Elephants on Acid (16 page)

The researchers were quick to point out that in some cases, dogs clearly have saved their owners’ lives by seeking help. The media loves to report these stories, since they provide feel-good tales to end news broadcasts with—“Stay tuned for the dog that dialed 911!” But the researchers argue that such stories should not be considered indicative of typical dog behavior. So much for the urban legend of the life-saving pooch.

And while we’re on the subject of urban legends, here’s another one. “Timmy fell down a well” is perhaps the most quoted line from the
Lassie
TV show. So much so that Jon Provost, the actor who played Timmy, titled his autobiography
Timmy’s in the Well
. However, although Timmy endured many calamities during the show—including falling into a lake, getting caught in quicksand, and being struck by a hit-and-run driver—he never once fell down a well.

Male turkeys aren’t fussy. They’ll try to mate with almost anything, including a head on a stick.

During the late 1950s Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, animal researchers at Pennsylvania State University, observed that when they placed male turkeys in a room with a lifelike model of a female turkey, the birds responded sexually to the model in a manner “indistinguishable from their reaction to receptive females.” The turkeys let out an amorous gobble announcing their intentions, began waltzing around and puffing up their feathers, and finally mounted the model and initiated a copulatory sequence.

Intrigued, Schein and Hale wondered what the minimal stimulus was that would elicit a sexual response from a male turkey. Specifically, how many of the model’s body parts could they remove before the turkey would lose interest? As it turned out, they were able to remove quite a few.

Tail, feet, and wings—they all proved unnecessary. Finally the researchers gave the turkeys a choice between a headless body and a head-on-a-stick. To their surprise, the turkeys invariably chose the head-on-a-stick over the body. Apparently this was all it took to get a turkey going. The researchers wrote:

A bodyless head supported 12 to 15 inches above floor level elicited courtship display, approach, and mounting movements properly oriented behind the head . . . The male’s subsequent response to the model head included treading movements, tail lowering, and movements directed towards achieving cloacal contact. At this point ejaculation could be evoked by applying mild tactile stimulation to the exposed penile papillae of the male. Effective stimuli included a warm watchglass, a human hand, or any warm smooth surface.

The male’s fixation on the female head appeared to stem from the mechanics of turkey mating. When a male turkey mounts a female, he is so much larger than her that he covers her completely, except for her raised head. Therefore, it is her head alone that serves as his erotic focus of attention.

Having isolated the head as the ultimate turkey turn-on, Schein and Hale next investigated how minimal they could make the head before it failed to elicit a response. They tested turkeys with a variety of heads-on-a-stick—a fresh female head; a fresh male head; a two-year-old female head that was “discolored, withered, and hard”; a similarly dried-out male head; and a series of balsa-wood heads that varied with respect to the presence of eyes and beaks.

The fresh female head was the clear winner, followed by the dried-out male head, the fresh male head, and the old female head. All the wooden heads came in a distant last place—indicating, perhaps, that turkeys prefer women with brains. But it should be noted that even though the wooden heads were not a preferred object of passion, they nevertheless did elicit sexual behavior.

Curious about the mating habits of other poultry, Schein and Hale performed similar tests on white leghorn cocks. They discovered that these birds, unlike turkeys, required a combination of head and body for adequate sexual stimulation. They detailed this research in a paper with the evocative title, “Effects of Morphological Variations of Chicken Models on Sexual Responses of Cocks.”

³⁸
Poultry are not the only birds easily misled in matters of romance. Konrad Lorenz once observed a shell parakeet who grew amorous with a small celluloid ball. And many other animals exhibit mating behavior toward what researchers refer to as “biologically inappropriate objects.” Bulls will treat almost any restrained animal as a receptive cow. Their general rule in life seems to be, in the words of Schein and Hale, “If it doesn’t move away and can be mounted, mount it!”

During the early 1950s researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center surgically damaged the amygdala (a region of the brain) in a number of male cats. These cats became hypersexual, attempting to mate with a dog, a female rhesus monkey, and an old hen. Four of these hypersexual cats, placed together, promptly mounted one another.

