How Could a Mere Microtrace of DMT Produce a Near-Death Experience?

Near death experiences (NDE) first came to public light in the 1970's with the publication of Raymond Moody's book Life After Life. Patching together elements from different accounts, Moody described an archetypal typical near-death experience, while noting that most accounts include only some elements in the described archetype. The archetype NDE included elements such as a sensation of floating out of the body, feelings of peace and joy, a life-review that occurs very quickly or in some altered type of time, a passage through a tunnel, an encounter with a being of light, and seeing deceased relatives. Since Moody's original book, near-death experiences have been the subject of extensive scientific study, with very many accounts published and collected by other authors.

A recent scientific paper attempts to hint at a natural explanation for near-death experiences, by trying to suggest that they may be caused by the hallucinogenic drug DMT. The paper was entitled “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience.” The hypothesis hinted at (that DMT may be an explanation for near-death experiences) is hardly credible. 99% of the people who have experienced near-death experiences never used the drug DMT. While some have suggested that there may be the faintest traces of this drug in the human body, the facts I cite at the end of this post will clarify that the human body does not have even a thousandth of the amount of DMT necessary to create some type of unusual mental experience.

The paper authors (Timmermann and others) made use of what is called the Greyson scale. Created by near-death experience researcher Bruce Greyson, the Greyson scale asks 16 questions about reported aspects of a near-death experience. A person can give an answer that can be 0 to mean “no,” 1 to mean something moderately extraordinary, or 2 to mean something highly extraordinary. For example, question 12 is “Did you feel separated from your body?” The three possible answers are 0 to mean “No,” 1 to mean “I lost awareness of my body,” and 2 to mean “I clearly left my body and existed outside of it.” The maximum score on the Greyson scale is 48.

Timmermann and his colleagues injected 13 subjects with the drug DMT. The number of subjects was smaller than the number of subjects (15) recommended for reliable data with a low chance of false alarms. Timmermann and his colleagues then asked the Greyson scale questions of these subjects. They then compared their answers to 13 random people who claimed to have near-death experiences.

There's something rather suspect in the latter part of this methodology. There has already been much data collected in regard to the Greyson scale scores of those who experience near-death experiences, so why not use some of that data (which involves large numbers of people), rather than randomly selecting only 13 people who experienced near-death experiences?

Figure 4 of the study compares the Greyson scale answers of the people who experienced near-death experiences with the answers of those who received the DMT injections. We see quite a discrepancy in several areas. The main differences are below:

• The people who had NDE's had a much higher tendency to report separation from the body than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had NDE's had a much higher tendency to report altered time perception than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report encountering spirits of the deceased or other spirits than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a higher tendency to report speeded-up thoughts than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report "understanding everything" than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report encountering a border or point of no return than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report having precognitive visions than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report experiencing ESP than the DMT-injected people.
• The people who had near death experiences had a much higher tendency to report experiencing a life-review than the DMT-injected people.

In light of these differences, it is clear that the authors of this study should not have used “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience” as the title of their paper, and should not have claimed “DMT Induces Near-Death Type Experiences” in their paper.

In order for us to judge how closely these DMT-induced experiences resembled near-death experiences, we would need to have first-hand accounts of the experiences from the people who had the experiences. It would have been very easy for a scientific study to have produced such accounts. Timmermann and his colleagues could have simply had each of his subjects write (or recite into a tape recorder) a 500-word or 1000-word account describing their experiences. Then those accounts could have been included verbatim as appendixes in the scientific paper. If that had been done, then we would be able to judge how closely the experiences resembled near-death experiences, not only by looking for points of similarity between DMT experiences and near-death experiences, but also by looking at things that happened during the DMT experiences that did not happen in the near-death experiences. But since Timmermann and his colleagues have not included any such accounts in their paper, we have no way of accurately judging how closely the DMT experiences resemble near-death experiences. It could be that the DMT experiences were filled with all kinds of things that never happen in near-death experiences.

