make a simple observation or drink a cup of咖啡。每个连续的您至少在上面的化身上都是一个轻微的变体。头脑还受到情绪创伤，脑损伤和疾病的严重改变，所有人都能够大大改变神经方程的结果。
Our tools for addressing brain conditions have ranged from the sublime to the barbaric. We've treated mental illness on the therapist's couch, as well as with scalpels and electric shock. Fortunately, scientific breakthroughs continue to refine our methods.
For instance, there'sneurostimulation或电刺激神经以减轻疼痛或抑制震颤。医生借助小型完成了这些壮举neurostimulators植入脊髓附近或主要神经。Deep brain stimulationand迷走神经刺激take this concept even further and may effectively manage various psychiatric disorders and neurological diseases. The only catch is they too require painstaking surgery to position implants in the appropriate locations -- in the neck for vagus nerve stimulation and inside the brain for deep brain stimulation.
What if there were a way to stimulate nerves and portions of the human brain without drilling through skulls and implanting electrical devices? What if there were a way to remotely tinker with the neurological equation?
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