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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Sympathetic Block | ||
| A way to keep certain mental contents from being spoken or revealed. |
This technovelgy takes advantage of the connections between the cerebral cortex and the autonomic nervous system. If you are consciously aware that the intention to reveal protected information arises in your mind, your central nervous system shuts down essential body functions. This might go through what we now call the emotional brain.
| "They've been given Sympathetic Blocks. You know about SBs, girl? Intelligence uses them for espionage agents. Take a certain body of information you don't want told. Link it with the sympathetic nervous system that controls autonomic respiration and heart beat. As soon as the subject tries to reveal that information, the block comes down, the heart and lungs stop, the man dies, your secret's kept. An agent doesn't have to worry about killing himself to avoid torture; it's been done for him." |
| Technovelgy from The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Gully Foyle finds a way to get around the sympathetic block by accelerating himself to 5x speed and then bypassing the heart entirely to support the SB patient with a heart pump:
He cut through skin and fascia, sawed through the rib cage, exposed the heart, snipped it out and connected veins and arteries to the intricate blood-pump alongside the table. He started the pump. Twenty seconds, objective time, had elapsed. He placed an oxygen mask over Kempsey's face and switched on the alternating suction and eructation of the oxygen pump.
Foyle decelerated, checked Kempsey's temperature, shot an anti-shock series into his veins and waited. Blood gurgled through the pump and Kempsey's body. After five minutes, Foyle removed the oxygen mask. The respiration reflex continued. Kempsey was without a heart, yet alive. Foyle sat down alongside the operating table and waited. The stigmata still showed on his face.
Kempsey awoke, screaming.
Foyle leaped up, tightened the straps and leaned over the heartless man.
"Look at yourself, Kempsey. You're dead."
Kempsey fainted. Foyle brought him to with the oxygen mask.
"Let me die, for God's sake!"
"I died for six months and I didn't whine."
"Let me die!"
"In time, Kempsey. Your sympathetic block's been by-passed, but I'll let you die in time, if you behave.
First successful use of such a device in a human being was on May 6, 1953 by Dr. John H. Gibbon Jr. at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia. 18-year-old Cecelia Bavolek had a large atrial septal defect. The machine maintained full cardiopulmonary bypass for 26 minutes during the repair (total time on bypass 45–75 minutes in some accounts).
The surgery was completely successful. The patient made a full recovery and lived for many years afterward. This is universally recognized as the first successful open-heart operation using a heart-lung machine to fully replace the heart's pumping and lung's oxygenation functions in a living human.
A similar concept is seen in Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein, which was written in 1958 (see hypnotic injunction).
Foyle strapped the body on the operating table, opened a case of surgical instruments, and began the delicate operation he had learned by hypno-training that morning— an operation made possible only by his five-to-one acceleration.
(Sympathetic Block Surgery 5x Speed in 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester)
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