Dune: The Bene Gesserit

The Bene Gesserit of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” use advanced mental and manipulative tactics to further their ends across the galaxy. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss this mysterious order and some scientific and philosophic interpretations of the Gom Jabbar awareness test.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You've heard of animals chewing awful leg to escape a trap.
There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain
in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he
might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

(00:22):
Once men turned their thinking over to machines and hopes
that this would set them free, but that only permitted
other men with machines to enslave them. The Great Revolt
took away a crutch. It forced human minds to develop.
Schools were started to train human talents. Welcome to stot

(00:52):
to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I know,
ever since that New Done movie came out, you have
been just itching to do another Science of Done episode

(01:14):
like the ones we did a few years back. But
obviously that happened right in the middle of October when
we had a bunch of other stuff planned. So it
seems like today is the day the spillover from October
is continuing yet again. Uh yeah, and I mean in
a way, it's a spillover from the October from before
last that the original release date for the new Done adaptation.

(01:35):
Oh my god, you're right. Yeah. So yeah, we, like
a lot of people have been have been really hungry
for this film to come out, um, because I knew
it would also just in general reignite, uh my fascination
with the Done universe, um, and you know, introduced new
people to the Done universe. Um. And of course to
correspond with that, we would need to go back in

(01:58):
and do some new Dooe episodes um, because like you said,
we did a few, or we did a couple years ago, um,
and now we're dipping back in. I think that was
my first or second year on the show, so it
was a long time ago now, yeah, yeah, it was
quite a while. And and since then we've had people
fairly frequently right in and say, oh, you should do

(02:19):
some more of those. We'd like to hear more of those.
So well, here you go. You asked for it, You're
gonna get it. Um. I think uh, I think I
think we may be doing a couple of episodes here,
but I thought we'd start with the ben and ingestre
it um with a with a particular focus on the
gom Jabbar awareness test. So this is a pivotal early

(02:40):
scene in the book, and it's also a memorable sequence
from all three adaptations. Um that it's it's one of
those things where it occurs so early in the novel
that even if you try to read Doone and didn't
finish it, you probably read this part because it happens
almost immediately. I I read this scene several times before

(03:02):
I actually made it all the way through the book.
I don't remember if I mentioned this on the show before,
but when I first tried to read the book, I
think one of the big problems as I was reading
a really bad paperback copy with extremely tiny print and
small margins. Have you come across this this mass printing. Oh,
it's like a it's on microfilm and it has a
little magnifier that comes out of the spine. Yes, it's

(03:22):
the Orange Catholic Bible version. It's not very fun to read. Uh,
And so I never actually completed the book until I
got like a more readable physical copy. Well that makes sense,
that makes sense. But so I remember this scene quite
well because I've been through it a number of times. Well. Um,
but before we're going further though, I want to drive
home a few different points here. So, first of all,

(03:43):
as much as possible, we're focusing on the first book
and its adaptations, uh, the stuff that most people are
gonna be familiar with, So we're we're gonna try not to,
for the most part, go too deep and get into
territory that that casual dune enthusiasts will not understand. Also
along those lines, we have to stress that we are
not done experts, we are not lower masters, um. As

(04:04):
much as we we like uh the world here, I um,
I believe. Let's say you've only read the first novel, correct,
and I've it's been a while since I've read the others.
I'm actually diving back in right now. So basically what
I'm saying is we may get something wrong, we may
misinterpret something in the books, and if that happens, well,
you know, right in we're happy to be corrected. Now.

