Keyboard Electrical Shock Therapy Can Cure Your Facebook Addiction

As they say, “desperate times call for desperate measures.” If you believe that philosophy, you might like this extreme solution to solve your Facebook addiction. Actually, it won’t just cure Facebook addiction, but it will train your brain to stay away from any website you waste too much time on. Electrical shock therapy is nothing new, and using it in this context makes me laugh. I can see how this would be effective though. It’s a way to use Pavlov’s Dog treatment on yourself.

That’s right. Now you can train your brain (through electrical shock therapy) that it’s bad to procrastinate important tasks by hanging out on Facebook, Twitter or any other time consuming website. It’s called the Pavlov Poke, and it was created by MIT doctoral candidates Robert Morris and Dan McDuff.

According to Mr. McDuff, “It monitors application usage and if you spend too much time on a particular website or application, it will give you a shock. The shock is unpleasant but not dangerous.” This electrical shock therapy has apparently cured Robert and Dan of their extreme Facebook addiction so now they can focus on finishing their dissertations.

Of course, the Pavlov Poke is all just a joke (the video below is awesome). Its purpose is to initiate a discussion about how communication technologies are designed, and how addicting they can become for all of us. Now that all these technologies are so accessible via our mobile devices, they are even harder to resist.

I’m sure there are probably some people out there who have such an extreme Facebook addiction that they might invite a little electrical shock therapy. The way it works is simple. Conductive metals strips are added to your keyboard. Then when you spend too much time on any website you are trying to avoid, an electrical current is sent through the metal strips all the way to the palm of your hand. Yikes!