Mad Science Experiments

The location was well-chosen: where should a Spanish neuroscientist demonstrate his control over an animal’s brain functions if not at a bullfight? And so it was that, on a spring evening in 1964, José M.R. Delgado came face to face with Lucero, a 250-kilogram fighting bull owned by the landowner Ramón Sánchez, who had granted Delgado the use of a small practice ring on his estate of La Almarilla in Córdoba for the experiment.

To begin with, several experienced bullfighters psyched up the animal, while Delgado kept his distance behind a wooden hoarding. But then it was the professor’s turn. Although his experience with the muleta (the red cloth used by bullfighters), which he had gained during his youth at various village fêtes was ‘pretty limited’, as Delgado himself later wrote, he was adamant that a researcher must take responsibility for his chosen methods and be prepared to face the bull himself. And so, wearing a shirt and tie, he appeared from behind the hoarding, walked tentatively up to Lucero, waving the red cloth in his right hand to provoke the bull, and holding a remote-control device in his left. A few days before the experiment, he had placed radio-controlled electrodes n the brain of Lucero and several other bulls. Now, as Lucero lumbered towards him. Delgado suddenly dropped the cloth and pressed a button on the remote-control. The brain implant activated, sending a milliampere of alternating current through Lucero’s brain. This instantly dissipated the animal’s aggression; Lucero skidded to a halt and trotted off at a leisurely pace.

Afterwards, the only concern among Spanish newspapers was that the experiment might herald the end of the Corrida (bullfight). Under such headlines as ‘Remote-control Bullfighting’ and ‘They’re Going to Take Our Toreros [Bullfighters] Away’, they reported the experiment in distinctly unflattering terms. By chance, two years later, Delgado’s experiment also made it onto the pages of the New York Times; the professor was giving a lecture in New York and a journalist from the newspaper was in the audience. This report instantly caused ripples. As Delgado later said, “Since that time, I’ve received mail each year from people who think I’m controlling their thoughts”.

As a young research scientist, Delgado had emigrated from Spain to the United States, and at the time of the experiment was a professor at Yale University. He wanted to find out more about human and animal behaviour by stimulating the brain with electrical pulses. As he had done with many of the animals he used in his research, he implanted electrodes into the bull’s brain in order to try and induce certain modes of behaviour. For example, he had already succeeded in making monkeys yawn and cats attack just by pressing a button. He had also found that he could influence affability, speech fluency and anxiety in epilepsy sufferers.

Delgado was not only convinced that electrical stimulation of the brain was the key to understanding the biological bases of social behaviour, but was also the prophet of a new ‘psychocivilized’ society, whose members would have at their fingertips a technology that would allow them to become “happier, less destructive and better balanced men”.

Colleagues called Delgado either a ‘mad scientist’ or ‘the Thomas Edison of the brain’. He countered critics who feared total control over human beings by citing the old adage that knowledge in itself isn’t bad, just its application. He asked doubters to consider the following scenarios: ‘Suppose that the onset of epileptic attacks could be recognized by the computer and avoided by feedback: would that threaten identity? Or if you think of patients displaying assaultive behaviour due to abnormalities in brain functioning: do we preserve their individual integrity by keeping them locked up in wards for the criminally insane?’

While Delgado’s dream of a psychocivilized society hasn’t yet become a reality, electrical stimulation of the brain certainly is, after a long period of neglect, being used on people: for instance, in helping patients with a variety of neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease manage their symptoms. In the summer of 2007 it also emerged that a man who had lain in a coma for six years had been brought back to consciousness by electrical brain stimulation.

back to 10 Weirdest Experiments Ever