(04:26):
Another thing I want to stress here is that I
have not read Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's prequel
and sequel books, so I can't speak to any lower
choices made in those books. Uh. I'd love to hear
from anyone who has read them as it relates to
what we're discussing here. Um, and I'm all for folks
enjoying these books, but again, uh, they're not something I
have read. I should also point out that I'm gonna

(04:49):
probably reference the nineteen four Dune Encyclopedia a little bit.
This is one of my most treasured books. I I
fondly remember reading a very ragged copy of it in
the library when I was a kid. Um, and I'm
not I think I could check it out. It wasn't.
They didn't classify it as a reference so you could
check this book out. And I spent a lot of

(05:09):
time reading through through that and I somehow picked a
copy up for like twenty bucks several years ago. It
goes for crazy amounts on eBay. Now. But wait, which
library was this? What? What library had a copy of
the Dune Encyclopedia. It was just a small town Tennessee library. Yeah, wow,
they just had it. And um, you know, I mean,
Dun's popularity is widespread, so I guess it's not that

(05:31):
that's strange. But yeah, it was very ragged, and um,
I was very fond of it. And then he had
had to look up a copy of the years later.
It's it's long out of print. It's probably never going
to be in print again. Um. And it's also not
entirely cannon um, but I refer to it anyway because
it's awesome. It was it was an approved work at

(05:51):
the time with an encouraging intro from Frank Herbert UM.
But it was written by various other authors. But if
you had a chance to look through it, um, you know,
grant grab it because it has recipes, it has wonderful illustrations,
it has all of this additional background info. It seems
this is just me looking in for the most part
from the outside, but it seems like as a whole.

(06:13):
With like with Doune Lore, you basically have like three
different tiers. They're the original Herbert novels, the Frank Herbert novels.
There's there's the lore of the Dune encyclopedia, and then
there's the additional um arm of it that is created
by by his son Brian Herbert and his novels sequel
in prequel novels. Oh no, So, now that there's a

(06:36):
big release of Dune by I guess it's by a
subsidiary of Warner Brothers. Is that right? Are we gonna
get a situation like Star Wars? Where now canon is
being decided by the media corporation that owns the rights
to the Dune movie. Um, I don't think so, because
I think it's kind of a I think there's a
certain amount of control held by um by Brian Herbert.

(06:58):
If I'm not okay, if I'm not mistaken, Um I
don't so. I don't know exactly how it's how it's
gonna work out, but I don't think it's quite at
the like the Disney level where you have like a
council that decides on on matters, but I have I
think the plan still is that we're going to get
a Binny jesser At television series, so that's going to
be interesting. Yeah, But what I want to know is, like,

(07:20):
is the Doinge Encyclopedia's recipe for spice melange omelets going
to be you know, B canon or ccnon or what's
the Oh yeah, yeah, that that the the pre Disney
Lucas you know, multi tiered classification system. Uh yeah, that's
pre Disney. Sorry, I can't keep I think Disney came
in and simplified matters to a certain extent, so I
don't think there as many classifications. But um so I

(07:43):
don't know, who knows what will happen with Done if
Done can, that's assuming like Done has like real staying
power is a mainstream commodity. I hope it does. I
hope that that we see at least through Doing Messiah
with this this current slate of films. Oh, I guess
I hadn't said, by the way, but I finally did
see the new movie and it's absolutely marvelous, just amazing, excellently. Yeah, well,

(08:04):
we'll have to to chat more and more about that.
Um So, so let's go ahead and just talk a
little bit about the background of the Benigester, like who
are the Benigesta and how they feature into the world
of Dune. Um you know, so for many of you,
this is going to be just stuff you already know.
Others you might be a little foggy on some of
the details. And I don't know if if you've only
watched the film, maybe you picked up on most of this,

(08:26):
but maybe not all of it. So Dune takes place
in the distant future. Humans have spread out from Old
Earth and they've inhabited various worlds. While they encounter native
organisms on these planets, including the mighty sandworms, of Iracus,
they do not encounter other intelligent life forms. So subsequently
there are there are no intelligent life forms in the

(08:48):
Dune Universe that are not human or at least human derived.
By the later works, Old Earth is said to be gone,
and we just have this vast diaspora of human colonized worlds.
All right, So there's a big interplanetary empire spans a
big chunk of the galaxy, but it is not populated
by all different types of intelligent aliens like say the

(09:10):
Star Wars universe, is right, and so that's something that
definitely makes it stand apart from some of these other, um,
you know, sci fi franchises. Now, I suppose that's like
the first big historical point in the Dune Universe is
people left Earth and started colonizing other worlds. But the
other big one, uh, and this one, you know, sets