At the summit of this beastial pyramid of the perverse stands
Homo sapiens
. We, as a species, are in no position to laugh at the mating habits of turkeys, bulls, or any other creature, since there are no apparent limits to what can serve as an erotic stimulus for a human being.

Case in point—Thomas Granger, a teenage boy who in 1642 became one of the first people to be executed in Puritan New England. His crime was having sex with a turkey (as well as a few other animals). Granger confessed to the deed, but defended himself by arguing that sex with animals was a custom “long used in old England.” Ah yes, Merrie Olde England! For some reason, this story—though entirely true—seldom makes its way into history books. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting piece of trivia to weave into the conversation during Christmas dinner.

The matador stands in the bullring, the hot Spanish sun beating down on his head. Thirty feet away stands a bull. A hushed crowd watches in the stands. The matador flourishes his red cape. The bull stamps one hoof, snorts, and then charges. At the last moment, the matador lifts the cloth and gracefully steps to the side, but the bull unexpectedly swings its head and knocks the matador to the ground. The crowd gasps. People start screaming as the bull circles around and charges again, bearing down on the matador, who lies clutching his stomach. It seems like a bad situation for the matador. The bull is only yards away. In a few seconds it will all be over. But suddenly the matador reaches to his side and presses a button on his belt. Instantly a chip inside the bull’s brain emits a small burst of electricity, and the bull skids to a halt. It huffs and puffs a few times, then passively walks away.

Could this be how bullfights of the future will be fought, with brain-control devices implanted in bulls to prevent injuries to the matadors? It might lead to a drop in ticket sales, but it could also save lives. However, there’s no need to wait for the future. Such technology has existed for decades. The ability to use brain chips to stop bulls was first demonstrated by Yale researcher José Delgado in 1963.

Delgado was a Spanish-born researcher who accepted a position at Yale University’s School of Medicine in 1950. Over the next two decades he became one of the most visible members of a generation of researchers who pioneered the science of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB).

ESB involves using wires implanted inside the skull to stimulate different regions of the brain. Such stimulation can produce a wide variety of effects, including the involuntary movement of limbs, the eliciting of emotions such as love or rage, or the inhibition of appetite and aggression. To its critics, it has always smacked of Orwellian mind control, but its defenders insist this is a misconception, pointing out that it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen when a specific region of the brain is stimulated. Nor is it possible to control thoughts or complex forms of behavior.

Delgado’s great innovation was to invent an ESB chip with a remote-control unit. He called the chip a stimoceiver. It allowed him to study subjects as they moved around in a natural way, free of cables dangling from their heads. Even though TV remote controls were not yet in widespread use during the 1960s (and were the size of a brick), this was the metaphor he used to describe his invention:

The doors of a garage can be opened or closed by pushing a button in our car; the channels and volume of a television set can be adjusted by pressing the corresponding knobs of a small telecommand instrument without moving from a comfortable armchair . . . These accomplishments should familiarize us with the idea that we may also control the biological functions of living organisms from a distance. Cats, monkeys, or human beings can be induced to flex a limb, to reject food, or to feel emotional excitement under the influence of electrical impulses reaching the depths of their brains through radio waves purposefully sent by an investigator.

With the stimoceiver, most of Delgado’s experiments followed a similar pattern. He would stimulate different regions of a subject’s brain and then observe what happened. He described much of this research in his 1969 book
Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society
. One of his more sensational experiments involved a monkey called Ludy. By pressing a button, he caused her to perform a complex sequence of actions that included turning her head to the right, standing up, circling to the right, climbing a pole, descending to the floor, uttering a growl, threatening a subordinate monkey, and then returning to the monkey group in a peaceful manner. She performed this behavior twenty thousand times in a row.