In fact, when we read previously published accounts of DMT experiences, such as those given here, we have reason to believe that DMT produces all kinds of weird stuff that doesn't show up in near-death experiences. The page includes all kind of random hallucinatory stuff such as someone seeing his house unbuilding itself, someone reporting that there were slinky toys everywhere, someone reporting his computer looking sad, someone reporting his friends melting, and someone being swallowed by a being like an octopus.

It seems likely that not a single one of the 13 subjects had an overall experience closely resembling a near-death experience, on the grounds that the Timmermann paper does not publish a single account written by the subjects who were injected with DMT. If any one of the subjects had reported such an experience, it seems that the authors would have included such a compelling account in their paper, which might have persuaded many people what the authors were trying to provide evidence for.

The Timmermann paper says that it got subjects “by word of mouth,” so we may guess that the subjects were students of the professors. Such persons might have been people more likely to give positive answers when given the Greyson scale questions after their DMT experience, particularly if they knew that one of their professors was hoping to get enough positive answers to publish a paper saying DMT experiences are like near-death experiences. A better approach might have been to have advertised for subjects online.

A question of great relevance here is: is there any reason to believe that the human brain might be able to produce or release enough DMT to produce an extraordinary experience that was something like a hallucinogenic experience or near-death experience? DMT was found in the brains of rats, but only 20 nanograms per kilogram (as mentioned here). To get a mystical or hallucinatory or extraordinary experience in a human, you need about 20 milligrams of DMT, an amount a million times larger than 20 nanograms.

The question of DMT in the brain was clarified by David E. Nichols in a paper he authored in the Journal of Psychopharmocology. Speaking of DMT (also known as N,N-dimethyltryptamine) in the paper Nichols says, “It is clear that very minute concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine have been detected in the brain, but they are not sufficient to produce psychoactive effects.” Addressing speculations that DMT is produced by the tiny pea-sized pineal gland in the brain, Nichols points out that the main purpose of the pineal gland is to produce melatonin, but the pineal gland only produces 30 micrograms of melatonin per day. But the pineal gland would need to produce about 20 milligrams of DMT (about 660 times more than 30 micrograms) to produce a mystical or hallucinatory experience. “The rational scientist will recognize that it is simply impossible for the pineal gland to accomplish such a heroic biochemical feat,” says Nichols. In the article in which he states that, it is noted that “DMT is rapidly broken down by monoamine oxidase (MAO) and there is no evidence that the drug can naturally accumulate within the brain.” Strassman attempted to detect DMT in the brains of 10 human corpses, but was not able to find any.

Given these facts, it is quite absurd to suggest that near-death experiences are being produced by DMT in the brain. Judging from the amount of DMT in rat brains, we have about 100,000 times too little DMT in our bodies for DMT-produced experiences to appear. Web pages speculating that near-death experiences may be produced by DMT will typically tell us that DMT has been detected in rat brains, failing to tell us how much DMT was detected (merely trace levels 100,000 times too small to produce any remarkable mental experiences).

Postscript:  You can google for "DMT experiences" to get many accounts of what it's like to take DMT. When people take DMT, it is extremely common for them to quickly experience a kind of runaway, kaleidoscopic imagery with all kinds of fantastic bizarre details. For example, you might see something like this in front of you:

People taking DMT report encounters with an extremely wide variety of strange beings, that may include elves, reptiles, spiders, robots, jellyfish, extraterrestrials, spiritual figures, or an octopus. So you might see something like this:

We may contrast such exotic dream-like imagery with the 20+ "veridical" near-death experiences described here, in which people having near-death experiences reported no kind of weird psychedelic imagery, but just ordinary down-to-earth details of medical efforts to revive them (while they were unconscious)  or parts of a hospital they hadn't seen yet, details that were subsequently confirmed. There's a world of difference between such accounts and DMT trips. 

Another reason for rejecting a DMT explanation and all other brain chemistry explanations for near-death experiences is that near-death experiences have been repeatedly been reported during cardiac arrests, after the brain has temporarily shut down (as it does within 20 seconds after the heart stops). Your brain cannot be tripping out on DMT when the brain's electrical activity has shut down. 

