Attempts to stimulate the brain directly with electricity will always struggle with the skull. As the experiment with the corpse demonstrated, most of the current from electrodes pressed to the outside of the head doesn’t pass through into the brain. Up the amount of current and the itchy tickling on the scalp worsens to an unpleasant burning sensation. Up it further and the burning is not just a sensation.
For better penetration, some neuroscientists have used lasers. Researchers at the University of Texas took a low-level CG-5000 medical laser, approved to improve circulation and relieve muscle pain, and pointed it instead at people’s foreheads. They were trying to activate an enzyme in the frontal cortex called cytochrome oxidase, to help brain cells produce more energy and so work harder. It seemed to work: volunteers given the laser treatment performed better on tests of memory and attention.
Another answer is to use magnets. Michael Faraday famously realized that waving bits of metal around inside a magnetic field can induce electric current and he used the discovery to invent the electric motor. Faraday’s lectures and demonstrations at the Royal Institution in London drew such large crowds that the road outside – Albermarle Street – was made the first one-way street in the city in an effort to control the traffic.
Faraday’s work with magnets also brought him to the attention of a different crowd; the followers of a controversial doctor called Franz Anton Mesmer. Unlike Faraday, we don’t remember Mesmer for his brilliant science. That’s because he didn’t do any. But he was still influential. He left us the terms ‘mesmerize’ and ‘animal magnetism’. And he developed a link between them, which we now call hypnosis.
Mesmer claimed human disease was caused by the movements of the sun and moon, which disturbed tides of invisible fluids in the atmosphere and inside the human body. The nervous fluid inside people was magnetic, and the imbalance in this animal magnetism caused by the motions of the heavenly bodies, Mesmer said, could be fixed by applying magnets to the body of the patient.
Mesmer was the first stage hypnotist. Demand was so great for his magnetic therapy he would treat dozens of people at a time, tying them together and making them stand around a specially constructed apparatus called a baquet. This was a circular wooden case, about a foot high, which Mesmer and his helpers, chosen for their ‘youth and comeliness’, heaved into the centre of a large hall and filled with powdered glass, iron filings and symmetrically arranged bottles, usually all covered in water. From holes in the wooden lid, long iron poles stuck out.
Mesmer’s patients, up to thirty at a time, would sit in a circle around the baquet, holding both the poles and each other’s hands, while Mesmer walked among them with an iron rod. The hall was hung with thick curtains, and the silence Mesmer insisted upon was broken only by gentle music played on a pianoforte or harmonicon, accompanied sometimes by singing.
Wearing a lilac coat, Mesmer would strut and sit beside his patients for two to three hours, fixing their gaze on his, and prodding and stroking their diseased bodies with his iron stick. He would place his hands on their stomachs, or, shaping his fingers into a pyramid, move from their heads down to the feet and back again.
The patients? Some barely reacted, staying calm and claiming to experience nothing. Others coughed, spat, reported slight pain, a local or general heat, and fell into sweats. Some went into convulsions called crises. Mesmer’s theatrics seem to have had an unusually strong influence on many of his younger female patients.
Among those influenced by Mesmer and his ideas was IQ-test pioneer Alfred Binet, who dabbled with magnetism in his early years. After he witnessed one display, Binet wrote: ‘Young women were so much gratified by the crisis they begged to be thrown into it anew; they followed Mesmer through the hall and confessed it was impossible not to be warmly attached to the magnetizer’s person.’
As other magnetizers copied Mesmer’s techniques, another strange consequence emerged: some patients went into a passive, trance-like state, during which they appeared asleep but could nonetheless continue to listen and talk to the hypnotist. In this ‘magnetic sleep’ the patients became prone to suggestions – women could be made to fondle and kiss an imaginary baby and men to pretend to be drunk. It was nothing to do with the magnets of course and stage hypnotists have repeated the trick ever since.
It was an inauspicious start for magnetic stimulation, but other scientists were drawn to it and continued to experiment with the way it could influence the body and the brain. And just like the use of electricity, magnetic stimulation of the brain has enjoyed a scientific revival in recent years.