Delgado could use his remote-control unit to manipulate human subjects just as easily as animal ones. He made one patient repeatedly clench his fist against his will, until the man said, “I guess, Doctor, that your electricity is stronger than my will.” Anxiety, rage, and love could also be dialed up on command. He rigged up a knob that he used to increase or decrease the amount of anxiety a female patient experienced. He pressed a button and caused another patient to fly into such a rage that she hurled a guitar across the room. Yet another patient violently shredded sheets of paper even as she moaned, “I don’t like to feel like this.” Other patients were luckier and got to experience the love button. When stimulated in this way, two patients became so overwhelmed that they expressed a desire to marry the researcher. One was a thirty-six-year-old woman. The other was an eleven-year-old boy.

But the experiment that Delgado will forever be remembered for is his time in the bullring. It took place in 1963 at a bull ranch in Cordova, Spain. He implanted electrodes into the brains of “brave bulls”—bulls that were known for their aggressive tendencies. He then tested the effects of ESB on these creatures. He found he could make the bulls turn their heads, lift one leg, or walk around in a circle. In addition, “vocalizations were often elicited, and in one experiment to test the reliability of results, a point was stimulated 100 times and 100 consecutive ‘moo’s’ [
sic
] were evoked.” It was kind of like a real-life version of Big Mouth Billy Bass—or Billy Bull, one should say.

As a final test, Delgado got into a ring with one of the bulls. He stood by the side of the arena and waved a red cloth at the beast. The bull began to charge. When it was mere feet away from him, Delgado pressed a button and the bull abruptly stopped. Delgado admitted to worrying that the stimoceiver might choose that moment to malfunction, but everything worked perfectly. Delgado suggested the stimulation caused a sudden inhibition of the bull’s aggression, but other researchers argue it probably simply caused the bull to turn sharply to the side, frustrating the animal’s ability to charge. Delgado has acknowledged this may have been the case. Whatever the stimoceiver did, it worked.

The media gave Delgado’s bull experiment widespread coverage—including a front-page story in the
New York Times
—making him an instant scientific celebrity. However, rival brain researchers were less impressed. Elliot Valenstein, a professor at the University of Michigan, criticized Delgado, claiming, “His propensity for dramatic, albeit ambiguous, demonstrations has been a constant source of material for those whose purposes are served by exaggerating the omnipotence of brain stimulation.”

During the 1970s and ’80s ESB came under attack from those who feared it would be used to create a totalitarian state of mind-controlled zombies. Funding dried up, and Delgado moved back to Spain, where he focused on noninvasive methods of brain research. However, during the past decade,
³⁹
interest in ESB has revived, thanks to advances in computers and electronics, as well as to the recognition that brain chips can offer enormous therapeutic benefit to patients suffering from disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, or chronic pain.

Scientists have also been reviving the research tradition, started by Delgado, of designing remote-controlled animals. John Chapin, a professor at the State University of New York in Brooklyn, has designed a camera-equipped, remote-controlled rat that he hopes will be able to help rescue workers find survivors in rubble piles after earthquakes and other disasters. A Chinese researcher made headlines in 2007 with a remote-controlled pigeon, and there have been reports of the Pentagon funding research into the creation of a remote-controlled shark that could be used to track boats without detection. Fisheries have even been investigating the possibility of inserting neural implants into farmed fish. The fish could be allowed to roam free in the ocean and then, with a push of a button, be called back to be harvested. But, of course, it is the scientist who can create a remote-controlled dog with a “fetch beer” button, who will doubtless become the first ESB billionaire.

The public has long maintained a gossipy interest in the sex lives of scientists. Muckraking biographers whisper that Isaac Newton may have died a virgin, that Nikola Tesla was devoutly celibate, that Albert Einstein had a mistress, and that Richard Feynman was a ladies’ man. However, for much of history scientists steadfastly refused to develop a countervailing interest in the sex lives of the general public. Writing in 1929, the psychologist John Watson bemoaned the lack of scientific knowledge about sex: “The study of sex is still fraught with danger . . . It is admittedly the most important subject in life. It is admittedly the thing that causes the most shipwrecks in the happiness of men and women. And yet our scientific information is so meager. Even the few facts that we have must be looked upon as more or less bootlegged stuff.”