Post-Postscript: See this video for a very detailed technical discussion by David E. Nichols PhD on why the idea of DMT existing in the pineal gland is a fantasy.  Although micro-traces of DMT have been found in cerebrospinal fluid, there is zero evidence that DMT exists in the human brain. At 25:08 in the Nichols video, he displays a slide saying, "There is no evidence to suggest that DMT can be accumulated within the brain or within neurons at significant concentrations; such inferences are either not supported by direct experimental evidence or are based on flawed experiments." 

Post-Post-Postscript:  A study discussed in 2022 logged the experiences of many DMT users. An article on the study states this:

"Michael also suggested the findings poked holes in a common myth which posits dying feels like a psychedelic trip because the human brain releases DMT upon death. If anything, he felt the trips his team chronicled had less in common with near-death experiences than they did with typical recounting of alien encounters and abductions."

Two Reasons the Synapse Theory of Memory Storage Is Untenable

How is it that humans can remember things for decades? For decades neuroscientists have been offering an answer: that memories are stored when synapses are strengthened. But this idea has never made any sense. There are two gigantic reasons why it cannot be correct.

The first reason has to do with how long humans can remember things. People in their sixties or seventies can reliably remember things that they saw 50 or more years ago, even if nothing happened to refresh those memories in the intervening years. I have a long file where I have noted many cases when I remember very clearly things I haven't thought about, seen or heard about in four or five decades, memories that no sensory experiences or thoughts ever refreshed. I have checked the accuracy of very many of these memories by using resources such as Google and Youtube.com (where all kinds of clips from the 1960's TV shows and commercials are preserved). A recent example was when I remembered a distinctive characteristic of the “Clutch Cargo” animated TV show (circa 1960) that I haven't watched or thought about in 50 years, merely after seeing a picture of Clutch Cargo's head. The characteristic I remembered was the incredibly poor animation, in which only the mouths moved. Using youtube.com, I confirmed that my 50-year old recollection was correct. A scientific study by Bahrick showed that “large portions of the originally acquired information remain accessible for over 50 years in spite of the fact the information is not used or rehearsed.”

Is this reality that people can remember things for 50 years compatible with the idea that memories are stored by a strengthening of synapses? Synapse strengthening occurs when proteins are added to a synapse, just as muscles are strengthened when additional proteins are added to a muscle. But we know that the proteins in synapses are very short-lived. The average lifetime of a synapse protein is less than a week. But humans can reliably remember things for 50 years, even information they haven't reviewed in decades. Remarkably, the length of time that people can reliably remember things is more than 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of a synapse protein.

The latest and greatest research on the lifetime of synapse proteins is the June 2018 paper “Local and global influences on protein turnover in neurons and glia.” The paper starts out by noting that one earlier 2010 study found that the average half-life of brain proteins was about 9 days, and that a 2013 study found that the average half-life of brain proteins was about 5 days. The study then notes in Figure 3 that the average half-life of a synapse protein is only about 5 days, and that all of the main types of brain proteins (such as nucleus, mitochondrion, etc.) have half-lives of less than 20 days.

Consequently, it is absurd to maintain that long-term memory results from synapse strengthening. If synapse strengthening were the mechanism of memory storage, we wouldn't be able to remember things for more than a few weeks. We can compare the synapse to the wet sand at the edge of a seashore, which is an area where words can be written for a few hours, but where long term storage of information is impossible.

It may be noted that scientists have absolutely not discovered any effect by which synapses undergo any type of strengthening lasting years. Every single type of synapse strengthening ever observed is always a short-term effect not lasting for years.

There is another equally gigantic reason why it is absurd to maintain that memories are stored through synapse strengthening. The reason is that it is, in general, wrong to try to explain information storage by appealing to a mere process of strengthening. Strengthening is not storage. We know of many ways in which information can be stored, and none of them are cases of strengthening.

Below are some examples:

1. People can store information by writing using a paper and pen. This does not involve strengthening.
2. People can store information by using a typewriter to type on paper. This does not involve strengthening.
3. People can store information by drawing pictures or making paintings. This does not involve strengthening.
4. People can store information by taking photographs, either by using digital cameras, or old-fashioned film cameras. In neither case is strengthening involved.
5. People can store information by using tape recorders. This does not involve strengthening.
6. People can store information by using computers. This does not involve strengthening.

