When I was a kid in the 1960s, I read magazines while waiting at The Band Box beauty parlor for my mother to get her hair done. They had some of the usual ‘ladies’ magazines’ like Good Housekeeping and McCall’s (which had ‘paper dolls’ each month), and they also had some unusual ones whose names I don’t remember. One was kind of fascinating in a creepy way, with detailed articles that were neither news nor totally fiction, and tended toward fringe topics such as psychic mysteries.

The article that was on my mind the other day was about a person who had a behavioral dysfunction that reportedly required state-of-the-art brain surgery. The process was described in detail – how the patient was given a local anaesthesia but was left awake during the entire surgery since the brain itself has no feeling, according to the write-up. The patient was awake as the scalp was shaved, and as the surgeon drilled a series of holes in the skull until he could remove a circular disk of the bone. He then applied some sort of stimulation to different locations in the brain and asked the patient to tell him what each stimulus felt like. The replies were like: ‘My ring finger is itching.’ ‘There’s a pain in my right eye.’

In that way, the surgeon reportedly was able to locate the specific area of the brain causing the patient’s dysfunction.

I experienced the article from the perspective of the patient. I was fascinated and horrified.