The Orgasmic Braina:hover{color:336699; }The Orgasmic Brain [Quotes from The Three-Pound Universe, 0-874-77650-3, 419 pg pb byJudith Hooper and Dick Teresi, 1986; 1991[from pages 152-161 of the paperback edition] '...If New Orleans is a city with an overripe id, it is also hometo Tulane University Medical School and its unique department ofneurology and psychiatry. ... In 1950, [Dr. Robert G.] Heath firstput depth electrodes into the brain of a human mental patient. ... Hiselectrodes charted the circuitry of pain in some of the illest brainsin Louisiana. It was the first time electrodes had been used insidehuman brain tissue (except very briefly during epileptic operationsjust to guide neurosurgeons around the homogenous macaroni of thecortex), and so Heath's operations were controversial, to say theleast. In the years from 1950 to 1952, he implanted brain electrodesin twenty-six patients. Some of them suffered from incurableepilepsy, intractable physical pain, Parkinson's disease, and othermedical conditions, but most came out of the dimly lit back wards ofthe state mental hospitals. With dental burr-drills, Heath and hisco-workers drilled through the patients' skulls, guided the electrodescarefully into specific sites, and then left them there, at first fora few days, later for years at a time. ... "By implanting electrodes and taking recordings from thesedeep-lying areas," he explains, "we were able to localize the brain'spleasure and pain systems. We'd interview a patient about pleasantsubjects and see the pleasure system firing. If we had a patient whoflew into a rage attack, as many psychotics did, we'd find the'punishment' system firing." The pleasure system includes the septalarea and part of the almond-shaped amygdala; the other half of theamygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, and the tegmentum (in themidbrain) constitute the punishment system. ... Whenever a mental patient flew into a violent rage orturned into a catatonic zombie, the EEG was almost certain to displaythe telltale sawtooth pattern. If the patient got well, the spikedisappeared. ... "The primary symptom of schizophrenia isn't hallucinationsor delusions," he tells us. "It's a defect in the pleasure response.Schizophrenics have a predominance of painful emotions. They functionin an almost continuous state of fear or rage, fight or flight,because they don't have the pleasure to neutralize it." ... It turned out that electrical stimulation of the pleasurecenter automatically turned off the punishment system -- what Heathcalls "the aversive system" -- and vice-versa. And so Heath tried tocure mental illness with direct electrical stimulation of the pleasureneurons. "If we stimulated their pleasure systems, violent psychoticsstopped having rage attacks," he says. "We even stimulated the septalarea in people suffering from intractable cancer or arthritis pain andwe were able to turn off the pain." ... By stimulating the septalpleasure area, he could make homicidal manias, suicide attempts,depressions, or delusions go away -- sometimes for a long time. ... As it turned out, it took more than a few pulses of current toexorcise madness. Heath had to devise safer electrodes that could beleft in the brain for years so that a patient could be restimulated atintervals. Then, in 1976, the "most violent patient in the state" --a mildly retarded young man who had to be tied to his bed because ofhis savage outbursts -- received Dr. Heath's first brain pacemaker. The pacemaker is an array of tiny battery-powered electrodesthat delivers 5 minutes of stimulation every 10 minutes to thecerebellum, at the very back of the brain. Its power source, abattery pack about the size of a deck of playing cards, could fitneatly in the patient's pocket. (Later it was miniaturized tomatchbook proportions and implanted in the recipient's abdomen; itrequires recharging every 5 years.) The cerebellum, Heath learned, isa better entryway to the brain's emotional circuitry. Stimulating aprecise half-inch of its cauliflowerlike surface automatically firesthe pleasure area and inhibits the rage centers, and so it was nolonger necessary to invade the limbic areas farther forward in thebrain. The first pacemaker patient soon stopped trying to slashhimself and his caretakers and went home from the hospital. All waswell, for a while. Then the man inexplicably went on a rampage andattempted to murder his parents. Before he was subdued, he hadseverely wounded his next-door neighbor and narrowly missed being shotby the sheriff. Heath's X rays quickly spotted the problem: brokenwires between the pacemaker and the power source. Once the wires werereattached, the rage attacks waned again. The