On Penfield Machines, Philip Dick and Cyborgs 1

Some brief cyborg reflections on the Penfield Mood Organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

I had read about Wilden Penfield back in the 1990’s when writing my dissertation; in particular, I was interested in the through line of research on brains, early abuse of “research” by the military and others, and applications to cyborg narratives. Penfield is a fascinating character; he began his surgical career studying epilepsy, and early on was befriended by David Rockefeller. Later the Rockefeller Foundation funded his Montreal Neurological Hospital.

I forget the book where I first learned of Penfield’s amazing surgeries, in which he stimulated the brains of conscious patients with electricity. The patients then responded, and slowly Penfield began mapping areas of the brain. In particular he mapped the sensory and motor cortices and found links between them and limbs and organs.

I remember reading about him stimulating parts of the brain, and having patients identify memories, smells, etc. Here is a reenactment of one of his famous stories, the “burnt toast” surgery:

http://www.videos.com/play/M18380073-1/cognition_penfield/dr_wilder_penfield_i_can_smell_burnt_toast.html

To “reproduce” this experiment you can go here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/brain/

And going along with the 1954 theme (my date of birth, and that of THEM! The film I just wrote about), he published his Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain in that year, along with the maps mentioned above. One thing I did not know what that his famous experiments of restimulating memory occurred in less than five percent of his patients (Wikipedia).

In Philip Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Penfield is mentioned on the first page, as the name of the so-called “mood organ.” I still remember loving this conceit by Dick; you wake up and program the mood organ in order to feel what you want to feel, or are supposed to feel given what you are about to do. So he feels merry when he wakes up, unlike his wife, who is unmerry, grumpy, bitter, sharp. When he moves to reset her Penfield, she says,

“Keep your hands off my settings.” Her voice held bitter sharpness. “I don’t want to be awake.”

He is merry; she is unmerry. He has dialed merry; she feels angry. But when his merry attempts to get her to set her machine on high enough so that she will be glad to be awake is rebuffed (they have a marital spat, and she lays into him for being crude, a cop, a hired murderer) he “felt irritable now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.”

In Dick’s wonderfully jaundiced vision of the future, Penfield and his kind have pioneered the mapping of the brain so that it can be manipulated by users to achieve norms – contentment, happiness, “businesslike professional attitude. The trouble is, these settings are in fact wildly contrasting to the post apocalyptic world of the novel, in which humans “prepare” to go outside with lead codpieces, the air is still radioactive from a nuclear war, most animals are extinct, and most humans have emigrated to other planets. In fact, those who don’t emigrate degenerate; at any moment, the poisoned atmosphere can turn a normal person into a “special” (distorted genes making it illegal for one to reproduce; mental failure making one a “chickenhead” like the character Isidore).

The entire opening sequence of husband and wife waking up, getting into an argument, and “making up,” are all a wicked Swiftian satire on machines we use to alter our attitude toward the world. The cyborg element of this is obvious and disturbing: if we can map the mind, and we can locate the seat of the emotions, then we can alter what we feel regardless of what we perceive. This “control” is more or less the Holy Grail for many of the scientists, like Delgado, who did “research” in the field of electronic brain stimulation. Penfield was not such a man (in fact he comes across as quite a wonderful human being), but his work for Dick was emblematic of the kind of mind and brain control Dick was terrified of.

Is the Penfield Mood organ the TV of the postapocalyptic future? In many ways the mood organ looks back on the TV as a cousin, and in fact Dick mentions TV as another source of conflict:

Then he bent to turn on the TV.

From the bedroom Iran’s voice came. I can’t stand TV before breakfast.”

“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”

I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now, “ Iran said.

Then dial 3,” he said.

“I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial. If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine...”

In Dick's cyborg future, beyond shock treatment and lobotomy and pharmacology, we have the ability to alter our basic emotions and moods, and this device is a consumer device, more or less the "toaster" model that Apple has for its products (that is, an iPod should be as simple to use as a toaster). The opening scene of a novel that is purportedly about humans and androids/replicants is full of this notion of cyborg control of one's mind, and of others' minds as well. In case the reader might have missed the import of this fight between man and woman over technologies that allow us to escape our actual, messy emotions caused by the uncontrollable in our world, the fight ends not with dialing ecstatic sexual bliss, but with "594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters." Dick wants to link this mood organ qua emotional self manipulation with the nightmare that loss of clear connection between mood and reality have wrought: patriarchal nightmares of total war, ecological destruction, planetary exhaustion. That TV has this futuristic cousin implies that this is a role TV plays in Dick's 1968 present, and in ours as well.

Another cyborg point: in the novel, the The Voight-Kampff empathy test is used to attempts to identify androids and distinguish them from human beings. It is a 60s version of a biometric ID system, based on autonomic responses to questions that in 'normal' humans automatically generate an empathic response.

"I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voight-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments...

"This" - he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires - "measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response... This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles.

The irony is that humans themselves have seriously flattened empathic abilities, partly due to the degraded social and environmental world they suffer. They need machines to feel, and in classic Dick paranoid writing, it isn't always clear who is an unempathic android and who is an apparently unempathic human being. The flattening of affect for cyborgs is almost a universal theme (especially in Mars Plus, Pohl's book about a cyborg designed for a Mars mission, but of course Arnold's Terminator is reasonably affect-free and notably unempathetic).

Of course the test is a kind of Turing test, and part of what makes Dick such a wonderful writer is that the biometric tests for androids are fallible, and can be designed around. Again, writer after writer encourages us to focus as much on the organic as the cybernetic, and to consider both the technical ways we alter mood and adjust consciousness (from drugs and alcohol to television and iPods to shock treatment to religion to meditation techniques) and the organic nature of emotions and empathy. One might also consider the difference between technologies for altering mood, and techniques; direct manipulation of the brain may be on the horizon, and yet may prove to be as seriously problematic as drugs; mice that find a way to hit a bar that stimulates the pleasure centers, hit the bar early and often.