Continued reading Jonathan Sadowski's The Empire of Depression. A few topics I enjoyed reading about were the evolution of new therapeutic modalities from psychoanalysis in the 1970s and the factors that influenced their evolution.

And while reading about the creation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by Aaron Beck, it lead me to read back through Martin Seligman's studies on "learned helplesness" as described by Robert Sapolski in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

My next step as soon as I finish reading Sadowski's book (and also, maybe, Sapolski's handful of chapters related to depression) will be to build a wearable brain activity monitor with a single sensor that I can use every day in an unobtrusive way.

Also. I was admiring the "medical device" that eye glasses are. But then, as I put my contact lenses on, I realized how creative contact lenses are. They are truly invisible.

What if future brain activity monitors are like "contact lenses" and function as invisible caps that wrap around our scalps just as contact lenses wrap around the iris and pupil?

This brain activity monitor, or "emotional lens", could allow us to see inside ourselves. To see our "souls", or our emotional activity. The shapes of the glasses constructed by our minds to navigate the world.

Here's an idea I had during my morning run.

Summary: A Continuous 2D Brain Activity Map

What if, the technology used to better understand brain activity (and therefore emotions) is a technology that creates a continuous 2D map of brain activity over time? Just like the Earth (a sphere) has a 2D representation of it's topology, so could our heads / scalps have a 2D representation of the electrical impulses emitted over time.

This 2D Brain Activity Map could be used to identify the key signatures of emotions and feelings. How does fear manifest in my mind? Could there be signature brain activities within predictable time intervals that define a specific feeling or emotion? If yes, how do these signature electrical patterns compare across individuals in a family? In a community? In a city? In a country? Globally as a species?

How can we define parameters for "healthy" and "unhealthy" patterns of electrical activities? What electrical activities tend to initialize or lead to behaviors? Which of these behaviors are destructive to the self? Destructive to society?

More specifically, what is the mapping between key electrical signatures to emotions to behaviors to suicide? To murder?

As a species, how can we agree to define an initial open-source definition of these health parameters? How should such parameters be defined? Who overlooks such parameters? What professions and fields should be involved? Should religious professionals also be involved?

After all, I believe that if we are able to define such electrical activity signatures that represent certain human feelings, and we then are able to set "healthy" and "unhealthy" parameters, in a way, we would be defining moral parameters rooted in biology.

This could be one of the bridges between science an religion.

It could also be a way to start mapping what some religions define as "the soul". I don't think there is a soul. I think it's just our human way of describing what it feels like to feel things and to be something. But nonetheless, this might bring an opportunity to bring more science to rigor to therapy, more understanding to human suffering, and more dialog between science and religion.

These two fields, science and religion, might agree to disagree. But at least let's agree on a few things and on the important perspective each field brings forth, irrespective on whether there is a God or not. Let's focus on the morals.