young man is now invocational rehabilitation and doing well. In 1974 a pretty, intelligent twenty-one-year-old librarianwas shot in the head during a holdup. After an operation that removedmuch of her frontal lobes, she had frequent seizures, was barelyconversant, and had to be fed through a tube because she stoppedeating. By the end of the next year she was in a continual frenzy.She lashed out at anyone within range and once tried to stab herfather. She screamed whenever she was touched and complained ofconstant, excruciating pain all over her body. Her brain pacemakerwas installed in November 1976, and, magically, the rage episodessubsided. She started eating; her memory improved; and her doctorsbegan describing her personality as "pleasant" even "sparkling." Another patient, a severely depressed former physicist,was troubled by voices that commanded him to choke his wife. When hegot one of Dr. Heath's pacemakers in 1977, the infernal voicesvanished, along with his perennial gloom. He and his wife began tovisit relatives and dine together in restaurants for the first time inyears. But *his* wires eventually broke, and once again his wife wasthreatened with strangulation. When the gadgetry was mended, so wasthe man's psyche. Ironically, the many technical snafus that plagued thepacemaker gave Heath the perfect controls for his experiments. ...Even so, the cerebellar pacemaker is not a psychiatric cure-all. ByHeath's estimates, about half of the seventy-odd patients have beensubstantially rehabilitated -- no mean feat, given that pacemakerrecipients come from the ranks of the "incurable" -- but other havenever emerged from their private hells. For some reason, depressivesand patients prone to uncontrollable violence have benefitted most;chronic schizophrenics the least. Fortunately for posterity, Heath and his colleagues filmedmany of their bold journeys into the human emotional apparatus. ... A woman of indeterminate age lies on a narrow cot, a giantbandage covering her skull. At the start of the film she seems lockedinside some private vortex of despair. Her face is as blank as herwhite hospital gown and her voice is a remote, tired monotone. "Sixty pulses," says a disembodied voice. It belongs to thetechnician in the next room, who is sending a current to the electrodeinside the woman's head. The patient, inside her soundproof cubicle,does not hear him. Suddenly, she smiles. "Why are you smiling?" asks Dr. Heath,sitting by her bedside. "I don't know ... Are you doing something to me? [Giggles.]I don't usually sit around and laugh at nothing. I must be laughingat something." "One hundred forty," says the offscreen technician. The patient giggles again, transformed from a stone-facedzombie into a little girl with a secret joke. "What in the hell areyou doing?" she asks. "You must be hitting some goody place." The "goody place" is the septal pleasure center, which theunseen technician is stimulating with an electrical current. "She wasa mean one," Heath muses. "She was hospitalized for years for aschizoaffective illness. ... This film was made in 1969, and thetreatment has held on her -- she's doing well." [From another patient story:] "There -- see the big delta waveappearing in the septal region," Heath tells us. Sure enough, large,languorous waves are now coming from the lead to the septal electrode."There's almost an exact correlation," he adds. "When he gets a rushof good feeling, the record shows large-amplitude waves in thepleasure system." ... Along with depth electrodes, Heath's team would oftensurgically implant a sort of tube, called a canula, through which theycould deliver precise amounts of a chemical directly into the brain.Oriental sacred texts (and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) mentiona legendary bliss drug called "soma", the food of the Himalayan gods.The real life version might be acetylcholine, a natural chemicalneurotransmitter. When the Tulane researchers injected acetylcholineinto a patient's septal area, "vigorous activity" showed up on theseptal EEG, and the patient usually reported intense pleasure --including multiple sexual orgasms lasting as long as thirty minutes. "I can show you a film of one of the recordings," Heathoffers, fishing through some of the reels on the shelves. We halfexpect a neurologic peep show, but the film he digs out is the raw EEGrecord of a woman patient, who was being treated for epilepsy, underthe influence of acetylcholine. A flat, clinical voice-overaccompanies the staticky march of brain waves across the screen: Now we're coming to the start of the changes ... It's in the form of a fast spindle, about 18 per second ... first in the dorsal right anterior