Deliver Us from Evil: Part 1

The Brutal Character Assassination of José M. R. Delgado, a pioneer ahead of his time.

This is going to be one of the most controversial subjects I have ever written about, and my ultimate thoughts on it are probably going to be additionally controversial. It is broken into 2 parts, because otherwise it would have been just too long. Part 2 comes out next week.

The more I travel up and down this rabbit hole of honest scientists doing honest work and living up to the best ethical standards of their time (note: not necessarily of our time), who are one day turned into some political target for someone else’s political gain, or mobbed and threatened for things they never said or did, the more I recognise our own times. It’s fascinating how there’s this repeating theme throughout the last thousand years or so.

Alan Turing, J Robert Oppenheimer, Ignaz Semmelweis (lured into an asylum and beaten to death, because he was depressed, apparently).

Hell, just one year after Einstein’s theory of relativity had its most spectacular experimental verification in 1919 with the measurable bending of light during an eclipse, Albert wrote in a letter dated 12 September 1920:

“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”

If this reminds you of the debates over Climate Science and Vaccines, where simply agreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus seems to be a polarising political statement, then you’re not alone.

I agree with Einstein: what a strange madhouse this world is.

Toro, Toro, Toro

His heart thumped.

Fear. Adrenaline. Focus.

El Toro, the Bull, was facing him down, perhaps 20 metres distant. A Toro of this pedigree could close that distance in an instant.

His grip firmly on his cape in one hand. In the other, he held no sword: only a button.

He was to play the Matador, yet without his sword, he would not fight. Instead, he would surrender himself to the only 2 possible outcomes such an encounter could offer: mercy, or death.

To expect mercy from the ravages of a charging Spanish Fighting Bull was to expect the impossible; the beast grants none its absolution, only the horns. Why should this man of science, a man like any other, with his cape and his button, be treated any differently?

A passing observer, asked to wager, would be a fool not to bet all they own on that Bull.

Eyes narrowed. Hoofs scraped the ground, nostrils flared. The Andalusian sunshine bore down upon Bull, Matador, Spectators, and the hallowed ground under foot.

In the blink of an eye, el Toro was galloping, a freight-train at full tilt. Unstoppable. Irrepressible. Dead-on target.

Reaching a distance of no more than 3 metres from the defenceless Matador, right when death was all but a certainty and victory was to belong to the great Beast, the impossible indeed occurred:

The bull hesitated.

One of Spain's national past-times is the Bull fight: A lone Matador, with a cape and a sword, faces off against the might of a Fighting Bull, whose ancestors have for centuries been selectively bred to enhance their strength and their aggression. These are nothing like the average rather docile male bovine. One does not stand alone near such a creature unless very well trained, or possessing a death wish.

Delgado, a native of rural Andalusia, was not new to this.

"My personal ability with the cape had been tested sometimes in the rural festivals of my youth and is limited, but an investigator must accept the responsibility of his own methodology," he wrote in a Spanish account of these experiments for an encyclopaedia on Bullfighting from the 1980s.

Holding out his cape, he steadied himself as the beast - a great and powerful Toro named "Lucero" - charged, sharp horns piercing the air ahead of it. He held firm to the device in his hand, and just as it seemed there was no escaping a violent end, he pressed the button with his thumb.

The bull seemed to slow, like it was hesitating, just for a moment. Then, abruptly, it changed direction, turning itself in a full circle.

There, it stopped, apparently a little dazed, "surprised at its own conduct"; all its prior aggression and violence drained away as if through a plughole in a bathtub. It seemed, for all intents and purposes, satiated.

Delgado, not eager to push his luck any more than was absolutely necessary, then backed away into a protected wooden shelter. Once secure in the shelter, he released the button. Instantaneously, Lucero returned to the attack, slamming against the outer wall where Delgado was hiding.

A Spanish fighting bull will instinctively attack anyone who enters its arena. This is how they are bred and trained. It's not that they hold some sort of malicious intent, rather they are simply responding to emotions which drive their urge to protect and defend territory from invaders. A human is a clear threat, as far as the bull is concerned.

Somehow, as if by magic, Delgado had found a way to simply turn off this drive at will, and to do so from a distance.

"The result seemed to be a combination of motor effect, forcing the bull to stop and to turn to one side, plus behavioral inhibition of the aggressive drive."

The bulls were implanted with Delgado's new Stimoceiver, a device powered by a battery pack attached to the outside of the head rather than by tethered wires and cables. It received radio signals from a device held in Delgado's hand, which could transmit information about the frequency and intensity of the electric current to be delivered to the brain via the electrodes.

