The Pleasure Seekers

It was an outlandish, ethically questionable experiment, but this was the 1960s, after all. Psychiatrist Robert Heath of Tulane University in New Orleans hoped to cure his patients' depression, intractable pain, schizophrenia, suicidal feelings, addiction and even homosexuality -- which in those days was considered a psychiatric disorder -- by drowning them out with pleasure, induced by an electrode implanted deep in their brains.

Heath's experiments were based on findings from a decade earlier that administering a mild electric shock to the equivalent brain area in rats -- the "reward center" -- would send the animals into a state that looked like ecstasy. The rats would work at complex tasks over and over for the promise of another shock. Heath wondered whether his human subjects would react in the same way -- and they did. When they were given a shock, they said they felt good. And when handed the electrode's controls, they just kept on pressing, again and again, sometimes a thousand times in succession.

Unfortunately for Heath, the good feelings waned almost as soon as the current was cut and the method did not provide any long-term benefit. Heath himself eventually moved into other lines of psychiatric research. But his experiment remained one of several that cemented the orthodoxy that creating pleasure in the brain was a simple matter of pressing the right neurochemical lever. For poets, writers and metaphysicians down the ages, pleasure had been a subtle, many-sided enigma to do with contemplating the likes of God, love or a beautiful garden. But now it seemed Nirvana could be equated with squirting a few microamps of electricity into a tiny part of the midbrain....