So basically every case in which we are sure information is being stored does not involve strengthening. What sense, then, does it make to claim that memory could be stored in synapses through strengthening?

In all of the cases above, information is stored in the same way. Some unit capable of making a particular type of impression or mark (physically visible or perhaps merely magnetic) moves over or strikes a surface, and a series of impressions or marks are made on the surface. Such a thing is not at all a process of strengthening.

Consider a simple example. You have a friend named Mary, and you one day learn that Mary has a black cat. Now let us try to imagine this knowledge being stored as a strengthening of synapses. There is no way we can imagine such knowledge being stored by a strengthening of synapses. If you happened to have stored in your brain the knowledge that Mary has a black cat, it could conceivably be that a strengthening of synapses might allow you to more quickly remember that Mary has a black cat. But there is no way that the fact of Mary having a black cat could be stored in your brain through a strengthening of synapses.

Every protein molecule of a particular type has exactly the same chemical contents – for example, every rhodopsin molecule has the same chemical contents. Unlike nucleic acids, which can store strings of information of indefinite length, a protein molecule cannot store arbitrary lengths of information. So we cannot imagine that there is some particular tweak of protein molecules added to a synapse (when the synapse is strengthened) that would allow information to be stored such as the fact that Mary has a black cat.

In his Nautilus post “Here's Why Most Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain,” C. R. Gallistel (a professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience) points out the absurdity of thinking that mere changes in synapse strengths could store the complex information humans remember. Gallistel writes the following:

It does not make sense to say that something stores information but cannot store numbers. Neuroscientists have not come to terms with this truth. I have repeatedly asked roomfuls of my colleagues, first, whether they believe that the brain stores information by changing synaptic connections—they all say, yes—and then how the brain might store a number in an altered pattern of synaptic connections. They are stumped, or refuse to answer....When I asked how one could store numbers in synapses, several became angry or diverted the discussion with questions like, “What’s a number?”

What Gallistel describes sounds dysfunctional: a pretentious neuroscientist community that claims to understand how memory can be stored in a brain, but cannot give anything like a plausible answer to basic questions such as “How could a number be stored in a brain?” or “How could a series of words be stored in a brain?” or “How could a remembered image be stored in a brain?” Anyone who cannot suggest plausible detailed answers to such questions has no business claiming to understand how a brain could store a memory, and also has no business claiming that a brain does store episodic or conceptual memories.

Gallistel suggests a radically different idea, that a memory is stored in a brain as a series of binary numbers. There is no evidence that this is true, and we have strong reasons for thinking that it cannot be true. One reason is that there is no place in the brain suitable for storing binary numbers, partially because nothing in the brain is digital, and everything is organic. Another reason is there is no plausible physiology by which a brain could write or read binary numbers. Another reason is that we cannot account for how a brain could possibly be converting words and images into binary numbers. A computer does this through numerical conversion subroutines and by using a table called the ASCII code. Neither numerical conversion subroutines nor the ASCII code is available for use within the brain.

In short, the prevailing theory of memory storage advanced by neuroscientists is untenable. Why do they advance this theory? Because they have no better story to tell us. There is actually no theory of a brain storage of memories that can stand up to prolonged critical scrutiny. As discussed at length here, there is no part of the brain that is a plausible candidate for a place where 50-year-old memories could be stored. As discussed here, there is no part of the brain that acts like a write mechanism for stored memory or a read mechanism for stored memory.

What our neuroscientists should be doing is telling us, “We have no workable theory as to how a brain could store and instantly retrieve memories.” But rather than admit to such a lack of knowledge, our neuroscientists continue to profess the untenable synapse theory of memory.  For they want at all costs for us to stay away from a very plausible idea they abhor: that episodic and conceptual memory is a spiritual effect (a capability of the human soul) rather than a neural effect.