In addition to receiving signals, the Stimoceiver also sent an ongoing trace of the natural electrical activity detected at the site of the electrode over a second radio channel.

This was the first ever fully wireless neural implant. The year was 1963.

To say that he was ahead of his time is an understatement.

The Flippin '50s

The 1950s heralded what came to be known as the Cognitive Revolution.

A strange follow-up to the Age of Extremes, a period lasting from the Great War up to the end of World War 2; the rise of Fascism across Europe, the institution of race hatred as law of the land, the systematisation of atrocity and crimes against humanity, the conquest and subjugation of sovereign peoples and states, the development and use of super-weapons.

The Nuremberg trials brought home to everyone throughout the world the truly startling horror of what had just happened:

The minds of men obsessed with wiping out entire categories of human being from the face of the earth, obsessed with conquering their neighbours with the most brutal force, had achieved dictatorial leadership over one of the worlds greatest economic and industrial nations, re-built it into probably the most formidable military superpower the world had ever known, and then proceeded to carry out their demented ideology with all the tools at their disposal.

The industrialised genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Poles as the Nazis marched throughout Europe was meticulous in the extreme and recorded in great detail by the Nazis themselves, with a kind of efficiency and industriousness only a German could muster.

Such minds, it was assumed, cannot possibly be healthy or sound. They are abominations. They are monsters. They are Inhuman.

Would that such minds were so treatable, perhaps these atrocities might be avoided or made impossible.

Would that it were so simple.

As the worlds doctors, researchers and scientists returned from the battlefields of the world, it was this question which would play on many of their thoughts, and for some would become the basis of all their endeavours.

They would set out to achieve by science what many thousands of years worth of religion had failed to do:

Understand the mind.

Deliver it from evil.

The application of human energy to the control of natural forces is continually increasing, and perhaps it is time to ask if the present orientation of our civilization is desirable and sound, or whether we should re-examine the universal goals of mankind and pay more attention to the primary objective, which should not be the development of machines, but of man himself.

José Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind (1969)

The search was on for the genetic and biological roots of mental illness, pathological aggression, and violence. In order to find and bind the troubles which may be found in a persons psyche, two major competing methods were pursued: the pharmaco-chemical, and the electro-physical.

Into the mix came a genial and gentle Spaniard of impeccable old-world manners and rural upbringing by the name of José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado.

Delgado was born in Andalusia in Spain, part of the province of Ronda, in August of 1915, and was keen to begin the study of Medicine. His first formal research contribution was published in 1933 at only 18 years of age. By 1936, having only recently enrolled, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced him to halt his studies and he served in the Anti-Fascist Brigades of the Republican side as a medic. When the Fascists sadly attained victory in 1939, Delgado spent 5 months in a concentration camp.

After eventually being released, he completed his studies, and migrated to the United States, joining the faculty at Yale University, where he would do some of his most ground-breaking work.

It would also be during his time at Yale when his life's work would be misrepresented by charlatans and liars, his words fabricated from whole cloth, and turned into the basis of one of the worlds best-known conspiracy theories: Mind Control Chips.

The 50s were known for a lot of really wild scientific discoveries, following on the heels of the decade that saw the invention of LSD (hard act to follow.)

1952 in particular was known as a "watershed year" in neuroscience.

The work of Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley on the now-iconic mechanism of Action Potentials; the publication of Sir Bernard Katz and Paul Fatt's observation that neurotransmitters are released at synaptic junctions in "discrete quanta" during neurotransmission.  Then, there was Chlorpromazine, the "miracle drug" which brought an era of calm to mental institutions and hospitals across the western world (by more or less tranquillising the patients).

This was also when Delgado would publish one of his most famous papers, an initial study into the electrical stimulation of the brain via implanted electrodes.

"It distressed me greatly when I first came to this country in the early fifties to see so many patients without frontal lobes," he told a reporter for the New York Times in a story from 1970. He was referring to a procedure which was quite popular at the time for treating various treatment-resistant epilepsies and psychotic illnesses in the US: lobotomy.

"Of course, much psychosurgery has now been replaced by drug treatment, but there are still people with dangerous seizures which simply do not respond to medication."

Lobotomy - the severing of the frontal lobe of the brain - had boomed in popularity in psychiatric medicine from the 1930s - 1950s, mainly because of the strangely tranquillising effects it could have on a patient, especially one who was prone to outbursts of violent unprovoked aggression.

Mental hospitals and institutions across the USA performed them on patients in their care far more often than was actually necessary, both for violent and non-violent patients, and in the process, they caused many premature deaths; the majority of those that survived were permanently reduced in their intellectual capacity, along with other complications.

