Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home: the wonder of the wireless revolution – review by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. "Rubens, a BBC producer for more than 35 years, is keen for her book to show how radio affected people’s lives – 'the shift in household habits, the awakenings of new tastes, the alterations and adaptations of attitudes'. Evidence for this was minimal before she discovered the work of two pioneering audience researchers, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, whose 1938 explorations into radio’s effects on working-class people in Barton Hill, near Bristol, was published, and quickly overlooked, in the week Britain declared war on Germany. In a box in the Bodleian Library, Rubens found the pamphlet and Gill’s original notepads, full of rare examples of early feedback. These included radio’s effects on a man who was once drunk and abusive ..., a Welsh grocer obsessed with the news ... and a husband who tunes the radio to foreign-language stations when he leaves for work, so his wife can’t understand it, then disconnects it completely when he goes away for a conference. 'She’s left him now,' trills the interviewee on this subject. Rubens’s findings may have been the book’s impetus, but other stories around the development of radio put flesh on these bones.... The finest testimony, however, comes from a 1928 letter to the BBC from a 'clerk in a provincial city'. His life is 'a tram-ride to the office, lunch in a tea-shop or saloon bar, a tram-ride home' and he can’t spend much money, 'because you’ve got your holidays to think of'. But, he adds: 'Please don’t think I’m complaining. I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It’s a real magic carpet.' Almost 100 years later, despite our world being so very different to his, radio, at its best, continues to be."
Researchers fool university markers with AI-generated exam papers – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university’s markers – who were not told about the project – flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students. The authors said their findings showed that AI processors such as ChatGPT were now passing the 'Turing test' – named after the computing pioneer Alan Turing – of being able to pass undetected by experienced judges. Billed as 'the largest and most robust blind study of its kind' to investigate if human educators could detect AI-generated responses, the authors warned that it had major implications for how universities assess students."
It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "The first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart. Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project.... Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they’d keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn’t how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable.... Rather cheeringly, however, it seems ... gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way. Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and 'digital detox' events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection."
Finishing a book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The writer. [Picture shows him hard at work.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The agent: 'It's great! I have a few notes.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The editor: 'It's great! I have a few suggestions.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The readers: 'It's great! We need a sequel!' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.]"
‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth – interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "One of the things he has been thinking about recently is his responsibilities as a writer. 'I’ve become quite wary of the power to provoke emotions in readers... And most of my writing life, that’s how I justified my job. I would say that you won’t learn much about history from me; go to a historian. However, a novelist can provide the emotional dimension; we offer some sort of emotional truth that is not there in nonfiction, however scrupulously well researched and documented.' But over the last few years, he’s become increasingly worried that stirring up strong emotional responses has a far darker dimension, as we see in the way that political movements are able to harness citizens by appealing to their instincts rather than to evidence. 'In the post-truth Trump era, there’s this relentless attack on accredited news media. It’s not just Trump: it’s a general atmosphere that whatever the evidence, if you don’t like it, you can just claim some alternative emotional truth for yourself....' That can only be intensified, he believes, by the increasing power of AI. 'AI will become very good at manipulating emotions. I think we’re on the verge of that. At the moment we’re just thinking of AI crunching data or something. But very soon, AI will be able to figure out how you create certain kinds of emotions in people – anger, sadness, laughter.'... So in a post-truth society aided by AI and algorithms, is it enough for fiction to pack an emotional punch? 'If I was deploying that kind of gift for the service of a politician or for a large corporation that wanted to sell pharmaceuticals, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was commendable, you’d be highly suspicious of it. But if I’m doing it in the service of telling a story, that is considered to be something really valuable,' he says. 'It’s something that increasingly makes me feel uneasy, because I haven’t been praised for my incredible style, or because in my fiction I exposed great injustices in the world. I’ve usually been praised for producing stuff that makes people cry.' He laughs. 'They gave me a Nobel prize for it.'"
Opening our eyes to the science of sleep, in 1971 – archival exploration by Genevieve Fox in The Guardian. "'Sleep is like love. If you have it, you take it for granted,’ reports Wendy Cooper in the Observer Magazine on 24 January 1971.... In special sleep laboratories throughout the world, the ‘secrets of the strange phenomenon of sleep are being properly investigated for the first time,’ enthuses Cooper. They are armed with a new wonder machine: the electro-encephalograph (EEG), which detects the minute electrical changes taking place in the brain, amplifying and recording them.... The real excitement starts, says Cooper, when ‘the eyes make rapid jerky coordinated movements… This indicates a special form of sleep known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep; the brainwaves at these times resemble waking brainwaves and the body parallels this with a storm of activity’. Irregular heart-rate, increased oxygen intake, reduced muscle tone, It’s all preparation for action in the sleeper’s ‘personal world of dreams’, dreams that are vivid, ‘emotional, self-involved and often bizarre adventures’. This association between REM sleep and active dreaming is ‘perhaps the most exciting discovery so far made in sleep research’ – for ‘it makes possible the scientific study of dreams’."
