Wow, Michael Chrichton was a prophet.
Way back in the 70s, I read a book by Chrichton titled The Terminal Man, which describes exactly this scenario. In Chrichton's story, a man, Harold Benson, suffering from what was then called temporal-lobe epilepsy is fitted with a computer controlled implant designed to trigger his pleasure centres in order to arrest the onset of epileptic seizures - exactly as described in this article.
In the book, although the implant is designed to trigger only when it detects a seizure, Benson quickly works out how to deliberately induce seizures in order to experience the burst of pleasure the implant generates. As a result of the continuous seizure state, he enters a psychotic mindset in which he believes machines have taken over the world, that everyone around him is now a machine, and embarks on a horrifically murderous rampage to free the world of his perceived machine dominance.
It's incredibly spooky to see how a novel that grabbed my imagination back in the 70s is actually coming true. The Terminal Man now joins 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact in my library of sci-fi futures whose time I'm now living in. Makes me feel like a time traveller!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
