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THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN MIND

CHAPTER SIX (pp. 151, 152 and 153)

THE BRAIN AND THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN

That a good hypnotic subject experiences the world through his hypnotist, that another human being can control and even determine for him what he shall see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and remember that, you may well say, is a pretty sad state of affairs. And if you want to pat yourself on the back and give thanks that you are not one of the 20 per cent of potential somnambulists, who can be placed at a hypnotist's mercy, go right ahead. But after you have counted this blessing, you might as well count it right out. Because the power the hypnotist cannot exert over you can be exerted by a tiny electrode and an electric current so weak you cannot even feel it. Applied along one narrow strip of the convoluted and furrowed shell of your brain called the cortex, the electrode will make you hear sounds of all kinds. Applied along another, it will send lights and colors dancing before you. Along a third, it will have you smelling things. Along a fourth, it will make you skin crawl or burn or tingle or itch - it will bombard you with a variety of strange sensations. At other spots along the cortex, greater in area, an electrode will start a chain of recollections unfolding in exhaustive detail, and the recollections will not stop until the electrode is removed. If the hypnotist cannot regress you in age, a little metal plate and a light electric current can.

So far the hypnotist has an advantage over the electrode, and the somnambulist over the rest of us. Hypnosis keeps the mind in play. Trance experiences have form and make sense; they are structured and meaningful. The experiences the electrode produces, however are not. The hypnotist's subject can see dinosaurs, penguins and petunias. The electrode's can see only lights and colors. The hypnotist's subject can hear a Brahms quartette or his mothers voice. The electrode's can hear only meaningless noises. The hypnotist's subject can select for reliving an experience he enjoyed, and he can decide when to begin and end it. The electrode's has no choice in the matter at all. Where the experience begins is a function of where on his cortex the electrode is placed, and how long it continues is a function of how long the electrode remains.

But give the brain physiologists and their electrodes a little more time and they will undoubtedly be able to do by mechanical means everything the hypnotist can do by psychological ones. They know where on the cortex the keyboard is located that turns vibrations into sound, and where on the cortex the palette is that turns them into color. They know, indeed, where on our cortices each kind of sensory impression is formed. And if they have not yet discovered the precise spots within these general areas that correspond to the precise sense impressions, they will. If they have not yet discovered the exact spots on the cortex which correspond to those particular moments in time at which any given memory begins, they will find them, too. Then with their electrodes, they will be able to play on us at their pleasure, and the world we live in may be determined, not by its actual nature or even by hypnotic suggestion, but by the whim which decides where the electrodes will be placed.

The electrode's whims may one day determine all our actions, too. When the time comes that we can sit passively, believing that things are happening to us because the electrodes tell us that they are, it will also have come that we make overt responses to these imaginary happenings on the electrodes' commands. For as there are centers in the brain for receiving impressions, so there are centers in it for acting on them. By stimulating these centers, the electrodes have already learned how to start people babbling or twitching or winking or sniffing or shaking, and although they are still behind the hypnotist in this respect too - movements in hypnotic trance are structured, coordinated, and meaningful, while the movements that can so far be produced by electrical stimulation are more or less random and disorganized - the men who manipulate the electrodes will solve that problem, as well. And then, no than more robots will we have to know why we do things we do.

More - and worse! these gentlemen have learned to produce - at least in rats - not merely unmotivated behavior and delusions about the events of the outside world, but delusions about the events of the inner world, as well. For a long time they have known how to make the electrodes substitutes for every unpleasant inner sensation; by stimulating one part of that body deep in the brain called the hypothalamus they can make rats engage in behavior that indicates severe fright or anger, motivated by absolutely nothing in the external world. Now they have discovered how to use electrodes and weak electric current to lead the animals to believe that all their wants have been satisfied, whether they have or not, and even to prefer their hallucinatory satisfactions to the real thing. For the sake of an infinitesimal shock to another portion of the same hypothalamic area, they will brave electric grids to which they would not even touch a tentative toe for the sake of food or a tryst with a member of the opposite sex. The shock is so pleasurable, indeed, that once the rat has learned to give it to himself - a simple enough procedure which, in the usual experiment, requires only that he step on one particular spot in his cage - he will do it regularly once every five seconds, The only thing that will make him stop this self-stimulation is turning off the current. when that is done and he realizes that the shock is no longer available, he will simply lie down and fall asleep. Perhaps one day we will be able to live this sybarites life too.

More on the scientology's use of electricity: LINK