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: are we really getting sicker? – review by Mark Honigsbaum in The Guardian. "As medicine has become more sophisticated and we have developed more sensitive tests and treatments, so more and more people have acquired diagnostic labels. As Suzanne O’Sullivan, who has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, argues in The Age of Diagnosis, this can be a good thing if the diagnosis leads to greater understanding and improved treatments, but not if the diagnosis is not as definitive as we think and risks medicalising people without long-term benefits to their health. For example, as many as half a million people in Australia are reported to have Lyme disease, even though the Lyme-carrying ticks are not present in Australia. Worldwide, the condition has an estimated 85% overdiagnosis rate. Or consider autism. Fifty years ago, autism was said to affect four in 10,000 people. Today, the worldwide prevalence is one in 100 and in the UK diagnoses of autism increased 787% between 1998 and 2018. Similarly, the proportion of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, a term first coined in 1987 to describe fidgety children who had trouble concentrating, doubled in boys and tripled in girls between 2000 and 2018 and today the diagnosis is also increasingly being applied to adults. But what if these reported increases do not reflect an actual increase in the prevalence of these conditions but are examples of 'diagnosis creep'? As O’Sullivan writes: 'It could be that borderline medical problems are becoming ironclad diagnoses and that normal differences are being pathologised… In other words: we are not getting sicker – we are attributing more to sickness.'”
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: do no harm – review by Adam Rutherford in The Guardian. "Thirty years a doctor, 25 a neurologist, [O'Sullivan's] excellent books occupy a space once dominated by Oliver Sacks, where individual tales of disease and distress reveal broader truths about science, medicine and people.... She describes a trinity of 'overs'. Overdiagnosis, where a medical problem is treated when treatment might not be needed; overmedicalisation, where non-medical behaviours are turned into the business of doctors; and underlying both, overdetection: we are ever better at identifying signals of disease, sometimes earlier than necessary, when those indicators may not end up presaging the disease itself. For example, some studies have shown that early screening programmes for cancers may result in arduous treatment when cancer itself was not inevitable. Alongside balanced analysis of the epidemiological data on prostate and breast cancer, O’Sullivan examines the growth in behavioural conditions such as autism and ADHD. The tone is not sneering or dismissive, as debunkings of bad science so often can be. O’Sullivan is instead full of compassion, care and grace.... O’Sullivan is brave to take this subject on, and she hits the target. I have little tolerance for tedious old men droning on about how 'in our day, you just got on with things', or 'now everyone’s got autism/ADHD', or worst of all that young people today are delicate snowflakes, medicalising everything and blaming everyone else. Apart from anything, this sentiment has been expressed by every older generation for thousands of years. So how do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from rightwing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."
They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed – article by J Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. "Ziz’s writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the 'rationalists'. The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology and the big questions of our time. Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all. They debate with earnest and deadly seriousness, and their preferred arena of intellectual combat is dense blogposts, often with footnotes.... Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead. From there, the story grew stranger. Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord. A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, transgender. But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.... How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead? What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having 'dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer' – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death? The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come."
Universality by Natasha Brown: clever satire of identity politics – review by Jo Hamya in The Guardian. "The first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses [a gold bar] to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining 'microsociety' on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic.... Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with 'multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend'. A perfect symbol, in short, of 'the excessive fruits of late capitalism'.... [But] after the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters’ perspectives. We learn to read carefully.... [After her previous novel Assembly,] Brown is having more fun within the constraints of our current sociopolitical discourse. Universality is less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core question: nothing about the language in it is neutral. Pronouncements on 'wokeism', on meritocracy, on race and culture wars fall from characters’ mouths like bombs. Thanks to the novel’s ingenious structure, the more you hear them, the more you realise how inhibiting they are, and how soul-crushingly tiring it is to spend your one precious life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and utterly useless system: a realisation only one character profits from, though dangerously so. It’ll be interesting to watch Brown navigate her publicity run in an era of tech bros heralding a very particular mode of free speech. If Assembly was a meditation on the linguistic construction of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identity, then the final two chapters of Universality successfully consolidate this new novel as an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths."
Unearthed notebooks shed light on [Michael Faraday, the] Victorian genius who inspired Einstein – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "The little-known notebooks of the Victorian scientist Michael Faraday have been unearthed from the archive of the Royal Institution and are to be digitised and made permanently accessible online for the first time. The notebooks include Faraday’s handwritten notes on a series of lectures given by the electrochemical pioneer Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in 1812.... The notebooks shed light on the workings of Faraday’s mind and reveal he made intricate drawings to visualise the scientific experiments and principles he was learning about at the lectures. 'He’s taking the time to make his own publication and grounding what’s being taught to him in his own understanding,' said [Charlotte New, head of heritage for the Royal Institution]. 'He’s heavily illustrating his notes to understand the principle that’s been taught to him.' He even wrote an index for each notebook, she said, just for his own use and personal research.... A curated selection of key pages from the notebooks will be launched online for the first time on the Royal Institution website on 24 March, to mark 200 years since Faraday founded the annual Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Inspired by Davy’s talks to pursue a career in science, Faraday established these lectures in 1825 in the hope of encouraging others in the same way.... Eventually, every page of Faraday’s notebooks will be digitised and made searchable online."
