It all started with this documentary.

(I’ve only watched the first half, so, no spoilers!)

In it, I learned about an experiment in which researchers implanted electrodes in a rat’s brain (poor rattie) in order to control the rat’s behaviour.

Two electrodes were implanted in the areas that controlled their respective sets of whiskers, namely the right side whiskers and the left side whiskers. With these wireless electrodes, the researchers could give the rat the sensation of having either its left or right side whiskers stimulated.

That did not disturb me. Animal rights issues aside, there are no big scary implications lurking in messing around with a rat’s whisker.

The part that scared me greatly was that there was a third sensor. It was put there to help encourage the rat going where the researchers wanted by being able to reward the rat for compliance.

By stimulating the pleasure center of the rat’s brain.

Now THAT, so to speak, blew my mind.

As all Larry Niven fans know, the ability to stimulate the pleasure centers of a brain gives you possibly the most potent possible tool to completely control said brain.

Niven wrote more than once about a future which contained (amongst other things) the phenomenon of wireheads, people who become addicted to direct stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain via future technology. It is the ultimate high, because it completely bypasses reality and simply feeds your brain pleasure with no intermediary.

In Niven’s work, predictably, wireheads do not have very good lives, often starving to death because they can’t stand to leave their wire stimulation long enough to eat.

Even more frightening is Niven’s invention of a weapon called the tasp, which does the same thing remotely. Think of it as a Pleasure Ray. Point, zap, bliss.

With a weapon like that, a person could be a Skinner master of any person, given sufficient time to condition them. Do what I want, or no more joy juice. It’s like being the ultimate drug dealer.

The idea that we can literally do this now frightens the hell out of me.

Because you know that if they can do it with a rat, they could do it with a person. It might be a very difficult surgery, but it is at least possible, and in the future^[1], we may very well have the ability to stimulate any part of the brain from outside the skull entirely.

And despite all our mental sophistication, a human being is as vulnerable to simple operant conditioning as any other animal. We do what brings pleasure and avoid what brings pain. Ample experiments exist in the annals of science proving this. We will even invent elaborate justifications for doing so, in order to convince ourselves that we are still acting out of reason and knowledge.

But really, we are just pressing whatever lever makes the food pellet drop into our bowl.

All of this has got me thinking dark thoughts about the future. I love brain science, it is my favorite field of medicine and psychology, but it also scares the sweet loving shiznit out of me because I know what is happening and what is coming, and it gives me highly uncharacteristic “are there things which are simply too dangerous for us to know?” thoughts.

With the advent of the fMRI, we are now capable of watching thoughts occur in the human brain in realtime. Minute changes in bloodflow can be monitored, recorded, and someday, interpreted.

We are on the brink of making telepathy a reality. At first we will simply be able to read someone’s thoughts, but after that, it will not be too long before we can rewrite the entire contents of the human brain as easily as we reformat our hard drives.

And I truly worry that humanity’s sanity simply cannot withstand the potential feedback loop of brains reprogramming brains reprogramming brains, not to mention the obvious worries about the sanctity of the human mind, privacy, humanity, human rights, and just plain creep factor.

Perhaps this is merely the paranoid stirrings of my eventual decrepitude, and worries like mine will seem as silly as all the worry about mind control and brainwashing in sixties science fiction. Perhaps I will be ab absurd old man some day, railing against perfectly wonderful technology because I think it is trying to steal my brain and make clones of me.

But the fact remains….. the future of brain science is both incredibly exciting… and positively terrifying.