Suppose, if you will, that there exists a tiny device the size of a pinhead that can be implanted in your brain. The device is connected to a pressure-sensitive switch in your bellybutton.
When you press the button you experience the most mind-numbing pleasure that the human brain can sustain. Every nerve cell and neuron in your body is flooded with pure, unadulterated bliss. You feel the combined pleasure of eating your favorite food, reading your favorite book, watching your favorite movie, listening to your favorite song, visiting the SDMB, learning that you’ve just won 50 million dollars, having a full-body orgasm, winning an Olympic gold-medal, taking a hit off a crack pipe, riding a roller coaster, and being in love for the first time.
You can press the button any time you want, as many times as you want.
Would you want such a device implanted in your body?
And have everyone else on Earth implant it in their body… so the entire population of the planet will be spasming in bliss 24/7, and I can use the opportunity to rise to power and take over the world!!!
Larry Niven wrote about this at some length. Wireheads (folks with electrical stimulators hooked right into their pleasure centers, as you suggest) appear in several of his “Known Space” stories, especially in (IIRC) The Ringworld Engineers, where one makes an important plot point. Scary idea – Wireheads, in his view, end up as worse than Heroin junkies or crack addicts, just living for the next push of the button. I agree. IIRC, there was an experiment with rats that had such wiring done to them. They ended up pushing that damned pleasure lever to the exclusion of all else, even food and sex.
You do remember correctly about the rats. Not only that, they would run across a painfully electrified cage floor to get to the lever. The rats had a lever on each end of the cage that would not work again until the other lever was pressed. Those little rats would hop, skip, and jump back and forth across that electrified floor until the power was turned off to the brain stimulator.
You can find some poor quality video of this experiement here.
Didn’t Michael Crichton write a book about this? I may be wrong, but IIRC there was a novel about how they implanted one of those things in the brain of a murderer to distract him from slaughtering people, but it backfired when the guy escaped and started killing again, with even more fun than before. Oops.
Could I have the version without the crack hit and substitute having all my enemies and creditors suffer an inverse effect whenever they either think of me in a negative manner or think of collecting their money? That would rock.
What the mermaid is 5 years late on her mortgage and car payments? uhm…just let it go man, let it go. In fact send her chocolate and roses now!!! And talk to her employer about raising her salary too.
IIRC, the device in The Terminal Man wasn’t a pleasure device intended to stop a would-be murderer, but a therapeutic device intended to fix brain function. As in all Michael Crichton works (Jurassic Park, Westworld), this goes horribly wrong, and disaster occurs (And they call him a science fiction writer? One thing that’s always bugged me is that, in MC’s universe, scientists don’t know what’s going on, lack any sort of imagination for foreseeing consequences, and don’t build in safeties and fail-safes. He’s a damned anti-science fiction writer!)
To its credit, the underappreciated movie version has some neat stuff, particularly the scene where the titular implanted guy starts to have an episode, while a TV in the background plays a scene from a 50s monster flick.
Any thoughtful person would be scared silly of such a device. I’d consider an offer to give me one of those “pleasure buttons” the same as an offer to kill me.
Some sicko would think of inflicing just such a device on condemned criminals as a means of execution. Wait… Never mind, I just did.
Okay, so what if the device had a built-in timer that only allowed it to remain activated for a total of 30 minutes per day.
In other words, you can press the button as many times as you want, but once you reach your daily limit of 30 minutes, the device shuts off until the start of the next 24-hour period.
I can imagine it now… I’m cleaning my navel piercing, being really careful not to rotate the barbell too roughly, trying to wash all the Provon out of the hole, and suddenly… OOOH! OOOH! YEAH! RIGHT THERE, BABY! AHHHH!
Or I’m on the 4 train during rush hour, and some stockbroker elbows me in the stomach in his hurry to get out at the Wall Street stop, and I’m all YEAH! YEAH! SHOVE ME AGAIN, YOU FANTASTIC MAN CAKE!
Also covered. Spider Robinson postulated it would take all of about fifteen minutes for a junkie to figure out how to disable the safty overrides. Actually, I think in his universe, it took fifteen seconds and a nail file…a great short story.
(Yeah, I know he turned it into a novel. I didn’t like it.)
Dammit, I’m not going to quit until somebody says yes.
Okay, 1) the device cannot be tampered with. It’s hermetically sealed in a tiny capsule that, if broken, will cause it to self-destruct, and 2) it comes with a safety switch (located in the left ear canal) to prevent it from being activated by accident.
Since no one has mentioned anything beyond the rats…
This has been done with humans. You can read all about it here. I find it particularly interesting that at one point they mention someone who stimulated his pleasure zone, for lack of a better concise term, 1500 times an hour, and then say, two paragarphs later, “People don’t self-stimulate constantly.” I think 1500 times an hour is pretty constant.
I immediatley wonder if the device will always be a fresh experience no matter how much it’s used. And I wonder what will become of people like me who will no doubt spend too much time navel-gazing, as it were. Thing is, it’s not really a happiness button, is it? I imagine during the experience you can’t do much else but enjoy. And somewhere on the Net are instructions for hard-wiring the button “on”.
I think slightly more challenging is the idea of having a happiness switch. Guaranteed happiness at the flick of a switch. Could we survive on happiness alone? I fear not.
So now there’s potential for a mini-explosion inside my navel? Still no thanks.
And just answering the OP alone, I’ve already got too many distractions (SDMB, DVDs, nachos, masturbation) sapping my motivation and preventing me from becoming rich, famous and respected. I don’t need one more, especially not one as powerful as this one.
CalMeacham, I’m in a small minority of Niven fans who liked The Ringworld Engineers better than Ringworld. In particular I like the fact that Louis was able to overcome wire addiction, and how that achievement prepared him for that other challenge he faced near the end of the book.
