Brain
Topics in the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to brains. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
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Categories
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Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes (1999)
 In 1999 researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, anesthetized a cat with sodium pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, and forced it to look a screen that showed scene after scene of swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men. |
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Monkey-Head Transplant (1970)
 When Vladimir Demikhov unveiled his two-headed dogs in 1954, it inspired a strange kind of surgical arms race (or rather, head race) between the two superpowers. Eager to prove that its surgeons were actually the best in the world, the American government began funding the work of Robert White, who then embarked on a series of experimental surgeries, performed at his brain research center in Cleveland, Ohio, resulting in the world's first successful monkey-head transplant. |
 In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual. |
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The Remote-Controlled Bull (1963)
 Yale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull's brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away. |
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Dr. Chamberlain’s Glass Brain (Oct. 1936)
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The scene: London, 1935. A man in his mid-twenties sits in a comfortable chair in the middle of a hospital room. His eyes are tightly closed. His arms lie on the armrests. Several fingers of his right hand are enclosed in glass devices resembling test tubes, connected by plastic tubing to a machine. An older man wearing a white lab coat creeps up behind him, careful not to make any noise. The older man walks around in front of the sitting man, looks closely at him to determine that his eyes are shut, then reaches down between the other man's legs, grabs, and roughly squeezes the testicles. The younger man gasps.
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