Many think that there is an exact match between the assertions of scientists and observations. But this is not correct. The diagram below shows something like the real situation. Claims such as the claim that memories are stored in synapses are part of the blue area, along with many dogmatic and overconfident pronouncements such as string theory, multiverse speculations and evolutionary psychology. The idea that memory is an aspect of the human soul rather than the brain is supported not only by many observations in the green area of the diagram (observations that a typical scientist would not dispute), but also by many observations in the red area (such as the massive evidence for psychic phenomena). See the posts at this site for a discussion of very many of these observations.

Do not be fooled by the small number of scientific papers that claim to have found evidence for an engram or memory trace. As discussed here, I examined about 10 such papers, and found that almost all of them have the same defect: the number of animals tested was way below the standard of 15 animals per study group, meaning there is low statistical power and a very high chance of a false alarm.  Besides a reliance on subjective judgments of freezing, the papers all deal with small animals, and don't tell us anything about human memory. 

I can give a baseball analogy for the theory that episodic and conceptual memories are stored in the brain. We can compare such a theory to a batter at the plate.  If such a theory includes a plausible explanation of how human experiences and concepts could be stored as neural states, overcoming the extremely grave encoding problem discussed here, we can say the theory at least made contact with the pitched ball. If such a theory can credibly explain how memories could be written to the brain, we can say such a theory has reached first base. If such a theory can explain how a stored memory could last for 50 years, despite the very rapid protein turnover in brains and synapses, we can say such a theory has reached second base. If such a theory can explain how humans can so often instantly remember obscure things they learned or experienced decades ago, overcoming the seemingly insurmountable "finding the needle in a haystack" problem discussed here, we can say such a theory has reached third base. If such a theory were to be confirmed by someone actually extracting learned information from a dead brain, we can say such a theory reached home plate and scored a run.  But using this analogy it must be reported that the theory of conceptual and episodic memory storage in the brain never even reached first base and never even made contact with the ball. For none of these things has been accomplished. 

Postscript: The 2017 paper "On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory" was written by some leading neuroscientists. It states on page 9 that "synaptic weight changes can now be excluded as a means of information storage." The paper thereby disavows the main theory about memory storage that scientists have been pushing for the past few decades, the very theory I've rebutted in this post. The paper then suggests (in a pretty vacillating and tentative fashion) a variety of alternate possibilities regarding the storage of memory in the brain, none of which is suggested as the most plausible of the lot. See this post for why none of the alternate possibilities mentioned is a very credible idea. 

Why Crummy Research Can Get Highly Hailed

The following thing happens again and again in the world of science and science reporting.

1. Someone will publish a paper providing feeble or faulty evidence for some thing that the science community really wants to believe in.
2. The flaws of the paper will be overlooked, and the paper will be hailed as a great research advance.
3. Innumerable web sites will hail the feeble research, often hyping it and making it sound like it was proof of something.
4. Countless other scientific papers in future years will cite the faulty paper, meaning that there will be a gigantic ripple effect in which weak science gets perpetuated.

We might call this last effect “the afterlife of bad science.” Flawed and faulty research will enjoy a long afterlife, reverberating for years after its publication, particularly if the research matched the expectations and worldview of the scientist community.

We see an example of this in the case of a 2002 paper that was entitled “Molecular Evolution of FOXP2, a Gene Involved in Speech and Language.” The 2002 paper said, “We show that the FOXP2 gene contains changes in amino acid coding and a pattern of nucleotide polymorphism, which strongly suggest that this gene has been the target of selection during recent human evolution.”

The study rang the bell of those favoring orthodox explanations of the origin of man and the origin of human language. Since FOXP2 was being called a “language gene,” the study suggested that natural selection might have helped to spread this language gene, and that natural selection may have had a role in the origin of language. In the following 16 years, the study was cited more than 1000 times by other scientific papers.

With that many citations, we can say that the study won superstar status. But no such thing should have occurred, for the study had the most obvious defect. According to an article in Nature, “It was based on the genomes of only 20 individuals,” and “has never been repeated.” The authors had no business drawing conclusions about the natural selection of a gene from such a small sample size. 

Now, according to the journal Nature, a study using larger data has overthrown the 2002 study. We read the following:

They found that the signal that had looked like a selective sweep in the 2002 study was probably a statistical artefact caused by lumping Africans together with Eurasians and other populations. With more — and more varied — genomes to study, the team was able to look for a selective sweep in FOXP2, separately, in Africans and non-Africans — but found no evidence in either.