Delgado believed there was a better way, a more direct way, that would allow someone to regain control over their own mind. He believed that only by probing the brain's physical constructs, mechanisms, and behaviours using electricity and directly-administered neurochemicals, it was possible to reveal its inner workings, make precise adjustments, repair dysfunctions caused by genetics, infections, or physical damage.

The use of precisely implanted electrodes - a procedure he called ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) - could make lobotomy, leucotomy, gyrectomy, thalamotomy, and other such destructive operations entirely unnecessary.

"Among these efforts, implantation of electrodes in the brain offered promising possibilities."

Regardless, this kind of experiment could not have been easy, for anyone involved.

Typically, a subject had to have the electrode wires implanted through a hole drilled in the skull, and then buried down into the relevant part of the brain, with a socket sticking out of the side of the head. It would then be plugged in physically to wires routed to a seismograph-like recording device, along with an electrical generator. In this way, they could both record the electrical impulses naturally occurring in the brain, and input their own via the generator.

"Leaving wires inside of a thinking brain may appear unpleasant or dangerous, but actually the many patients who have undergone this experience have not been concerned about the fact of being wired, nor have they felt any discomfort due to the presence of conductors in their heads," Delgado wrote in the 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind;

"some women have shown their feminine adaptability to circumstances by wearing attractive hats or wigs to conceal their electrical headgear."

Uhhh-huh...?

This was obviously not ideal. Anyone who has ever had to be hooked up to an IV, or monitors for a Sleep Study, knows this. That also vastly restricted the kinds of activities the subject could be doing as part of the experiments.

The Yale faculty knew Delgado as a "Technological Wizard", who loved to hack together custom hardware for his experiments, and he was good at it. This he further proved when he came up with a device which would turn out to be his most controversial invention: The Stimoceiver.

Over the next 17 years, from 1952-1969, Delgado was prolific, practically manic in his scientific output: 134 separate publications detailing research and experiments on cats, monkeys, and human patients, with the electrical and chemical stimulation of different brain regions and their resulting effects on healthy and psychotic subjects, their behaviour, emotions, and personality.

Delgado's 1969 speculative-science book Physical Control of the Mind described 3 particular experiments he performed on human subjects which seem to suggest an interest in dabbling just outside the bounds of therapeutic medicine.

This is one of the aspects of some parts to Delgado's research that I - and perhaps most people - find concerning, to say the least. Just reading his recounting of one particular experiment, where an 11-year-old boy - afflicted with "severe psychomotor epilepsy" - was implanted with a Stimoceiver in both temporal lobes:

The patient had been silent for the previous five-minute interval, but immediately after this stimulation he exclaimed, "Hey! You can keep me here longer when you give me these; I like those." He went on to insist that the ongoing brain tests made him feel good.
[...]
Then LP was stimulated again, and the patient started making references to the facial hair of the interviewer and continued by mentioning pubic hair and his having been the object of genital sex play in the past. He then expressed doubt about his sexual identity, saying, "I was thinkin' if I was a boy or a girl-which one I'd like to be." Following another excitation he remarked with evident pleasure: "You're doin' it now," and then he said, "I'd like to be a girl."

At initial glance, there is a lot that is worrying in this example. Like, a lot. We do need to remember, however, that these particular results weren't what was actually intended or expected. The goal was to treat the epilepsy, which seemed to emanate from the temporal lobe. They were simply reciting the observed events as they occurred, likely recorded on a tape recorder. That, and the interviewer wasn’t José Delgado himself.

As John Horgan wrote in his 2005 Scientific American article "The Forgotten Era of the Brain":

Delgado limited his human research, however, because the therapeutic benefits of implants were unreliable; results varied widely from patient to patient and could be unpredictable even in the same subject. In fact Delgado recalls turning away more patients than he treated.

Then, one day, a little-known movement, driven by some incredibly obscure and religio-politically-motivated individuals, picked up on José Delgado and his new pop-sci-esque book, twisted it to their own purposes, and generated a political firestorm which would go on to tarnish the reputations of the good and the bad alike, all but ending much of the experimental research in direct electrical stimulation of the brain, and whose shadow looms large over the field to this very day.

That shadow would also come to define one of the world's most potent conspiracy theories, bolstering the anti-medicine and anti-science movements, leading to threats, and encouraging the public slandering and menacing of honest scientists by the mob.

---

This has been Part 1 of “Deliver us from Evil”. Next week, we explore the long shadow - and the people who cast it.

You won’t want to miss it!

---

This week’s DopaMerch T-Shirt release is here: My Periodic Table of Psychiatry. Great for diagnosing friends, scaring off said friends, and making new cooler friends! It’s also a great way to support my work and keep me writing: