Let Joy Be Unconfined

It is a Curiosity of human ingenuity that virtually no new sensual pleasures have been invented in the whole of recorded history. With the marginal exception of flying--which as a concept is as ancient as any of which we have record--most joys of the senses were old stuff in Babylon in 2225 B.C. (and that includes speeding; they had laws against it). Even the forays of science-fiction writers into the vast field of sensual pleasure have been unexpectedly few in number and timid in concept. For the most part, their proposals have been limited to the vicarious enjoyment of the already known; Huxley's "feelies," essentially only a widening of the sensory spectrum of the cinema, is a fair example. But was everything old stuff in Babylon? After all, the people of that great city didn't have the motion picture. Nor did they have vibrators, TV playback units, distilled liquors, most drugs, refined foods and cooking techniques, general cleanliness, bottled oxygen, still photographs, and a great many other pleasures we take for granted.

All this is true but not to the point. If we are to talk here about sensual pleasures, then we must begin by separating pleasure from entertainment as sharply as possible. Though the line is sometimes decidedly fuzzy, the two differ--when they do--in only one major respect: Pleasure is inherently private, personal and active; entertainment is usually public, impersonal and passive. Thus, there is a vast difference between flying an airplane and riding in one. There is also a vast difference between acting in a play and just watching one. We ought to be aware, too, of differences that are only differences in degree. The Babylonians did not have vibrators, but they had massage; they did not have photography, but they had painting; they did not have printing, but they had reading; they did not have whiskey, but they had alcohols; they did not have soap, but those who could afford to be clean managed to be; they did not have bottled oxygen, but they knew pure air when they breathed it. Most of the advances of this kind we have made over them are simply refinements, and some of these simply statistical--a matter of nose counting.

Nor has there been any real change in entertainment, either, since the age of Pericles--only in ways of presenting it, such as TV and the motion picture. Certainly there has been no measurable improvement. Here the best efforts of a Dante, a Shakespeare or a Goethe have managed only to keep us roughly on a par with Sophocles, no mean achievement in itself. Novelties in presentation are always cropping up, but no technological ingenuity on anybody's part is going to improve the product. That is strictly the province of the creative artist, who can work his miracles on any stage or in any medium.

These piddling advances aside, the direct, private pleasures of the senses have not undergone any really significant changes. This is a deplorable state of affairs, and one I propose to remedy forthwith. It seems to me that this curious backwardness on the part of technology--or of the sensualist--is not likely to persist in a society where physical wealth, leisure and technical skills are all increasing explosively.

What, then, are some of the unrealized possibilities of the senses? Let's consider them one at a time:

1. Odor. Appealing to the sense of smell has always been a haphazard, clumsy and rudimentary procedure with very little skill or ingenuity involved. The situation can be summarized by noting that this sense has as yet no art form that appeals directly to it, as do the other senses. Even at its subtlest, the perfumer's craft is still a marginal or ancillary one, operating mostly by guesswork and rule of thumb. There is no scientific language of words or symbols that permits odor technicians arbitrarily to invent new odors--nothing but the personal experience of trial and error.

The reason for this, in turn, is that there is as yet no satisfactory theory of how odors get to the nose, how the nose distinguishes between them, or how the brain interprets the odor messages that it gets from the nose. Perfumers and aromatics chemists--despite their involvement in a $100,000,000 industry--are constantly confronted by the fact that people perceive odors differently, perhaps because of differing backgrounds and associations. Anyone who has ever tried to describe an odor, or even to remember one, can appreciate this difficulty. The other senses do not behave this way: Almost everyone agrees on what color red is or on what an oboe sounds like. All in all, it is no wonder that there is yet no technique for synthesizing and combining odors rapidly and reliably, with firm control of duration and intensity, nor any way of recording them; and hence no art form.

When such techniques are invented--as is inevitable, although it may not come soon--early uses will doubtless follow such conventional lines as the scoring of dramas for odor accompaniment. A fairly recent American movie called Behind the Great Wall made a stab at this: The scents of barnyards, bombs, smoke, rivers, tigers, oranges and people were blown at the audiences through air ducts. The technique was cumbersome, particularly since there was no way of clearing the hall of one odor before the next came along, and foundered on another basic and maddening behavior of the sense of smell--it tires easily, becoming quite anesthetized to any specific odor after about ten minutes and refusing to recover for at least ten more minutes.

Another such use might be the accompaniment of music with odor, particularly music intended to evoke or exploit memories. A simple example might be the matching of September Song to the smell of autumn leaves burning; and a work such as Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the "Pastoral," might have imposed on it (refining a technique pioneered by S. Piesse, a 19th Century French perfume manufacturer) a whole spectrum of bucolic odors--new-mown hay, cider, and so on. As the technique became more sophisticated, the practitioner would be likely to try for dissonant effects--where the music says "horses," for example, the odor organist might counter with a whiff of gasoline. Eventually, odors would even be matched to completely abstract compositions, such as a Bartók quartet, providing material for reams of controversy about their appropriateness.

The best-established association of odor, of course, is with food, and here one might try the scoring of counter-pointing odors for a meal. The French long ago made the pleasant discovery that the joys of eating are heightened by talking about food during the repast--and not necessarily about the food being eaten at the moment. An orchestration of related odors would also seem to be worth exploring.

Odor is a crucial sex lure in the animal kingdom, and people have used it that way, too, all the way back to prehistory. Though perfumes have come to be aphrodisiac in themselves--probably by association--they seem to have first come into use to mask body odors, as a predecessor of soap. Many people of both sexes, however, find the unadorned odors of the other sex exciting, as Dr. Albert Ellis has described in some detail; and, after all, the chief ingredient of the most reliably aphrodisiac perfumes--musk--is simply the body odor of another animal, a secretion of the male musk deer. Yet this technique, too, is still in a surprisingly rudimentary state. There may well be hundreds of chemical compounds that do not occur in nature that would be more reliably and powerfully aphrodisiac than those we now know. The aphrodisiac effect, of course, might be a drug action, like the intoxicating effects of ether, acetone or airplane dope, and not at all related to what the compound smells like.

An abstract art of odor composition--orchestrating pure odors for olfactory appreciation alone, not tied to literary or culinary stories or programs--may follow. Presumably, it would be broadcast as electrical impulses directly to the olfactory bulbs or even to the brain, from a keyboard instrument that allowed precise and delicate choices of overtones and blending effects, as do the stops of an electronic organ. A work in this form would resemble pure music or abstract painting, having no semantic content and not intended to remind anyone of anything; it would exist for its own sake. Individual odors, like individual notes in a symphony, might be prolonged, or pass in a split second; they would be matched against each other simultaneously in an equivalent of harmony; they would be contrasted in blocks, like masses of color or orchestral choirs; and their sequence would be important, like melody, for odor composition would most closely resemble music--an art that could not be apprehended in any order that the audience could choose, but instead an art strictly oriented in time, with the order firmly and permanently fixed by the composer. Certainly, the critics of such works would have a field day hurling olfactory imprecations at compositions they didn't like.

If this stage of development is ever reached, future generations may enjoy a greatly heightened sensitivity of the human nose, at present perhaps the dullest and most neglected of the major organs of sense. A whole section of the brain awaits such a possibility: the most primitive part, the rhinencephalon or "smellbrain," which testifies to the enormous reliance our predecessors on the evolutionary tree placed on odors as a source of information about the world. The rhinencephalon now serves a number of other important functions, but probably, like the rest of the brain, a large part of it is simply held in reserve.

2. Sound. The limits of human hearing sensations have nearly been reached already, as far as the arts are concerned [see the author's Music of the Absurd, Playboy, October 1964], though there is probably still some future in electronic devices and other newly invented instruments, such as those being exploited by the French group of composers and engineers headed by Pierre Boulez, and the musique concréte school of Stockhausen and the late Edgar Varése.

However, certain highly specific sounds, not tied into a relationship with others as they are in a musical composition, (continued on page 134)Let Joy be Unconfined(continued from page 104) have specific emotional and physiological effects on human beings. Some familiar examples are the nervous jump produced by a firecracker or any other sharp, unexpected sound; or the shudder produced by the rasp of a fingernail across a blackboard. (There do not seem to be any pleasant examples.) This aspect of sound has thus far never been explored more than marginally for sensual use, either pleasant or unpleasant. To some extent, like the exploitation of odor, it awaits a theory of why some sounds (and only some sounds) behave in this way, from which one could predict just how wide this particular palette might be. The present "engram" theory of such effects--which says, for example, that loud, low noises frighten us because they arouse ancestral fears of sabertoothed tigers--has proven useless for both prediction and engineering, and hence is more than likely untrue.

In any event, the current repertoire is limited to a few sounds, producing such oddly disconnected effects as salivation or a sensation of dread. The salivation effect may be one reason (though probably a minor one) for the immemorial popularity of dinner music. It seems more likely, however, that dinner music is only a special case of music's ability to produce states of relaxation or tension. Whether a single, specific tone can relax or tighten the body is quite a different question.

The answer is yes. The few known somatic effects of sound establish firmly that even now some of music's traditional uses are occasionally more direct in their action upon the body than is suspected even by their practitioners. The sensation of awe often experienced even by the irreligious when exposed to pipeorgan music, for example, may be quite divorced from anything having to do with the Church. Instead, it seems to be associated quite specifically with the very low tones--around 15 cycles per second--produced by the instrument's pedal notes, especially the 32-foot reeds. The beats involved here are so slow that they can be not only heard but physically felt, both against the skin and in the inner ear, which controls the body's sense of balance. The response of awe may be partly associated with the ecclesiastical surroundings and associations; divorced from these, the pure sensation produced may be simply one of disorientation, a notorious producer of religious ecstasies through the more familiar media of drugs, various kinds of starvation, or other attacks upon the senses.

The pipe-organ effect also points to a peculiarity of the known somatic effects of tone: Almost all the sounds that produce direct changes in the body cannot be heard. They are either subsonic or supersonic. Tunnels of love and grottoes of fear in amusement parks often use such unsuspected sounds to heighten the desired atmosphere, which usually otherwise is so trumped up that only children get much charge out of it.

It is a common fact of experience that intensity of noise appeals directly to the emotions. Very quiet sounds suggest intimacy, simply because one's immediate impulse is to move closer to the source in order to be able to hear. Very loud noise is menacing, and there is the best possible reason for this: Loud sounds, all by themselves, can kill you. Any noise above 90 decibels in volume, and above 4000 cycles per second in frequency (near the frequency of the top tone of the piano), produces a spasm of the arteries throughout the body. If it is prolonged, the resultant load on the heart can be fatal. Sound levels this high (in both senses of the word) are usually associated only with jet engines, but some Italian city fountains, particularly in Pavia, are almost as noisy.

The occasional effectiveness of music in soothing the savage breast, as noted both by Congreve and by modern exponents of "music therapy" for mental illness, may have a slightly different additional explanation: the notorious suggestibility of the body processes to external rhythms. Anyone who has ever tried to march out of step to military music can testify to this effect, but it can be much more subtle. For instance, a rhythm that begins at the same rate as the heartbeat can by subsequent slight variations actually control the pulse rate to some extent--an effect exploited throughout Louis Gruenberg's two-act opera The Emperor Jones (an American turkey of a few generations back that had nothing to recommend it but this device, plus Lawrence Tibbett as the Emperor).

The erotic effects of rhythm are quite well known and reflected publicly in popular music and social dancing, which have been becoming pretty specific lately. There are essentially two kinds of erotic rhythm involved here. One is the steady, monotonous beat that the jazz critic Henry Pleasants celebrates, and that underlies all kinds of primitive music from the earliest fertility chants to the mindless pounding of rock 'n' roll. Persistent repetition of this kind accelerates the pulse (as in The Emperor Jones), which in turn suggests to the body that there is some reason for excitement; the body promptly responds with a pattern of responses called the general adaptation syndrome, which makes us ready for any sort of strenuous action, whether it be fight, flight or fornication. The generality of this response is the reason teenage rock-'n'-roll concerts hover so predictably between orgy and riot.

The second kind of erotic rhythm is much more subtle, and adolescents do not seem to be very sensitive to it. It is what is called rising rhythm, in which a given rhythmic pattern gradually changes into faster patterns--not the same pattern played faster, but an increase in the nature of the rhythm. Music designed to take advantage of this, which reflects the changing nature of coital rhythm, can have profound erotic effects on the musically sensitive, and accounts for the fact that many adults with good ears have favorite pieces of music to which they like to make love. The Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is the most usual choice, but there are many others less obvious. It should be added that some people find making love to music mechanical and restrictive, but there is no reason that a composer who knew exactly what he was out to achieve could not get around this difficulty. After all, we already know that practically all music has an erotic effect upon some persons, particularly along with wine and candlelight. Probably, however, this effect is simply suggestive, rather than a direct physiological response. This kind of low-grade erotic reaction--as contrasted with the immediate erotic responses to touch, for example--may reflect nothing more than a suggestion to relax, the opposite of the fight-or-flight response, created by the general orderliness of music as opposed to the dangers we associate with random noise.

If this is the case--as Dr. W. Grey Walter, the British pioneer in electroencephalography, maintains (in his elegant popular survey of his field, The Living Brain)--the continuous flood of barely noticeable music in which we live, thanks to Muzak and similar purveyors of audible molasses, may be lulling us on many occasions when we ought not to be lulled. At the very least, it may help explain in part why non-Americans (most of whom prefer to choose their own music at their own times, not to have it forced on them in elevators, buses, railroad stations, and so on) think us sex-obsessed, and why the advertising fraternity finds it so easy to push that particular button in our psyches to sell anything from Springmaid sheets to industrial hardware. The theory also suggests that, if music is to find greater and more specific use in heightening our sexual lives, we might well start by protesting its use to dilute them.

3. Taste. Although this is always listed as one of the "classical" five senses, it is rudimentary. It can discriminate only four fundamental sensations: sweet, sour, salt, bitter. That is not much of a palette to work with. All the other sensations we think we receive through taste are actually dependent on odor. To prove this to yourself--though I doubt that there can be many who haven't already tried this experiment, probably in boyhood--you need only try to distinguish (continued on page 206)Let Joy be unconfined(continued from page 134) the taste of an apple from that of a raw potato while holding your nose.

Nevertheless, the tongue has its pleasures if it is allowed help by two other senses: smell and touch. Sweet-sour-salt-bitter not only provides a lifesaving way of discriminating among possible foods and possible poisons, but it is also a fundamental erotic spectrum; probably many more people like to taste their lovers than are yet willing to admit it. Here both touch and odor play important parts. The tongue is exquisitely supplied with all three touch senses--we'll get to those shortly--and, in addition, is highly muscular and mobile. Given this combination of attributes, what we call taste is, in fact, so sophisticated a sense set that it has an art form of its own--cooking--which the future will doubtless refine but is not likely to surpass. Basically, taste will not change until the sense of smell does.

4. Touch. At the opposite pole from taste, touch is actually three complete senses, which detect, respectively, heat/ cold, pressure (including rough/smooth) and pain. It is thus a highly refined, sensitive and discriminating faculty with endless possibilities for new stimuli available for technological exploitation.

To my sorrow, I do not think that many of these possibilities are sexual. There simply are few novelties even imaginable in this field. As Frederik Pohl noted in The Playboy Panel: 1984 and Beyond (July and August, 1963), there is probably not a single square inch of the human body that has not been exploited by the tactile senses for sexual pleasure at one time or another, and the senses of touch are too discriminating to be fooled by manipulators less perfectly adapted to it than the human hand.

This question arises immediately because--as Dr. Walter has also pointed out--the sense of touch conveys sexual suggestion faster and more directly than does any other sense. Hence, to the suggestible, almost any kind of sensation inside the wide arena of possible touch responses may be sexually arousing.

As an example, let us start with the world's most neutral substance: water. Nude mixed bathing has been popular for many centuries, more probably for the excuse it offers for nudity than for anything the water adds; though many men like their girls slippery, water is an impediment to the act of love itself, because it washes away the precoital fluids.

But water in motion, especially if warm, is a caress. Many women will testify, if pressed gently, to having found their earliest sexual excitement in the motion of bath water (see, for example, that housewife's handbook on promiscuity that got Ralph Ginzburg into trouble with the post office). Masturbation in the bath is not quite as common among men, because the testicles do not function at heats above body temperature--that is why they are out there in the cold instead of inside, as a woman's glands sensibly are--but it is far from rare (see Leopold Bloom's meditation on the subject, in James Joyce's Ulysses).

This effect probably could be improved upon, through an offshoot of hydrotherapy--that now largely outmoded method of dunking the mentally ill (and the physically debilitated) into whirlpool baths, made popular at home by the Jacuzzi device. Recent work in a technique called electrophoresis--a technique that, among other things, shows promise of predetermining the sex of babies in artificial insemination, since it selectively affects the migration of sperm--has shown that, under certain conditions, liquids can be made to swirl locally even in a small tub, thus suggesting that a bath with a multiplex of local eddies in it might be possible, caressing the bather wherever he or she prefers. Turbulence is part of the fun of swimming; now it is possible to control it. Furthermore, the vast range of available and possible detergents makes it possible to change the texture of the bath, as oils and aromatics make it either soothe or tingle; gels might change its density, thus making eddies in it firmer, or making it feel more womblike; or present bubble-bath formulas could easily be modified to fill the tub with foam all the way to the bottom, and make the foam as sticky and persistent as a frog's nest, should you want it that way. (And why not load the bubbles with odors and gaseous intoxicants, to pop into the air around you in any order you like--controlled, perhaps, by the rate of cooling of the water--on the model of time-release drug capsules? This wouldn't affect your sense of touch, but it might abet it, as odor abets taste.)

Sonic stimulation of the sense of touch in various ways is also a likely possibility--not only for shaking the dirt off, as science-fiction writers have suggested, but also for pleasure. It could be combined with bathing, too, since most liquids convey sounds much better than air does. Combinations of these principles might also be incorporated into a bed, for on-the-spot massage, like those that have been standard equipment in airport hotels for some years, but more specifically directed to tactile or sexual pleasures than to simple relaxation. They might also be designed into a suit that could be worn to work. Such a suit might be a form of on-the-job diversion more acceptable to the innocent bystander, and to the boss, than a transistor radio or a Thermos bottle full of martinis might be.

Some people caress jade for kicks. Specialists maintain large collections of jade for this purpose, which they dip in water for fullest appreciation of its texture. Again, this pleasure might be enhanced by other dipping solutions. Various Asian peoples also carve stroking stones in small sizes that are carried on the person, not as amulets but simply for the pleasure they give to the touch, or for relief in moments of tension. Smoothly sculpted pieces of this kind can be outright hypnotic. This use of touch has not yet evolved into an art form in the West, but it has its precursors: Americans finger loose change and keys in their pockets; Greeks have worry beads; Englishmen fondle cane and umbrella handles. As an art, it might well be developed even further in the West, since the vast field of plastics has opened for it a whole new realm of possible textures.

And why, pray, has nobody ever done anything interesting to the touch with underwear? Some of it now pleases the eye, but its history as something intended to be worn next to the skin is dismal. For a long time, there simply wasn't any. In the late Renaissance, as outer clothing grew stiffer, heavier and more for show, the original woman's shift (a linen or lawn chemise, designed to prevent brocade scratch) expanded to a skirt and later grew into petticoats. Comfort promptly went out the window, however; by the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, women's underwear was all whalebone, elastic and lacings--hot, heavy, confining and likely to bring on the peculiar hunger faints then called chlorosis, and ridden in the back by bustles big enough to support a tea tray.

Light, pleasant, small underwear for women did not become popular until the 1920s, with the invention of the one-piece garment called the step-in, of John Held memory. This was later divided into two pieces and the slip was added--and there has been no real change since. Throughout this history, there was only one appeal to touch, which might be subsumed under the slogan "Nothing feels like silk." This has now changed; nowadays, almost everything feels like silk, which is no real improvement. Men, of course, have always been shortchanged on their undergarments; Richard Wagner was often accused of being some sort of pervert because he liked silk underwear and would buy no other kind after he became affluent; and today the only alternative available to the luxuryloving male is the clammy, slippery spectrum of wash-and-wear fabrics, most of which feel terrible. This is a shame, for people would like to buy clothes for their tactile qualities. Americans and citizens of other affluent cultures stubbornly will not wear clothes to match their climates partly for that reason (though more largely because of the tyranny of custom and fashion).

Fashion designers, who work for show, are seldom far behind technology in exploiting the optical possibilities of new fabrics, as witness the new transparent styles. (Someday they may get around to intermittent transparency--fabrics that can be seen through only under special kinds of lighting.) But their appeals to touch have been astonishingly primitive. In the future, our clothing may become as much of a pleasure to feel as it is to look at. A fortune awaits the designer who first puts this elementary notion into practice, particularly for the benefit of men.

5. Sight. The advent of op art has reminded us that sight, too, can produce physical sensations--of motion, distance, afterimages, vertigo, free flight, freedom from our ordinary metrical frame, and many others--which can transcend the usual subjective experiences of recognizing a dog or the color of a traffic light. I say "reminded" because these nonsymbolic optical experiences have been known to physiologists for more than half a century, as only one small aspect of this most marvelous and complex of the classical five senses. (There are, as we shall see, many more than five.) Mostly, however, they have been treated as oddities or paradoxes of vision, of no special interest; though one of them--the illusion that the moon is larger near the horizon than at the zenith--has fascinated poets for centuries. Op art has undertaken to remind us that things are seldom what they seem, a truism likely to enrich us all once we decide to look at it seriously.

No quick and partial review could do justice to the wonders and mysteries of sight, a sense that utterly dominates the human brain and processes most of the information we receive from outside, at a truly stupendous rate. Animal brain tissue is mostly devoted to serving the nose, but in humans, the eye is king--the nose gets snubbed. We are all voyeurs, like it or not.

As Dr. Walter and others have shown, not everybody thinks visually--apparently a sizable section of mankind thinks in abstractions, without forming mental pictures, and marriage between the two types is not recommended--but visualization is certainly very widespread, both deliberately and in dreams. Direct stimulation of the brain to produce visions or dreams, with plots and a full range of other accompanying sensations, is a science-fiction idea of long standing.

The possibility of living a completely vicarious life was invoked by Laurence Manning and the late Fletcher Pratt in The City of the Living Dead, which predicted that for many persons such a life would be more attractive than reality.(Most of the people in the story were, in fact, living the same dream life over and over again, not from choice but because the attendants had become too lax to bother changing the recordings.)

A present-day surgical procedure called stereotaxis, involving direct implantation of electrodes into the brain, makes such an innovation look entirely possible. It has already been found that such direct stimulation can invoke specific sensations and even specific memories. Patients whose brains are being explored in this way find themselves suddenly in the midst of their high school prom, hear the voice of a long-dead relative or find the operating theater incongruously redolent of violets. These are not simply recalled, but experienced directly, as immediate events. No special recording would be needed to produce these results, only a weak, undifferentiated electrical current; it is where the current is applied that counts.

Direct implantation into the brain tissue will probably not prove to be necessary. Dr. Walter and his colleagues have already found that such effects own be produced by using a subject's own brain waves to control the frequency of a stimulus, such as a flashing light. This process, called "flicker-feedback," is limited to medicine at present: It provides a sure-fire method of diagnosing epilepsy, and Soviet physicians have extended it to the artificial induction of sleep. However, there is no reason in principle why it could not be used to induce almost any sensation, even a full 3-D, odorous, tactile stag production. The technique obviously is not limited to sight, though at present the eyes are the most frequently used portal for the brain stimuli involved.

Other senses: Even without appealing to clairvoyance, telepathy or other "extrasensory" perceptions whose existence is dubious, the human body possesses a good many senses beyond the classical five. In fact, we have already considered ten, because of the three quite distinct senses involved in touch and the four in taste. The latest count indicates that there are at least 24 senses. Some of them are quite obvious and have already been used as vehicles of pleasure: for example, the sense of balance, upon which almost all forms of amusement-park rides depend for their effectiveness, coupled with the sense of acceleration, which is what makes speeding fun. (Velocity alone, without visual or atmospheric reference, produces no sensation; it is change in rate of motion that we enjoy. For some reason, we find an increase in rate pleasant, a decrease unpleasant.) As motion pictures demonstrate, these two senses can often be fooled by the eye, but they do not depend upon it.

