Wirehead (science fiction)


Wirehead is a term first used in works of science fiction to refer to various kinds of interaction between human beings and technology, or to a person who makes use of such technology. In its most common usage, the "wirehead" concept refers to technologies involving electrical wiring that is implanted in or otherwise connected to a human brain and used to deliver safe amounts of electricity either to the whole brain or to more specific areas of the brain, often the so-called "pleasure centers" or reward circuitry.
Though the concept of "wireheading" originated in science fiction, electrical brain stimulation and related technologies have long been studied in neuroscience and psychiatry and are routinely used in therapeutic and research settings. Usage of the science fiction term has since expanded to include these real-world applications.

In fiction

Literature

In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a "wirehead" is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant known as a "droud" in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain. Wireheading is the most addictive habit known, and wireheads usually die from neglecting their basic needs in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of humanity without self-control. A wirehead's death is central to Niven's Gil "the Arm" Hamilton story "Death by Ecstasy", published by Galaxy Magazine in 1969, and a main character in the book Ringworld Engineers is a former wirehead trying to quit.
Also in the Known Space universe, a device called a "tasp" which does not need a surgical implant can be used to achieve similar goals: the pleasure center of a person's brain is found and remotely stimulated. It is an important device in Niven's Ringworld novels.
Niven's stories explain wireheads by mentioning a study in which experimental rats had electrodes implanted at strategic locations in their brains, so that an applied current would induce a pleasant feeling. If the current could be obtained any time the rats pushed the lever, they would use it over and over, ignoring food and physical necessities until they died. Such experiments were actually conducted by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s, first discovering the locations of such areas, and later showing the extremes to which rats would go to obtain the stimulus again.
Mindkiller, a 1982 sci-fi novel by Spider Robinson set in the late 1980s, explores the social implications of technologies that manipulate the brain, beginning with wireheading, the use of electric current to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain in order to achieve a narcotic high.
In the Shaper/Mechanist stories by Bruce Sterling, "wirehead" is the Mechanist term for a human who has given up corporeal existence and become a computer simulation.
In The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton, forty electrodes are implanted into the brain of the character Harold Franklin "Harry" Benson to control his seizures. However, his pleasure center is also stimulated, and his body begins producing more seizures in order to receive the pleasurable sensation.

Film and television

In the 1983 film Brainstorm, a wireless brain connection machine is made. A character named Hal Abramson abuses the device with a signal of neverending sexual pleasure.
In season three, episode 10, "Awakening" of the television series The Outer Limits, a neurologically impaired woman receives a brain implant to help her become more like a typical human.
In episode 41, "Zone Dancer" of the 1986 animated series The Centurions, the lead character Crystal Kane is accused of "Zone Dancing" and seen using a "droud" to interface her brain with computer networks in what is probably the first animated representation of cyberspace and virtual reality. The story, written by Michael Reaves, weaves a future noir tale of cyberpunk espionage, cloning, and private-eye procedural, all set in the universe of the animated series and makes copious references to William Gibson's Neuromancer. There is even a Zone Dancer named Gibson and, in what may be an homage to Larry Niven's Louis Wu, a cyberneticist named Dr. Wu.
The title character of the television series House is a physician who suffers from chronic pain. In the episode "Half-Wit", House seeks a medical procedure to stimulate the "pleasure center" of his brain.

Real-world examples

Though electrical brain stimulation is exaggerated to its logical extremity in science fiction tropes such as wireheading, the technology and its application for medical purposes do indeed exist in the real world. The application of electricity to the brains of animals in order to study brain function has been practiced for nearly a century. In 1924, Hans Berger succeeded in recording the first human electroencephalogram. William Grey Walter wrote a paper in 1938 on the applications of electro-encephalography, the measurement of electrical activity in the brain using wires of different types.
Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper used electrical stimulation of the human brain to find the places where their patients' seizures were coming from. Dr. J. Lawrence Pool wrote "Effects of Electrical Stimulation of the Human Cerebellar Cortex" and described stimulation of a patient's brain. In 1944, Reginald Bickford is reported to have recorded the EEG of psychiatric patients who had had lobotomies. After the 1949 Nobel Prize was awarded to António Egas Moniz for the procedure of lobotomy, a more precise method of destroying brain structures was pursued. In 1955, the placing of wires into a mentally ill patient was performed by Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen. Stephen Sherwood also performed wire implantation. In 1961, five patients had wires implanted to treat their mental illness and a precision leucotomy was performed for favorable results.
Throughout the 1950s, many doctors continued to place wires or electrodes into the human brain. They worked primarily on the brains of epileptic and psychiatric patients. Robert Galbraith Heath placed electrodes in his subjects' brains in the 1950s to try to treat their mental illness and wrote several papers on his work of stimulating the various regions of the brain. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado also placed electrodes in his patients' brains. He called his inventions a "stimoceiver" and a "chemitrode".
By the 1980s, silver and copper electrodes had been found to be toxic to brain tissue. Electrodes are encapsulated by fibrous growths as an inflammatory bodily response to a foreign object.