In 2008, for instance, a man with autism called John Elder Robison had fluctuating electromagnets applied to his head. As Faraday predicted, the combination of the magnetic field and the movement induced electric currents inside John’s brain – much stronger current than could be achieved by direct electrical stimulation. As a consequence, something in John’s brain was released. There were no lilac coats this time, but the effect was mesmerizing.
John was taking part in a research study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston into how people with autism process language. He had thirty minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Because the focus of their research was language, the researchers targeted Broca’s area, part of the frontal lobe. The scientists asked him to wear a gumshield during the magnetic stimulation, in case of involuntary movements. They told him any effect would probably be mild and short-lived. They were wrong.
The first sign something had changed for John was during a telephone conversation later in the day. His voice sounded different to him. He was using different tones and was lowering and raising the pitch at the end of words for emphasis. He realized with astonishment he was doing so to portray emotion. Like many people with autism, John had previously struggled to decode and identify emotion, and to appreciate how the tone of someone’s voice could say as much as their choice of words.
Now, for the first time, John’s voice sounded to him like it carried an emotional range. Confused (though probably not as confused as the friend he was talking with), John hung up the phone. He put on some music – an old track by the Tavares, a group John had worked with in a previous career as a sound engineer.
‘Everything was different. Every little nuance of the recording held meaning for me. My range of sonic comprehension had just widened a thousand-fold. Whatever they did with that brain stimulator had unlocked something very powerful in the way I heard music.’ The magnet seemed to have released something inside his brain and the effect went beyond music.
‘The filter of autistic disability – if that is what hid the emotion from me before – seemed to have vanished. I heard a smile in one voice, as I saw it on my friend’s face, and I felt its truth inside of me.’
The scientists who had delivered the brain stimulation were as surprised as John at his transition.
A few hours – all the time that had passed since the TMS session – was nowhere near long enough for John’s brain to have plotted and formed the new connections to allow him to experience emotion in this sophisticated way. The capacity must have been in there all along. The brain stimulation, somehow, had released it, had switched it on. They asked John to tell them if anything else unusual happened. It did.
Faces, other people’s faces – previously an inscrutable mask – started to talk to him. John was working as a mechanic and he realized that a female customer was communicating with him, but in a way he had never tuned into before.
‘As she spoke, her face began to tell its own story. I wasn’t even hearing her words, but her feelings shone through clearly.’ As the woman’s words spoke of the mechanical problems with her car, John could read a deeper narrative in her expressions and tone. She was anxious, about the car, the cost of the repair, her ability to pay, how she was going to get to work.
Like many people with autism, John had spent a lifetime blind to these social cues – the kind the rest of us take for granted. Previously, he would have answered her with a non-committal factual response that she would simply have to drop the car off and wait. Instead, from out of nowhere, the newly engaged part of his brain blew away the dust gathered over decades of inaction and answered for him.
‘Don’t worry. The problem you are describing sounds like a pretty small thing to fix’.
Not everybody with autism wants a fix, but plenty do. When John wrote about his experience with TMS on his blog, lots of them got in touch. Some wanted advice, some wanted to try the brain stimulation for themselves, or try it on their children. All wanted some hope.
John’s unlocked emotional frequencies did not all bring good news. He found it difficult to turn off his new awareness, and he would burst into tears when he read in the newspaper about the deaths of total strangers. A fire hose flow of unregulated and unfamiliar emotion and empathy now flooded his consciousness. ‘Experiencing the collective emotional energy of a small crowd and feeling each person’s hope, fear, excitement and worry was just as disabling as being blind to it.’
The brain stimulation had given John a new ability. He felt like he could see into people’s souls. He was desperate to know more about what had been done to him, but the scientists involved could only speculate. The magnetic stimulation had been low frequency, which is known to inhibit brain activity in the same way as the cathode does in the circuit set up during electrical stimulation. (High frequency magnetic stimulation has the opposite effect and activates brain cells.)
Perhaps, they suggested, John’s brain had reacted to the inhibition by bringing other circuits online to compensate for the temporary loss. Maybe the surge of activity through a long-idle part of John’s brain had jump-started a dormant mental ability to sense and judge emotion.
It’s easy to be sceptical of the changes John reported. We have no independent way to confirm them beyond John’s personal testimony, and in most branches of science and medicine, such anecdotes tend to be scoffed at unless they can be backed with convincing data and the effect preferably repeated in lots of other people.
