Speed of Thought, Looking for Fulfillment

Sometimes I wonder why I am so busy.
Every morning, before my alarm goes off, my phone makes plenty of noises and chirps and squeaks to let me know that robots are sending me email. In a half-dreamy state of grog, I pick up my phone and look. Sales on car parts. Free movie rental when you buy a soda. Write to your senator to encoura..... zzzzzzz.
Twenty minutes later it's the same thing. Half an hour after that, my alarm actually goes off and I sit up.
And check my email.
Why? Who am I waiting to hear from, God? A supermodel? Someone offering me a job? What makes my brain make my body think that they might be emailing me at such ungodly hours when even most birds are upset that there are birds already chirping. All I know is, when I do get a relevant tidbit - not necessarily e-mail, or a phone call, or a face to face conversation - it excites my brain and makes me feel alive. Dopamine, rushing in because what I've been looking for is finally there. It's like love. You don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
But it is a smaller event than that, something much more immediate and visceral, but fleeting. It is falling in love with a moment, an object, an email, someone's smile, for just a minute. It excites our brains and makes us feel alive, fulfilled. The view from the top of a mountain can do that, so can walking through a park with your headphones on at just the right moment.

So what does this have to do with technology? Recently I watched an ABC special called Science and Spirituality where they were creating "religious experiences" in the brain. Well, if that's true, couldn't we shoot lasers into our brain to trigger dumps of dopamine and endorphins? I do not mean the uncontrolled rush that comes from certain illicit drugs, as the nature of their illegality makes finding the right "amount" something best left to Timothy Leary. But what if we could zap ourselves - and make ourselves smile, fulfilled, happy, for just a moment out of the day? Not to say we are all depressed - and neither is the author - but sometimes a moment of pure joy is a blissful spark to a dull day.

Now, while there are drugs that do this, as have been mentioned, some of them apparently do it well. A major bit in the written news lately (as I do not consider much TV News worth watching) mentioned that Johns Hopkins University had found the "sweet spot" for doses of psychoactive mushrooms, stating that small but effective doses over long periods of time are amazing for the human brain and mood. Sounds like a natural Paxil - and some part of me wonders why we don't take nature more seriously more often, but medicine is just a part of the technological machine as anything else.