Circa 1781, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrates that animal bodies utilize electricity for nerve and muscle contractions. Fast forward to 1890, a German scientist named Fleischle von Marxow detects the first electrical impulses in the brain. In 1924, Hans Berger begins investigating brain waves with electroencephalography (the EEG). This was the foundation of neuromodulation - the use of machines to regulate brain and nervous system functions. By 1936, experimentation both measuring and modulating brain waves via direct stimulation were widespread.

By 1962, when Aldous Huxley was giving his speech at Berkeley on "The Ultimate Revolution" - that is the final revolution of the state over the individual, the advances in neuromodulation were astonishing, even by the standards of today when science fiction is a popular form of entertainment, if for no other reason than that most of the population is blissfully unaware of just how easily their emotional states can be directly manipulated via technology.

But Huxley wasn't talking about entertainment or science fiction, he was warning about neuromodulation as means to directly control human beings as science fact. This form of control, he postulated, could be used in conjunction with the pharmacological pacification and hypnotic conditioning of the population he had expounded upon at length in his dystopian novel Brave New World in 1932.

The goal of the judicious application of electrical neuromodulation? To induce the love of servitude, the love of the state and the love of tyranny. In his speech, Huxley gave numerous examples of successful neuromodulation that had already taken place before 1962 that intimated just how successful such technology could be, let's listen, shall we?

"But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases it has been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes planted in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if ever this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in McGoon's(?) laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they’d press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}."

"Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. And where evidently, the result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at its bar and sort of saying “To be or not to be that is the question”. (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the, if I can humanize or anthropomorphize, I mean he was feeling something terribly mixed and he would wait for quite a long time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing."

"I noticed in this most recent issue of Scientific American there’s a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you’re stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they’re fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she’s hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression."

"The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he’s seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they’d feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.

"Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?"