But remember one thing: the entire field of psychiatry and the study of mental disorders pretty much rely on personal testimony. Millions of people are diagnosed and treated for depression and OCD and anxiety and dozens of other problems depending on the answer they give to the question: so how do you feel? There are no brain scans, blood tests or physical measurements to probe the state of our minds.
John’s discovery of emotion, and the unlocking of his ability to read people, certainly makes a good story. He has written a book about it, called Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening, the latest in a series he has published on his life and experiences with autism. So, might John be, well, exaggerating? Could the change be not in his perception of emotion but in his imagination?
Only he knows for sure, but it seems unlikely to me that he is not telling the truth. For one thing, John wasn’t the only person with autism to report these effects after the TMS sessions. A woman called Kim who had enrolled in the same scientific study contacted him to share her identical experience. She too found for the first time she was able to read and judge people’s expressions. She knew when people were speaking in a sarcastic way. Social interaction, previously a black-and-white affair, was now presented to her in glorious Technicolor.
She wrote on John’s blog: ‘Before this stimulation, I thought that I read people’s facial expressions and their tone of voice fairly well. However, after seeing the difference following the stimulation, I would say that I miss 50 per cent or more of the social interaction.’
The plural of anecdote, as the online debunkers of pseudoscience like to point out, is not data. Kim and John did not report their experiences independently. It’s possible they influenced each other, and gave each other more confidence to over-interpret the change. Still, if they were fooling themselves, then they did so in a bizarre and pointlessly self-destructive way. Both John and Kim said they were changed by the stimulation, but not all for the better. Kim was distraught when she revisited her memories with her new emotional range and realized what she had missed out on.
‘Suddenly I understood why I have trouble with my friends, and why I don’t get along with my co-workers. TMS showed me everything I had done wrong in my life and it overwhelmed me.’
Things got worse when her new ability quickly faded away, her multicolour world snapped back to monochrome.
‘What am I going to do now? It’s like I’m haunted. I got a glimpse of those emotions but now it’s gone. So now I know what life is like for other people but it’s not that way for me.’
John also revisited past experiences and reassessed relationships and, as he did so, realized one of his friends was not what he seemed. What John had always thought was friendly chit-chat with him he now identified as ridicule and belittlement intended to single him out as different. John pledged never to speak to him again. And more followed: the TMS changed John’s mind in such a fundamental way it broke up his marriage.
Martha, his wife, suffered from serious depression. Sometimes she felt so bad she struggled to get out of bed. For years, her illness had not been an issue for John. He simply left her to it. He had shared her life, but not her sadness, because he didn’t do other people’s sadness.
The brain stimulation made him capable of seeing and feeling his wife as she truly was. And to his shame and distress, he realized he could not handle the emotions they now shared. The cloud of misery she lived in started to engulf him too. When he was with her, Martha’s depression would crush him and he felt dragged down. The feeling only lifted when he went out and left her in the house. And one day he never went back.
‘TMS took away my emotional innocence, and I’ll always be sad for its loss. But part of the cost of getting smarter emotionally was seeing people as they actually are, and not as I imagined them to be.’
John lives in Massachusetts and I spoke with him on the phone just before Christmas 2015. He’s articulate and easy to talk to and offered some thoughtful reflections on his experiences. He was also – and in my experience as a journalist this is a sign when someone is on top of their subject and telling it like it is – honest enough to admit there were some things he couldn’t explain and he didn’t have the answers for.
The change is still there, he said. It’s not as vivid as it was immediately after the stimulation and it sometimes needs to be nudged into action – he can miss some social cues unless he is primed to watch for them – but John is convinced, and convincing: the magnetic stimulation of his brain brought fundamental change.
Here’s an interesting question: if we accept that John experienced the change he describes, then did the magnetic stimulation make him more intelligent? After all, he can judge and respond better to environmental cues based on emotions now, so he is in a better position to use what he has got to get more of what he wants. But better reading of emotion probably wouldn’t help him on an IQ test. So does intelligence go further than IQ? How far? Can we use neuroenhancement, therefore, to improve ‘intelligence’ even if it has no impact on IQ? The answers, just like most in this fascinating and complex area of science, are far from simple and extremely controversial.