septal, then it spreads to the other septal leads. ... This is still correlated with the same clinical findings of intense pleasure and particularly of a sexual nature. A half hour after the acetylcholine injection, the patient isstill having orgasms. Heath points at an ominous-looking scrawl onthe EEG and notes, "See, it looks like almost like the spoke-and-domepattern of epileptic seizure. It's a very explosive activity." The flip side of joy is pain. The next film shows a patienthaving his "aversive system" stimulated. His face twists suddenlyinto a terrible grimace. One eye turns out and his features contortas though in the spasm of a horrible science-fiction metamorphosis."It's knocking me out ... I just want to claw..., " he says, gaspinglike a tortured beast. "I'll kill you...I'll kill you, Dr. Lawrence." ... When [Heath] first showed his movies to an assemblage ofpsychiatrists, neurologists, and other scientists, some were outraged.Murmurs of medical hubris, mind control, and unsafe humanexperimentation circulated -- in large part because of the film wejust saw. But what looks like a scene from the Spanish Inquisition,Heath assures us, is no more than electrical stimulation of therage/fear circuits. Unfortunately, the audience, back in 1952,misread it. "They thought we were hurting him," he tells us. "But we*weren't* hurting him. We were stimulating a site in the tegmentum inthe midbrain, and all of a sudden he wanted to kill. He would have,too, if he hadn't been tied down... He started remembering a timewhen he lost his temper -- when his shirts weren't ironed on right andhe wanted to kill his sister. That showed us we'd activated the samecircuit that was fired by his spontaneous rage attacks." ... "As soon as we turned off the current he went back to normal,"Heath recalls. "We asked him why he had wanted to kill Dr. Lawrence(not his real name), and he said he had nothing against Dr. Lawrence;he was just there. He's like a psychotic person on the street wholashes out at whoever is around." ... Heath tells us some of his patients were given"self-stimulators" similar to the ones used by Old's rats. Wheneverhe felt the urge, the patient could push any of 3 or 4 buttons on theself-stimulator hooked to his belt. Each button was connected to anelectrode implanted in a different part of his brain, and the devicekept track of the number of times he stimulated each site. Heath tells of one patient who felt impelled to stimulate hisseptal region about 1500 times per hour. He happened to be aschizophrenic homosexual who wanted to change his sexual preference.As an experiment, Heath gave the man stag films to watch while hepushed his pleasure-center hotline, and the result was a new interestin female companionship. After clearing things with the stateattorney general, the enterprising Tulane doctors went out and hired a"lady of the evening," as Heath delicately put it, for their ardentpatient. "We paid her fifty dollars," Heath recalls. "I told her itmight be a little weird, but the room would be completely blacked outwith curtains. In the next room we had the instruments for recordinghis brain waves, and he had enough lead wiring running into theelectrodes in his brain so he could move around freely. We stimulatedhim a few times, the young lady was cooperative, and it was a verysuccessful experience." The conversion was only temporary, however. ... We ask Heath if human beings are as compulsive aboutpleasure as the rats of Old's laboratory that self-stimulated untilthey passed out. "No," he tells us. "People don't self-stimulateconstantly -- as long as they're feeling good. Only when they'redepressed does the stimulation trigger a big response. There are somany factors that play into a human being's pleasure response: yourexperience, your memory system, sensory cues..." hemuses. "[Timothy Leary] was asked whether drugs were a bad influenceon young kids, and he said, 'This is nothing. In a few years, kidsare going to be demanding septal electrodes.' "But it doesn't work that way." ' S N A P S H O T S01 : 02 : 03 : 04 : 05 : 06 : 07 : 08 : 09 : 10 :11 : 12 :13 14 :15 : 16 :17 :18 :19 : 20 : 21 : 22 :23 : 24 :25 : 26HOMEOrgasmPleasureOrgasmatronsFuture OpioidsBLTC ResearchDr Robert HeathSuperhappiness?HypermotivationBiomedical EthicsEmpathogens.comWirehead HedonismSurprise and RewardThe Good Drug GuideDesigner AphrodisiacsThe Abolitionist ProjectUtilitarianism On The NetThe Hedonistic ImperativeRats, Roborats and RatbotsCritique of Brave New WorldWhen Is It Best To Take Crack Cocaine?Wireheads and Wireheading in Science FictionPleasure Evoked by Electrical Stimulation of the Brain |
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