(09:30):
it apart from from from a number of sci fi
visions as well, is that you have this thing called
the Butlerian Jihad, in which these spacefaring humans rebelled against
their alliance on so called thinking machines, on computers and
conscious AI and and also more subtly, uh, you know,
it's implied against a machine way of thinking. Yeah, and

(09:50):
so this gives rise to one of the most unique
things about the sci fi setting of Dune. It is
a space faring science fiction saga without computers in it,
or I mean mostly without computers. Instead, computing tasks in
the Done universe are done by humans who specially train
their brains to do the kinds of things computers would
normally have to do. So you have figures like the

(10:12):
Men Tats, you know, sort of human computers, or the
the Guild Navigators who would do what a computer would
do in most other sci fi right. Yeah, so they're
all obeying these various edicts like thou shalt not create
a machine and the likeness of a human mind, or
thou shalt not disfigure the soul. Uh. There's a great
quote in the appendix to doone um to the novel

(10:33):
that says, then came the Butlet and Jahad, two generations
of chaos. The god of machine logic was overthrown among
the masses, and a new concept raised. Man may not
be replaced. And I know we've talked about this before,
but I always thought that that's an interesting touch, the
idea that, uh, that it's not just like the war
with the machines imagined in say the Terminator films, where

(10:56):
it's well, the machines wanted to destroy us, so we
fought against them. There is more of a suggestion of
kind of subtle psychological revolt and in more complexity to
the conflict between humans and thinking machines that a lot
of the conflict seems to have been rooted in human
resentment of what the thinking machines represented within human culture. Yeah, yeah,

(11:21):
And I always liked how that idea seemed to have
been given room to breathe. You know. Um, it's not
like here's here's blow by blow what happened during the
Balerian Jahade. Here's sort of forced to, uh, to imagine
what it might have consisted of. Yeah, it happened like
ten thousand years ago and is now the basis of
of major religions of the of the Empire in Dune. Now.

(11:44):
The Butalian Jahade is said to have lasted from the
year two hundred big to the year one oh eight
b G. And I know some of you are saying, well,
what what is b G? What does this mean? This
means before guild, which leads to the next point without yeah,
without thinking machines. Humans have to turn largely inward in
order to manage this interstellar civilization. And without thinking machines

(12:05):
to augment human cognition, they had to enhance human cognition itself.
And this, believe brings us to these different classes of
of humans and human factions. So we have the Spacing Guild.
We're told it's a mental physical training school aimed at
developing humans capable of handling space travel, particularly the dangerous

(12:25):
navigation of hyperspace that was key to interstellar travel. And
this is actually where you know, if you know anything
about doing, you've probably heard the phrase the spice must flow.
You know that it has something to do with a
brutal contest for a natural resource known as spice and
uh the rule. And so I think a lot of
people have, you know, critics have compared spice to oil,

(12:47):
say in the real world, saying that it's this all
important natural resource that makes basically everything in the economy possible.
It makes uh, it makes travel possible, it makes delivery
of goods and services possible. And that is largely the
case in June, but not by being an energy source
that powers spaceships, but rather, the spice is a drug

(13:09):
that makes the navigation of space by human minds possible.
That's right, Yeah, would telling that it. It basically allows
members of the Space and Guild and navigators in particular,
to see possible futures, to see just a little bit
into the future, so that they can avoid all the
various disasters that are can occur during this, uh, this
sort of space travel. Yeah, so like you, you take

(13:31):
the spice and then you can kind of hallucinate fractal
mathematics that allow you to to to see enough into
the future or or see possible futures well enough that
you can navigate the harsh terrain of outer space or
folded space in particular. I'm not sure exactly what that means,
but it's it's how they travel between the stars, right.
And then, like we mentioned o theire, they're also the

(13:53):
mint ats, the humans bred and trained to act in
the place of computers and thinking machines, uh, kind of
futuristics of its capable of carrying out really advanced computations
in their head and also I guess just carrying around
a lot of information. Yeah, you might see them as
a kind of advisor or concigliary who has an internal
computer within their brain, right, I have to say, I