No selective sweep means no natural selection in regard to the FOXP2 gene, which wipes out the idea of any gene evidence for a Darwinian explanation for the origin of language. But what could be more predictable? Whenever you do a scientific study with a very small sample size, there's always a very large chance of a false alarm.

The story here is: feeble study gets highly hailed, because it fits in with the belief expectations of the scientific community. Just such a thing goes on over and over again in the field of neuroscience. Every year there are multiple studies published that are trumpeted as evidence for neural memory storage in animals, as evidence for an engram. Usually such studies suffer from exactly the same problem as the 2002 FOXP2 study: too small a sample size. As discussed here, these “engram” studies typically suffer from even smaller sample sizes than the 2002 FOXP2 study, and may involve fewer than 10 animals per study group. With such a small sample size, the chance of a false alarm is very high. Similarly, almost all brain imaging studies involve sample sizes so small that they have little statistical power, and do not provide good evidence of anything.

But the scientific community continues to cite these underpowered studies over and over again, and the popular press trumpets such feeble studies as if they were good evidence of anything. Critics don't seem to get anywhere complaining about “underpowered studies” and “studies of low statistical power.” Perhaps it's time to start saying these too-little-data studies are examples of crummy research. “Crummy” is a word meaning “poor because of a small size” – for example, “You must be kidding if you think I'm going to live with you in your crummy studio apartment.”

Using the term “crummy research” for studies that draw conclusions or inferences based on too little data, we may say that a large fraction of the research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology is crummy research -- research such as animal studies that used too few animals, brain scans that used too few subjects,  or natural history studies based on too few fossils or too small fragments of DNA. Evolutionary biologists have a bad habit of drawing conclusions based on DNA data that is too fragmentary. The problem is that DNA has a half-life of only about 521 years, meaning that every 521 years half of a DNA sample will decay away. So when an evolutionary biologist draws conclusions about the relation between humans and some hominid species that lived more than 200,000 years ago, such conclusions are based on only tiny fragments of DNA found in such very old species – only the tiniest fraction of the full DNA. Anyone who draws firm conclusions from such fragmentary data would seem to be giving us an example of crummy research.

Some orthodox Darwinists probably gnashed their teeth when they read the new study showing no evidence of natural selection in the FOXP2 gene. For this gene was thought to be one of the few genes that showed evidence of such a thing. In the 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, the author makes this revealing confession on page 9: “The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” 

Judging from this statement, there are merely 10 or fewer cases where we know of some mutation that increased in the human population because of natural selection. And now that FOXP2 is no longer part of this tiny set, the number is apparently 9 or fewer. But humans have something like 20,000 genes. If only 9 or fewer of these genes seem to have been promoted by natural selection, isn't this something that overwhelmingly contradicts the claim that human origins can be explained by natural selection? If such a claim were true, we would expect to find thousands of genes that had been promoted by natural selection. But the scientific paper “The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution” tells us “there is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species."

In the study here, an initial analysis found 154 positively selected genes in the human genome -- genes that seemed to show signs of being promoted by natural selection. But then the authors applied something they called "the Bonferroni correction" to get a more accurate number, and were left with only 2 genes in the human genome showing signs of positive selection (promotion by natural selection).  That's only 1 gene in 10,000. Call it the faintest whisper of a trace -- hardly something inspiring confidence in claims that we are mainly the product of natural selection.  The 2014 study here finds a similar result, saying, "Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies." That's only about 1 gene in 500 showing promotion by natural selection.

Brain-Zapping Sex Experiments of the Neuroscientists

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):

“When I pulled out the 20 studies looking at tDCS and working memory, for example, they all found something, but they all found something different,” says Horvath. One study may have found an effect on accuracy, another on reaction time, and a third on response confidence. “But when I brought them together, they just canceled each other out, and I was left with nothing,” he says. It was a similar story for more than 100 other cognitive and behavioral outcomes. “It looks like the evidence says tDCS is not doing anything.”

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.