A few decades ago, cultural historian and author Mike Jay stumbled onto the unfortunate story of James Tilly Matthews. In 1797, Matthews was locked in a London psychiatric hospital known colloquially as Bedlam because he had become convinced that his mind was being controlled by a machine he called the “air loom.” That machine, he believed, manipulated his mind via a magnet that had been secretly planted in his brain by political operatives.
This was a florid fantasy, but Jay was fascinated by the echoes Matthews’ delusion contained of many real-life, cutting-edge technologies in development in the 1980s, two centuries later. As Jay attempted to trace the history of ideas about brain-technology hybrids back to their points of origin, he realized that such cyborgian notions had persisted throughout the industrial age. They were embedded in science fiction but also repeatedly brought to life in scientific invention, though the quest was always incomplete.
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“The imagined locus of the magnetic or electronic brain device is always in the future, where it will control our minds or endow us with superhuman powers, attack us with invisible rays or create seamless virtual realities,” Jay writes in the introduction to his new book, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain which tracks the course of this history.
I spoke with Jay about the ways culture and science can become mismatched when it comes to cyborgian fantasies, whether all brain-machine hybrids are technologies of transcendence, a device called the “God helmet,” his dislike of AI, and the dominant voices of technofuturism.
You write in the book that you first encountered the term “wireheads” in Bruce Sterling’s science fiction novel Schismatrix, where it was used as a contemptuous term to describe people who lived off grid. That’s sort of a fun twist because you would think wireheads would connote the opposite. Was there something about this double meaning that you felt made it especially fitting as the title for the book?
Where I first came across the term “wirehead” was in Schismatrix, but it predates that. It started to be used in the 1970s. The idea was that people were going to get addicted to sticking electricity into the pleasure centers of their brains, which was a thing back then when people believed that brains had pleasure centers and you could stimulate yourself with them.
It became a term for the ultimate addiction to technology. I liked it as a term because it suggests that there’s a slightly retro history of the future. I’m trying to give the idea that this isn’t the first time we’ve conceived of these things that we’re used to talking about rather breathlessly as in the future.
There’s actually a history to this kind of speculation. I’ve heard people use the term wireheads to mean electronics geeks and people who are very into technology. It’s one of those words that rings bells, but nobody quite knows what it means. That’s a bit of an invitation for a writer to kind of fix it and appropriate it.
You write in the introduction that the book is about these disputed borderlands where science and fiction are impossible to separate. Where are some of those borderlands today?
If I was writing this book 30 or 40 years ago, there’d be an enormous number of news stories to pull out of the air—from all the Clockwork Orange stuff about whether you can suppress violent impulses to, “Is there a godspot and can we give ourselves religious experiences?” All these are a little in the rearview mirror now.
Whenever I mention what I’m writing about now, everybody straight away goes, “Oh, Neuralink,” that’s kind of our one cultural reference these days, and I think it’s telling that there’s only one. But I think that’s a good example. I mean, when we talk about that, are we talking about what Neuralink is actually doing, which is producing extremely sophisticated medical technologies for probably quite a small number of people with very severe physical disabilities?
Or are we talking about Elon Musk’s sales pitch for Neuralink, which is, “We’re all gonna have these chips in our brains, and we’re all gonna be super intelligent, and our consciousness is gonna be uploaded to AI or the cloud or maybe on Mars or whatever.”
You still have today a mixture of ideas which, if you follow them back, actually come from the 1980s and 1990s and cyberpunk fiction, but they overlaid on the technology of today. That’s a recursive process that’s been happening for a long time.
How so?
There are a lot of stories in this book that have that arc when you trace them through. The one about having a pleasure center in the brain that we can stimulate is a good example. It starts off with a piece of science, with some work that suggests this, and then that goes viral into the culture, and you get lots of futurologists and science fiction writers riffing on it. And then it all becomes familiar to us from Barbarella and the orgasmatron or other cultural tropes.
It’s only after this process has happened—that it’s gone from science into the wider culture—that two or three decades later, scientists circle back and go, “Oh, actually there isn’t a pleasure center in the brain. That was an idea we had before the neurotransmitter revolution, and now we know that we have different neurotransmitters and different circuits and pathways in the brain. And it’s all much more complicated than we thought.”
You often get this thing where culture leaps on an early scientific discovery, and then afterwards, the science turns out not to be what we thought it was, but of course it’s still out there in the culture.
The scientists and the wider culture do seem often to become misaligned. You describe a few researchers who are very surprised by this gap. José Delgado and Robert Heath, for example, thought the mind control devices they were experimenting with would liberate humanity. They were not expecting hostile reactions to their work from people in the general public who saw more authoritarian implications. I thought that was such an interesting tension between what the researchers intended and how the public interpreted it.
