In a controversial set of experiments in the 1960s, the psychiatrist Robert Heath implanted electrodes in the brains of humans so that patients could push a button to stimulate their own dopamine neurons. Patients quickly began repeatedly pressing this button, often hundreds of times an hour. One might assume this was because they “liked” it, but in Heath’s words: The patient, in explaining why he pressed the septal button with such frequency, stated that the feeling was . . . as if he were building up to a sexual orgasm. He reported that he was unable to achieve the orgastic end point,
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