How BCIs can help with Anger Management
Everyone gets angry sometimes. Whether it's from stubbing your toe or from work/school, everyone has experienced anger sometime in their lives.
This common feeling can ruin lives.
If you don’t control it, anger can be dangerous. If not dealt with properly, it can lead to isolation, self-harm, ruining relationships, hurting others and jail time.
Although therapy is a great option, there need to be other options, especially with the new technology we see around us. We can get better options, with Brain-Computer Interfaces(BCI).
Brain-Computer Interfaces(BCI) — a device that allows your brain and computer to communicate.
How anger works
Anger is triggered from a part of your brain called the amygdala which turns on automatically when it senses a threat. A more common term for this is called fight or flight. Like many other processes our body has, we got the process of anger from our caveman days for threats like predators.
When it turns on, it activates your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
Neurons from your hypothalamus release adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) from your pituitary gland. The ACTH tells your pituitary glands to release stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine.
These are the hormones that activate symptoms of stress like:
- headaches
- digestion problems
- abdominal pain
- insomnia
- increased anxiety
- depression
- high blood pressure
- heart attack
- stroke
It limits your ability of different parts of your body like your vision, digestion and prefrontal cortex. As your prefrontal cortex gets impacted, it reduces your short term memory and decision making. This is why people make rash decisions while being angry.
Brain scans of murderers(generally angry people), showed they had damaged or inactive prefrontal cortexes so to combat anger, you can grow that part of your brain. One great technique for this is meditation(check out this article I wrote, showing the benefits of meditation).
What I did
I wrote a program that took a dataset from Kaggle where I classified the electroencephalography(EEG) data into:
- positive — happy
- negative — angry
- neutral — neither
If you’re interested in the code, I wrote it using google collab here:
This project is one step closer to an anger management app/extension using an EEG headset. I made an interactive mock-up of a possible app with this classification.
Implemented in mock-up:
- journal
- past journal entries
- day report
- past reports
- meditation
I made a video walking through the mock-up here:
Walkthrough the mock-up yourself here:
Future Works
Along with the help of proper doctors and neuroscientists, we can implement proper neurofeedback that improves the anger management skills of the users. We can also work with existing companies like Muse for health and wellness add-ons. Muse has features with sleep and meditation which can be integrated into the app! This can also be used by those who went to jail for anger management problems. This rehabilitation will ensure they don’t repeat their mistakes.
Hopefully, with an app like this, anger management can be a lot more personalized and helpful.
