The British press may have finally gone off the deep end. With a scare article in The Economist, a left-of-center news magazine that is normally a bastion of reason and moderation, the editors have taken time out from predicting the imminent bursting of America's economic bubble to ruefully inform the world that neuroscientists are feverishly developing mind-control technology that could turn us all into robots. This article was written in the style of New Scientist, which is the official layman's guide to disasters, calamities, and imminent dangers caused by the inexorable destruction of human freedom, the ozone layer, the rain forest, the planet, human rights, and the natural world order caused by science. The article calls for regulation of neuroscience research similar to that exercised over human embryo research in the U.K. by the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
Although the overall inspiration for this article may have come from a reading of the book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis "Often-Wrong" Fukuyama (the same author who earlier said that mankind had reached the "end of history"), its main focus was the recent paper by Sanjiv Talwar et al (Nature 417, 37-38 (02 May 2002)), describing an experiment in which neuroscientists implanted electrodes into brain regions called the medial forebrain bundle and somatosensory cortex of a rat. The scientists had used gentle stimulation of the electrodes on one side to cause the rats to think their whiskers had touched an object, which caused them to move in the opposite direction. The rats were then trained to associate this virtual whisker sensory stimulus with stimulation of the medial forebrain bundle, which causes pleasure, with the result that the rats were induced to move through a complex three-dimensional maze. In essence, they had created a "remote-controlled rat".
This experiment may sound weird, but it is a minor breakthrough in the field of learning and memory. To study memory, it is necessary to provide some reward for the rat -- whether it is cheese, a tasty chunk of Purina Rat Chow, or merely the warm fuzzy feeling a rat gets from having solved a particularly complex maze. The problem is that eating cheese by itself has a variety of effects on the rat which must be somehow subtracted out from the results. If the rat could be rewarded without producing these side effects, it would be much easier to find out how memory works -- and how to restore it when it is impaired, as happens in Alzheimer's disease.
Ever since the original experiments in 1954 by Olds and Milner showing that the median forebrain bundle acts as a motivating center or "pleasure center", people have expressed concern that stimulation of this brain region could be somehow used to control people's behavior and turn us all into zombies. But pleasure and pain are nothing new. Pleasure and pain provide an orientation to all motivated behavior. They are accessible through ordinary physical experience. Ultimately, everything a person does is determined by what they believe will make their situation better - i.e., will improve their pleasure/pain ratio, either in the short term through physical gratification, or in some abstract relief from anxiety provided from achieving more long-term ideologically-motivated benefits for society. Without pleasure or pain, we would not care if our hand were suddenly placed in a fire. Indeed, if the brain did not make constant reference to pleasure or pain as part of our everyday lives, we would all be "robots".
Implanting electrodes in someone's brain would be an incredibly inefficient way of controlling that person. Humans have known how to control each other's behavior using pleasure and pain since the first caveman whacked the second caveman over the head with a rock. We've been controlling animals for tens of millennia using the same basic principle. Food, sex, material and spiritual benefits, and social status are all used to control behavior. So why is the Economist so worried?
It's an old cliche that people are afraid of what they don't understand. And when it comes to science, there seems to be a great deal that the European press, even more than its American counterpart, do not understand.
It's tempting for scientists to accept the blame for this ourselves. Perhaps we don't communicate enough; or perhaps some of us, like Talwar et al., do rather silly experiments like trying to use rats to find land mines. But the public needs to remember what it's like for us - what it was like growing up as a 10-year-old junior scientist. Our childhoods are made into a living hell by the other kids. We never could have remote-controlled toy airplanes and tanks like the other kids. Only a lucky few of us had parents that were nice enough to forgive us when we blew up the basement and to overlook that unfortunate incident with the cat, a tube of superglue, and six helium balloons.
Sorry, I slipped for a moment there. I'm OK. Anyway, one look at New Scientist will convince you that, no matter what scientists do, the press will find something scary to say about it. After all, this is the same press that wrung its hands about America's "prisoners of war" at Guantanamo Bay, insisting that the American government should release the Al Qaeda terrorists as soon as the Pakistanis stopped pretending to look for more of them. Of course, the complaining died down a little when the European press found out that we were giving the prisoners free copies of the Holy Quran along with the usual jacuzzis and sauna baths we give to all our POWs, and they were getting a healthy diet of Froot Loops and bagels (I am not making this up), and Purina Terrorist Chow (okay, I made up that last one).
When it comes to scientific issues, such as stem cell research, global warming, abuse of ritalin and other psychoactive drugs by the schools, or crimes like the recent case of a lesbian couple who admitted deliberately creating children with birth defects, the news media are supposed to discover those truly knowledgeable about the issue and help bring their knowledge and wisdom to the public. Instead, just as with the prisoners at Guantanamo, we've seen countless examples of reports, not only from the European media but also from influential newspapers in the States and discredited science magazines like Scientific American in which issues are presented in such a way as to promote the reporters' or editors' pre-established points of view. The public can't form intelligent opinions on scientific issues like global warming, genetic manipulation, abortion, energy, or "mind control" if the reporters fall back on their ideological beliefs because they can't, or won't try to, understand the science. Of course there are some ideologues in the press who just aren't interested in being impartial, such as New York Times ecoactivist Andrew C. Revkin, the editorial board at Scientific American and, well, practically everybody at Reuters and The Guardian, a leftist British newspaper famous for their bad reporting and frothing, anti-American ravings; but most reporters are honestly just having an awful time understanding these issues. They'll never understand them if they keep reading books like Our Posthuman Future. We need to do better at educating these people about real science.
So here's the plan. When we scientists take over the world, the first order of business will be to reprogram everyone in the news media. When their conditioning is finished, they will have an irresistible compulsion to read about science and technology, to ask scientists or other experts about things they don't understand, to generally stop telling everyone that the sky is falling, and to acknowledge that some questions like global warming are complex and unanswered. It will be great. Finally we will be able control all that you see and hear. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. Left ... Right ... Up ... Down .... Zap!
Oh yes, I almost forgot ... And (zap!) you will stop (zap!) reading Fukuyama!
The author is a mad scientist at an independent neuroscience research institute. He spent his early years performing brain surgery on his friends and blowing things up.
Created May 30, 2002; Last updated June 6, 2002
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