Apparently whirling a strong magnetic field by your right temporo-parietal (TPJ) junction can influence your moral judgment, making it something like that of a five-year-old. As an example: ask a five-year-old if a kid who smashes five plates by accident is worse than a kid who smashes one on purpose. The five-year-old will say the former is worse, because at that age we focus on concrete outcomes rather than intentions.It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and that method has also been used in the so-called "God machine" to supposedly inspire religious and ecstatic states. However, the moral judgment experiments seem to be somewhat more credible:
In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for someone to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.All of which makes me want to hack up a helmet with huge electromagnets hovering over various bits of my brain, so I can watch 2001 and push buttons until something godly or reprehensible happens. It's the scientific equivalent of that time I drank a bottle of sherry from a case of the stuff I found in a dumpster.
In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects' ability to interpret others' intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.
There is definitely a market for that helmet. You could hook it up to a Wii and suddenly Grand Theft Auto is a whole new game.
The impulse behind that invention is a recurring theme in my longer work. Mmmm, push-button LSD...