Yes, they were all fascinating characters. José Delgado and James Olds and Robert Heath were some of the very earliest people to introduce electrodes and two-way signaling into animals’ brains, rats or bulls. They were operating in that white heat of early brain science, which was all unfolding against, on the one hand, the Cold War, and then on the other hand, the beginnings of the counterculture.
And a lot of people involved in cybernetics made that transition. They started off working within Cold War science and ended up in the ‘60s becoming part of the holistic consciousness revolution. You can see how those figures at that time started off with a belief in their liberal mission of science to save the world and restore and guard reason against the forces of unreason and propaganda.
But then they were blindsided when people looked at this from the outside and went, “You’re going to do what? You’re going to stick electrodes into people’s brains and control their behavior?” They’ve got themselves into a position where they believed this was a liberal thing to do because it would give power back to reason and civilization and take it away from our violent impulses and things that science has now made it possible for us to control.
Can you tell the story of the God helmet?
Yes, I followed this story quite carefully. This was a Canadian psychiatrist called Michael Persinger, who had been working with EEG and patients with epilepsy. And he had EEG readings on a patient who had a temporal lobe seizure, and she came back with this very quiet conviction, “I just saw God. He was right here. I was just with him.”And Persinger had the EEG reading that corresponded to this religious experience stored. So he developed a helmet, being Canadian, of course, it was a snowmobile helmet with electromagnetic coils in the headpieces. And it sent a very, very weak current pattern with this signal across the temporal lobes. And he started administering this to people in a darkened room, and people started having religious experiences when it was turned on. I remember some early reports.
I remember a big one in Wired magazine. People would traipse up there and put the God helmet on and have these religious experiences. I was fascinated. I was invited to try the God helmet on, but it was in Paris and expenses weren’t paid, so I didn’t quite get that. This was in the middle of the rise of neurotheology and the Decade of the Brain. People were asking, “Is there a godspot?” This religious experience in the brain became a sort of focus for a lot of that debate.
As it became a focus for that debate, people started paying a bit more attention. Other people tried to replicate Persinger’s findings and couldn’t. And then he gave his equipment to a Swedish lab who did the same thing, but with a double-blind methodology, so nobody knew, operators or subjects, whether the machine was switched on or off. And what they discovered was that people in the God helmets did have strange mystical experiences or a sensed presence or a belief that something was out there, something from outside their minds had entered. But people had these experiences also when the machine was switched off, so it’s that placebo effect again.
It was interesting for me going back to that 10 years later, because I knew a few people who had been involved in parapsychology research and had said at the time, “Oh my God, this is amazing. You gotta try it.” And I circled back to them 10 years later, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, I’m not sure if that really works. Oh yeah, I think I’ve got one in the attic still, but I haven’t dug it up for years.” So it became a vanished story. It felt like a contemporary story, but it’s kind of history now.
You write that the God helmet fits in a long line of technologies of transcendence. Are all of our brain machines, in some sense, technologies of transcendence?
I think they can be, and I think that’s one of the meanings they’ve always had. But they’re also technologies of control, which I guess is the opposite, in the same way that they’re technologies of medicine and healing, but they’re also technologies of paranoia and mind control.
I’m trying to communicate these contradictions in the way I’ve structured the book. Rather than structure it around this or that kind of device, I’ve structured it around our aspirations and our hopes and our fears and our ideas of what these things might do.
The idea that they might be technologies of transcendence goes way back. Someone like William Crookes, who was president of the Royal Society in Britain, and who was also very active in the Society for Psychical Research, gave a great lecture to an audience of electrical engineers saying, “You know, maybe there’s an organ in the brain that we don’t know about that picks up electrical frequencies that we can’t perceive in any other way.”
We still have these conversations. How exactly do migrating animals know where magnetic north is? Is there some kind of sixth sense there? But 150 years ago, people were talking about this. Maybe we can find a device and a signal that activates this part of the brain and maybe that’s gonna make it possible for us to connect with the spirit world or maybe this is how telepathy works. Maybe there are these signals that are moving between our brains in ways that we can’t notice. That’s one of the ideas that’s attached to technology in the brain from right from the beginning.
You quote William Gibson as saying, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Gibson’s idea is that the present contains the seeds of the future, but also the remnants of the “derelict utopias” of the past, whose original intentions have become warped. With each new generation, it seems we become convinced that technology will bring some kind of utopia, only to find that it makes the powerful more powerful and the vulnerable more vulnerable. Why don’t we learn that lesson?
I think because it does both things at the same time. Certainly, if you think of the internet revolution, all the rhetoric around that early on was about how “Information wants to be free,” that it was giving power to individuals, which it was. But at the same time, it was giving enormous information-gathering powers of control to governments and corporations.
