From The Economist, The future of mind control:
IN AN attempt to treat depression, neuroscientists once carried out a simple experiment. Using electrodes, they stimulated the brains of women in ways that caused pleasurable feelings. The subjects came to no harm?indeed their symptoms appeared to evaporate, at least temporarily?but they quickly fell in love with their experimenters. …
Yet neuroscientists have been left largely to their own devices, restrained only by standard codes of medical ethics and experimentation. This relative lack of regulation and oversight has produced a curious result. When it comes to the brain, society now regards the distinction between treatment and enhancement as essentially meaningless. Taking a drug such as Prozac when you are not clinically depressed used to be called cosmetic, or non-essential, and was therefore considered an improper use of medical technology. Now it is regarded as just about as cosmetic, and as non-essential, as birth control or orthodontics. American legislators are weighing the so-called parity issue?the argument that mental treatments deserve the same coverage in health-insurance plans as any other sort of drug. Where drugs to change personality traits were once seen as medicinal fripperies, or enhancements, they are now seen as entitlements.
oh please. pleeze.
subjects fall in love with their psychologists all the time. nevertheless this is a nice anectode. if the journalist really wanted to make a point (s)he could have come up with some serious references from the sixties – plus counterarguments, why the Orwellian/all right Dickian future has not materialized -yet!?
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