A new pleasure that awaits some of us will emerge from the nullification of these two senses: free fall, which produces a sensation of weightlessness. In ordinary life we are always oriented by the inner ear--that is, we know which way is up--and are under a constant acceleration of 32 feet per second per second, the acceleration of gravity. In space flight, once the rocket or other prime mover is turned off, there is no up or down and gravity is zero; everything floats. Though this situation reportedly made a couple of Soviet cosmonauts feel rather dizzy, most spacemen to date have enjoyed it. A group of British and Australian writers, headed by Arthur C. Clarke and A. Bertram Chandler, have for years been compiling a dossier of essays and verse on the possible joys of sex in free fall. Some of the effects they celebrate are clearly exaggerated, but it is evident that there's a lot to look forward to in a situation where absolutely no position is impossible. It would have its dangers, too; the cardinal rule would be, Hold tight!

Some of the other senses are wholly interior and seem permanently inaccessible to any outside intervention for purposes of pleasure, such as the sense that reports on the lactic-acid content of the muscles, expressed as fatigue. Even in this area, however, there are some surprises. Take, for example, the two senses that measure the acid-alkaline balance of the blood and its ionic content. This sounds very recondite, but actually, these two are fundamental to two of the great pleasures: One is expressed as hunger (blood-sugar level) and the other as thirst (blood-pH or hydrogen-ion concentration). Satisfying their demands is pleasurable quite apart from odor or taste, as a small group of people called anosmics, who have no sense of smell, can testify.

It is these interior senses, particularly the chemical ones with their direct access to the brain through the blood stream, that are acted upon to produce the experiences associated with hashish, heroin, alcohol and the more novel psychedelic drugs such as morning-glory seeds and LSD 25. These senses, including the one that monitors the body's internal temperature, are also responsible for the deliriums produced by some illnesses.

Another such sense almost unknown to the layman is called proprioception, which reports to the brain the relative positions and states of tension of the muscles. It is this sense, with some assistance from touch and the sense of balance, that enables a man to tell what position his body is in, even in the dark. Direct neural stimulation of various muscle centers, on the model of the present-day (and useless) system of reducing that makes the muscles jump without consciously directed exercise, might provide interesting exploitations of this sense. Just such a stimulator, in the form of an electrical prod, is presently used to force the ultimate performance out of reluctant stud bulls; and it need not be limited to males, for the deep (vaginal) female orgasm is almost entirely a set of simultaneous proprioceptive discharges from the contractile muscles--the same ones animals use for tail wagging--not more than slightly heightened by the sense of touch, since the vagina is only sparsely supplied with tactile nerves. The existence of this sense makes quite feasible the device described in a famous limerick (here slightly bowdlerized):

There was a young man from Racine Who invented a lovemaking machine.

Concave and convex,

It would fit every sex, And amuse itself, too, in between.

Finally, there is, indeed, such a thing as extrasensory pleasure. Its existence was deduced from recent animal studies, which found in the brain a "pleasure center" that can be electrically stimulated. Animals so wired, and given access to a pedal by which they can deliver themselves a jolt to the pleasure center at will, abandon all other activities in its favor. The sensation involved for the animal can only be guessed at, but it appears to be "pure" pleasure, not any specific sensation to which pleasure is secondary; at least there are no surface, physical reactions that suggest the involvement of one sense over another.

How humans might react to such a stimulus is unknown at present (though there are unconfirmed reports that the experiment has been tried in Sweden), but there's reason to suppose not only that such a pleasure center exists in people but that it may be better developed in humans than in any other animal.

What would such a pleasure be like? No one knows. It may turn out to be rather specific and closely identified with one or another old friend, such as the orgasm; or rather generalized, like a highly intensified version of the feeling of well-being; or something totally novel and comparable with nothing in our previous experience. If the animal experiments are any guide, it may well turn out to be not only delightful but obsessive, suitable only for the strong-willed. One thing is sure: In the near future, somebody is going to try it. And why not? There is no reason any of us should be addicts to only one particular pleasure, or only a few. The chances are good that the effects of pleasure technology on human history will be quite as drastic and beneficent as the invention of electricity.