The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy

Author:Pagan Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2012-03-05T13:00:00+00:00

In October, a group of researchers gathered around a conference table at the Harvard Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation. Fregni, his hair slicked to the side in the manner of a 1920s tycoon, wielded a remote control, flashing images onto a white board. About twenty-five scientists—from Thailand, Brazil, Bolivia, Israel, and Germany, among other countries—crowded the room. Most of them knew little about tDCS, and so Fregni was delivering an introductory lecture, what might have been called Brain Zapping 101. The graphs Fregni projected on the wall created a frisson of excitement. The audience oohed and aahed. They lifted digital cameras and snapped photos. You could feel it—the buzz that this technology is beginning to generate among the clique of researchers enchanted by both brains and gadgets.

At the end of his lecture, Fregni announced he would demonstrate tDCS. Did anyone in the audience want to try it out? Silence. The scientists gazed around, waiting for someone else to shoot a hand into the air. And then the room erupted into laughter at the collective reluctance to be wired up.

Before I quite realized what I was doing, I heard myself say, “I’ll do it.” My hand waved in the air, seemingly of its own accord. It was one of those moments when your body reacts while you’re brain lags a second behind. My heart seemed to beat everywhere, my hands, my feet, my face. Why hadn’t anyone else—any of the experts—volunteered? Now, I was teetering toward the front of the room. Shirley Fecteau, another Harvard researcher, guided me to a chair.

She and Fregni placed the sponge-covered electrodes on the top of my head, in the two spots where I might grow bunny ears, if I were a character in a fairy tale. This position, which targets the prefrontal cortex, is used to treat depressed patients. Someone wrapped an Ace bandage around my head so tightly that I began to feel headachy. I have lots of hair, and so the bandage began to slide upward. Someone pushed it back in place and I could feel fingers on my scalp, checking the position of the electrodes. Clearly, the Ace bandage alone wouldn’t do the job. So Fecteau found a giant elastic band and stretched it vertically around my head so it cut into my cheeks. For the rest of the experiment, it squashed my windpipe, like an especially tight strap of a birthday-party hat.

Fregni showed the control box to the audience, a black brick with a meter and a few knobs on its face. The wire from that box dangled along my arm and went up beyond the line of my vision—to my head. That’s when it hit me: They really were going to send electricity through my skull. Fregni turned the switch. The sponge on the left side of my scalp began to prickle, the way poison ivy will after you scratch it. The elastic band made me gasp for breath. The Ace bandage strangled my forehead. The room flashed as members

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