I was never a big fan of golden age sci-fi because it was always these gleaming futuristic worlds where everything was new and perfect. That was one of the things that always appealed to me about William Gibson. The remains of the old world persist, and projects that hadn’t turned out as their architects had wanted had been co-opted in ways that were different from what their originators thought they were going to be. The future, like the present, is always going to be messy.
You describe one of the first novels to feature a machine-enhanced brain, called The Clockwork Man, set in the year 8000, and published in 1923 by London playwright and magazine editor E.V. Odle. In the future of the novel, humans have internalized their machines, which opens up all kinds of technological miracles but also meshes humanity more tightly “to the cogs of the machine.” These clockwork humans, as you describe them, have lost some of their humanity and cannot function without their clocks, which seems very apt for today. Can humans devise machines that don’t deprive them of their humanity?
There’s a nice line of Marshall McLuhan’s that I quote where he says, “We always become robots when we’re uncritically engaged with our technologies.” And that sticks with me. I’m very aware that when you’re tapping away on your phone or your laptop, when you’re just clicking this and tapping that, you’re actually the robot, you know?
You give an agency over to the device. I guess that’s an individual decision. I think for a lot of people it’s coming up with AI and the attempts to market AI as the solution for all our problems. I haven’t engaged with AI and I think a lot of people haven’t, and the backlash against it suggests that we’re all a little concerned about becoming robots if we give all our mental processes creative iterations over to the machine.
You write that predictions, in addition to being great metaphors, can be agents of propaganda by directing our attention, directing investment. I recently spoke with science fiction writer Daniel H. Wilson, who is best known for writing Robopocalypse, and he said he had shifted his focus away from dystopias to more hopeful stories in which humans had actually solved some of the problems of the present. Do we need new kinds of hopeful science fiction with new predictions about the future?
Yeah, I think that’s right. The big tech guys are writing their versions of utopias. That’s what they’re trying to present to us. But I think it’s extraordinary the way in which all our technological futures have become fixated around AI at the moment. There’s not really any other story.
I mean, there are other non-technology stories like climate catastrophe, for example. But I think we have got into a place where it’s very hard to conceive of positive futures, which also ignores a lot of what’s happening now. This book started for me about 30 years ago, and that was just at that moment before the internet and then the smartphone and everything got going.
We have had a technological transformation and it has been extraordinary, you know? The thing about prediction is interesting because people do use prediction to say, “Okay, of all the things going on in the present, this is the important one. This is the one you have to pay attention to. This is the one that’s gonna define the future.” We don't always have to believe that when people say it, but at the same time, the way we’re talking now, for the first half of my life and more, it would have been impossible.
The video phone was one of these things that was always on the horizon and it never happened and it kept being predicted. And then suddenly, there was Skype and then there was FaceTime and now it’s every day. We tend to also underestimate or forget about the extraordinary transformations that technology brings because they become so mundane so fast.
Have you ever been tempted to write science fiction yourself?
I did write a little bit when I started out. I wrote screenplays mostly because I was coming out of working in TV, but I decided early on I wasn’t that great at it. I never quite believed my characters, I could never hear them speaking in my head. But the bit I really enjoyed was world building and constructing scenarios. And I discovered that you can do that out of real life and out of history, so I shifted over to non-fiction.
You mention in the book that the dominant voices of technofuturism have become more explicitly reactionary and anti-feminist, whereas female science fiction authors like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t pay much mind to brain gadgets, compared with their male counterparts. Why do you think that is?
I think technology has been developed by a very self-selecting elite cadre who are disproportionately young and male and have been very focused on their devices from very early on, and probably less attentive than the rest of us to whatever else is going on in the world: relationships or society or our environment. There’s a Silicon Valley groupthink, which is very streamlined and pushes forward very fast and efficiently towards the future that it envisages. But it’s a two-dimensional future, and its appeal across the broader spectrum of humanity is limited.
Octavia Butler said in a lecture at MIT that science fiction generally falls into one of three buckets: “what if,” “if only,” or “if this goes on.” And I wondered if you were to speculate, what would you say the science fiction of “if this goes on” would look like?
It depends what you think of as “this.” When people are put on the spot, most of the present-day trends that they perceive are ones that are going downwards or getting worse. “What if” is the purest form of science fiction speculation, one that’s not attached to any particular vision or any particular future. We get an awful lot more of, “if this goes on.”
You see that, for example, in climate fiction, which has a narrow emotional bandwidth. There’s not a huge variation in tone. There’s an enormous variation in the way that people are constructing ecological futures, but it’s pretty hard for “if this goes on,” to go anywhere other than towards some kind of extended catastrophe. Whereas “what if” opens up all kinds of different possible futures. 
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