The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic - article from 2013 in Slate, referenced in 'The big idea: do we worry too much about misinformation?' by by Adam Kucharski in The Guardian. "Wednesday [30 October 2013] marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. 'Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,' narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program.... That’s the story you already know—it’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories.... There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.... A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case. Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. 'To what program are you listening?' the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio 'play' or 'the Orson Welles program,' or something similar indicating CBS. None said a 'news broadcast,' according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising. Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show."
What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers, from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more – article by James Bailey in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Meaning of Life: Letters from Extraordinary People and their Answer to Life’s Biggest Question. "I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932. I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers.... What follows is a small selection of the responses... Hilary Mantel: 'I’ve had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: “meaning” and “purpose”. I don’t think they’re the same. I’m not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.' ... Michael Frayn: 'Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your anthology of views on the meaning of life. It’s not something I can respond to, I’m afraid, because it’s not clear to me how “life” can have a “meaning” in any ordinary sense of either word. It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut. Once we’ve got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a “meaning”, we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up.'... Kathryn Mannix (palliative care consultant): 'Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That’s what I’ve learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it’s shown me that it isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.'... Susan Pollack (Holocaust survivor): 'I am a camp survivor from Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. I was totally dehumanised, fearful, distrustful, lost to contemplate the future, all alone, unable to comprehend the values for a life in a modern civilisation.... The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was the discovery that kindness and goodwill had also survived. When the British soldier lifted me up from the mud hole – seeing a twitch in my body – he gently placed me in one of the small ambulances. From that experience, miraculous goodwill is one of the guiding lights to this day. I often think of that moment and ask, “What part of that goodness with your heart do you take from that soldier?”'... Oliver Burkeman: 'I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we’re seeking isn’t a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive. There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are “why I’m here” – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who’ve found liberation in something I have written.... What’s changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That’s all – but, then again, I think that is everything.'"
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley: how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. "In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures ...on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, 'English clocks' and 'British explorers', written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project ... except that, 'at every level except for the texts', this was 'an entirely central European endeavour'. Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson. This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain’s cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children’s literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre ... created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray."
AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End – text of lecture by Stephen Fry for King's College London's Digital Futures Institute, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ll take you back fifteen or so years to a time when I found myself being ... asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called.... What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. ... I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. 'Local and global rivalries will dissolve,' I said. 'Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely,' I cried, 'Twitter and Facebook and this new world of "social media" will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity.' Two years later as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria rose against their dictators, the Arab Spring bloomed. How right I had been. How clever and percipient I was. But… Just a year or so on and that blissful dawn had turned into the darkest of nights. Libya leapt out of the frying pan of Gaddafi into the fire of anarchy and chaos, Egypt into a military coup, Yemen into brutal civil war, Syria into a bloodbath. Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all.... Welcome to today.... Hilariously enough, just like the French Revolution, the Twitter revolution also ended with a little Napoleon seizing power and crowning himself Emperor, a little NapolElon I should say."
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: haunting accounts of horrific medical abuse – review by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. "William Sargant, ... one of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry,... firmly believed that a broken brain was no different to any other damaged organ or limb, and best fixed with aggressive physical treatment. Not for him the namby-pamby chitchat of Freud’s 'sofa merchants' and their spurious talking cures. Rather, psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia could all be cured with excessive doses of drugs and electricity, or, if they failed, with surgical lobotomy. Sargant’s patients were sequestered away behind locked doors on the top floor of the hospital. The most infamous part of his ward was a six-bedded area known as the Sleep Room. Here, the patients, nearly all of whom were female, were drugged into long-term stupors, being roused from their beds only to be fed, washed or given innumerable doses of ECT. A typical 'narcosis' treatment comprised three months of near-total unconsciousness, after which time the patient had often been reduced to a 'walking zombie' with permanent memory loss. The Sleep Room is peppered with haunting first-hand accounts of horrific treatment at the hands of William Sargant. The actor Celia Imrie, for example, ... was admitted under Sargant’s care because she was close to death from anorexia nervosa. She recounts being forced to drink such large doses of chlorpromazine – the first antipsychotic - that she dribbled, shook uncontrollably and found her hair in clumps on her pillow. She was injected daily with enough insulin to make her drowsy, weak, sweaty and near comatose. She remembers other women around her having huge rubber plugs jammed between their teeth before the high-voltage electricity of ECT was sent through their temples, and their bodies 'shuddered and jerked' with the 'scent of burning hair and flesh'. Sometimes a patient would reappear on the ward with their head thickly bandaged, scarcely able to walk after being lobotomised. Amid the moans, screams and stale stench of sleep, Imrie recalls the nurses reporting her own resistance to the drugs to Sargant, to which he ominously responded: 'every dog has his breaking point. To say that these stories are difficult to read is an understatement. Even as someone who learned, as a medical student, about the unspeakable mid-century vogue for lobotomy – permanently subduing patients by gouging out parts of their frontal lobes – some of the accounts made my skin crawl. It is to Stock’s great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage, allowing several patients to tell their stories at length in their own, unedited words."
