Mike Jay's "Wireheads"

Mike Jay is a celebrated historian of science, medicine, and culture. He is the author of acclaimed books including Free Radicals, Mescaline, and Psychonauts, described by Michael Pollan as “easily the most interesting work of psychedelic history I’ve read in years.”

Jay applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Wireheads narrates the arrival of the ‘sexual revolution’ in late 1950s USA: the Kinsey reports, the selling of sex in advertising and consumer culture, and the feminist response in Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique.

At first glance, page 99 is not typical of a book about technology in the brain: the previous half-dozen pages have described the psychologist James Olds’ discovery in 1954 that introducing electric wires into a particular site in the brains of lab rats seemed to stimulate a ‘pleasure centre’ that made them repeat the experience compulsively.

On the other hand, it does give an accurate sense of the book as a cultural history, which places scientific discoveries in a broader cultural context, in which science and society are constantly in dialogue.

The discovery of the ‘pleasure centre’ is a good example of this dialogue. The idea was held up as a cautionary tale of the dangers to which a sexualised, amoral and hedonistic society might lead. Futurologists such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov argued that it was an existential threat to civilisation; the scenario became a standard trope in science fiction stories, and philosophers debated whether plugging directly into the brain’s pleasure centre would generate a meaningful experience.

But the rapid advance of neuroscience soon made these speculations redundant. The discovery of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin led to a new model of the brain in which there is no specific ‘pleasure centre’ but a complex system of chemically mediated pathways, and pleasure emerges from a dispersed network of ‘hedonic hotspots’.

The ’pleasure centre’ was a flawed scientific theory that struck a cultural nerve and took on a life of its own.

Visit Mike Jay's website.

The Page 99 Test: Mescaline.

--Marshal Zeringue