The recent book The Pleasure Shock by Lone Frank is centered around the
experimental work of psychiatrist Robert G. Heath. The subtitle is
The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor. We
may wonder whether such a person is deserving of biographical
treatment. The book starts out by discussing a scientific paper in
which Heath implanted electrodes into the brain of a gay person,
apparently trying to electroshock him into becoming heterosexual.
Apparently
such behavior wasn't so unusual in the early 1970's. The book states
on page 156 the following, using ECT to mean electroconvulsive
therapy in which people are given electrical shocks:
At
about the same time Heath was doing his experiments, it was not out
of the ordinary for families in New Orleans to submit their
homosexual sons to electroshock “cures.” They received up to
forty shock treatments to “erase” the undesirable patterns of
behavior....Other places, they tried to show the patients pictures of
naked men, and at the same time, give them electric shocks to the
testicles.
We
are told the ghastly details of the Heath experiment in his paper
that can be read here. The experiment included implanting electrodes
into the brain of a gay person, and monitoring how he responded to
heterosexual pornography before and after zapping of his brain, as
well as how he responded to a female prostitute. The paper states that part of the rationale of the experiment was "to explore the possibility of altering his sexual orientation through electrical stimulation." Although noting she was "appalled" when reading about the experiment, Frank makes this
claim on page 4 about this paper: “The scientific logic was
rigorous and stringent.” No, the paper describes a crazy "mad scientist" type of experiment, and Frank should have unequivocally
denounced it.
But
apparently Frank has some odd attraction to the career of Heath. She
states this on pages 156 to 157:
When
I first heard about Robert Heath, the story grabbed me, and it was
something that went deep....My immediate sympathy still goes to the
weirdos, the people who don't just go along but do something
different...I keep looking at Heath not so much as a monster, but as a
gifted, curious scientist.
The
topic of pornography comes up again on page 270, where Frank
strangely says “it's a disease” if “people are glued to the
screen for hours looking at naked pictures and sex films.” She then
notes that a scientist named Nicole Prause is looking into how “deep
brain stimulation can be used to relieve the problem by dialing down
the desire for sex.” This apparently has Frank's approval, for she
says, “Prause is right.” Brain shocks to neuter a man's interest
in seeing pictures of naked women? That sounds as batty as Heath's
“gay conversion” brain electrode monstrosity.
In
this 2015 interview Prause says, “I am focused on using brain
stimulation to permanently alter sexual responsiveness in men and
women.” A logical response might be: God help us from
neuroscientists trying to use brain zapping to mess around with our
sexuality. You can read here a paper by Prause about an incredibly
weird brain-zapping sex experiment she did. At the same time she zapped
her subjects' brains with electromagnetism, Prause had the females
use vibrators and the males insert their penises into some weird sex
device. The paper notes, “Men were instructed only to insert their
penis into the attachment.” The fact that one of the subjects
complained of moderately severe head pain from the brain zapping did
not cause a halt in the ludicrous experiment, which should have been
halted and terminated as soon as anyone complained of head pain.
On
page 272 Frank tries to suggest that Heath was a forerunner of a
modern success, on the grounds that some people nowadays are using
something called transcranial direct current stimulation. She notes,
“There is a minor do-it-yourself movement of people who use small
headsets and 9-volt batteries to hit the outer part of their cerebral
cortex.” But a 2015 story says, “The largest meta-analysis yet of
the ability of one kind of electrical brain stimulation technology to
alter how people think and feel has found no evidence that it has any
effect on healthy adults.”
In
the article we read the following about transcranial direct current
stimulation (tDCS):
Postscript: Looking for other papers by Nicole Prause, the first one I find is a paper entitled, "Women's Preferences for Penis Size: A New Research Method Using Selection Among 3D Models." The research method involved women merely touching dildos with their hands. My reaction to this paper is the same as my reaction to Prause's brain-zapping sex experiment -- basically one of "I can't believe stuff like this gets published in scientific journals." A more substantive paper is one Prause co-authored, a paper challenging the claim that porn watching is an addiction. Oddly, this paper rather conflicts with the impression you get from reading Frank's book, that Prause may be someone wanting to cure porn watchers by using electrical treatment.
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