Hoping to find a cure for depression many years ago doctors cut the connecting tissue in patients, that joined the two hemispheres of the brain. Subsequently patients found themselves doing the same thing twice without realising – such as putting on two sets of clothes – because the hemisphere they had rarely used thought the other side was dead and started to take over functions. Recently to find cures for mood swings they have isolated the parts of the brain that control moods and can manipulate it with artificial stimuli. So accurately that they can make people ‘happy’ or even ‘sad’ within moments.
The upshot of these experiments is not so much the finding of cures for ailments bu the realisation that the brain is awash with chemicals that ‘make us what we are.’ That we can be manipulated and what we think of as ‘us’ is actually a series of functions reacting to external stimuli. This makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable but gives us a whole new series of reasons for the religious experiments that try to disassociate our brains from such ‘desires’, and concentrate on simply thinking.
As long as we find out thinking is simple and not some drug induced state of mind.