The Pleasure Instinct: Why We Crave Adventure, Chocolate, Pheromones, and Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

humans that would forever change the way psychiatrists think about emotions and at the same time provide enough source material to keep biomedical ethicists busy for decades to come.
    By the time he was twenty-four years old, the patient known as B-19 had a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy compounded by a history of chronic drug abuse and depression.“I live with the idea of suicide daily,” he is quoted as saying, and it is reported that he made several “abortive attempts.”We also learn that B-19 was homosexual and that “one aspect for the total treatment program for this patient was to explore the possibility of altering his sexual orientation through electrical stimulation of pleasure sites of the brain.”
    During the early years of his tenure, Heath pioneered the therapeutic use of electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) to treat epilepsy. Impressed by the work of Olds and Milner, who had just discovered “pleasure centers” in the brains of rats, Heath adapted their approach to recondition the brains of patients suffering from affective disorders and particularly schizophrenia.“The primary symptom of schizophrenia isn’t hallucinations or delusions,” he told a reporter years later.“It’s a defect in the pleasure response. Schizophrenics have a predominance of painful emotions. They function in an almost continuous state of fear or rage, fight or flight, because they don’t have the pleasure to neutralize it.” The idea was tantalizing—just stimulate the neural pleasure centers of a schizophrenic and this might rekindle damaged circuits affected by the disease and enable the patient to once again experience positive emotions.
    Electrodes and cannulas (needle-thin tubes through which drugs may be delivered directly into the brain) were placed in fourteen subcortical structures of B-19’s brain, including the septal region, hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus—areas that were hypothesized to regulate emotions in humans and had previously been identified as locations where rats “self-stimulate.”
    Prior to the study, B-19’s “interests, contacts, and fantasies were exclusively homosexual; heterosexual activities were repugnant to him.”After B-19 recovered from the surgery, Heath and his coworkers stimulated each electrode briefly and asked their patient to report what he felt. Stimulation at most brain regions produced only mild or “neutral” feelings, and in some cases actually induced anxiety or other aversive sensations. But one electrode positioned in the septal region consistently produced an intense pleasurable response. “The patient reported feelings of pleasure, alertness, and warmth (goodwill); he had feelings of sexual arousal and described a compulsion to masturbate.”
    During the first phase of treatment, B-19 was given a portable transistorized device that could be used to activate the different electrodes implanted in his brain.At first he experimented by stimulating a variety of sites—each time he pressed a different button, the device sent out a one-second pulse of electrical current to the corresponding electrode. Within a short time, however, the young patient was stimulating his septal electrode almost exclusively. During treatment sessions, he was permitted to wear the device for periods of three hours, and on one occasion stimulated this region more than fifteen hundred times (about once every thirteen seconds on average). During phase two of the treatment, B-19 was allowed to self-stimulate his septal electrode while watching “stag movies” of heterosexual activity, and he became “increasingly aroused.” Pleased with their patient’s progress, the innovative scientists hired a “lady of the evening” to assist them with phase three in which B-19 had his first “pleasurable” heterosexual encounter after being primed by five minutes of continuous septal stimulation.
    ESB was used to treat hundreds of patients (not just at Tulane) through the