(14:16):
like in the new film how they they had a
mentat's sort of rolling their eyes back in their head
while computing things. This is kind of a nice visual touch,
I can. I think that's one of the challenges of
any of these adaptations of of Done is that there's
a lot of written material that you either have to
you know, just commit to including a lot of narration

(14:38):
and added dialogue about what they are and how they operate,
or you need to find and focus on ways to
visually represent them. And uh, and I think all the
films have have succeeded to varying degrees in that, you know,
like these these characters look like that. They all look
like this, they all have this hairstyle or lack of hairstyle.
I mean, this is I think always going to be.
One of the real difficult cult is in adapting Dune

(15:02):
like a lot. I mean, Dune is not unique in
this regard. A lot of great science fiction and fantasy works.
The real pleasure in them is in the world that
they established. It's like a really richly imagined, an interesting
alternate world. So a lot of the pleasure of the
story comes in getting a lot of that rich detail
about the world. But how do you, Yeah, how do
you cram that into a narrative? How do you put

(15:23):
that on screen without just like explaining it. You could
have a narrator just telling the audience a bunch of stuff,
but that can get really tedious. So how do you
do it? And I think again, the new movie, I
think mostly navigates this really well. It finds good, succinct
ways to communicate some of these rich, strange details of
the situation. Yeah, it's seen that way to me as well. Though,

(15:46):
I'd love to hear from anyone out there who just
went into this cult um, because I've only heard like
one secondhand account of this where someone who's you know,
they thought the baron was the emperor sort of a thing. Like, So,
I'm wondering if that's like a common misconception based on
not knowing what to expect, or um, if that's you know,
just something that this individual had. Well, I mean, that

(16:07):
could be a totally fair criticism. If you go in
unfamiliar i mean, the Dune world, I think this problem
is going to be sort of inevitable, Like the dune world.
It's just a lot. There's a lot of detail. It's
very complicated. If you're going to tell the story in
the kind of rich way that that makes it come alive,
a lot of that detail is going to be in there,
and so it can be easy to miss things. Thank you,

(16:32):
thank you. All right, Well let's come back to the
Bennie Jesser. So, the Beni Jessri are related to these
other groups, but they untill they predate both of them. Uh.
They so they expanded with humanity across the stars and
the whole time, they're kind of working in the shadows,
functioning in many cases like a shadow government and behind
the guise of a semi mystical organization. They're a mostly

(16:55):
female organization who are particularly adept at manipulating religious culture. Uh.
They have seemed to have abilities related to mind control
and hypnosis. They have intense physical and mental conditioning that
make them really potent operatives and combatants. So you know,
they can really hold their own and we see them
do that in the movie, of course, um at least

(17:16):
in what we see Jessica Paul's mom to actually is
of course a Bennie jess It. They also make use
of spice themselves to sort of enhance these talents, and
we're also told they're aided by a kind of union
collective on consciousness. One thing I think is interesting about
the Bennie Jesser it is they exist within the Dune
universe kind of at the boundary of of hard science

(17:38):
fiction and fantasy, because there's a lot that they do
that seems right on the border of is this magic, right, Like,
Dune doesn't include overt magic, you know, you don't have
people who are majors or casting spells or anything. But
the Bennie Jesser in particular, can do a lot of
things that it is assumed that there is no magic involved,

(17:59):
and they are working by just some kind of obscure
physical mechanism, but you might not understand what that mechanism is, right,
And they guard their secrets too, But this also leads
to their critics saying, oh, well, they're a bunch of wages.
That's witchcraft what they're doing now. One of their big
games in the in the books, of course, is especially
the first book, is the selective breeding of the Quisots

(18:22):
hot iraq Uh not a mirror men tab but a
kind of super men tab they want to make essentially
a living some supercomputer, uh quote, one who can be
many places at once. And Herbert explains uh quote, in
simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental
powers permitting him to understand and use higher ordered dimensions.

(18:42):
And this fits into a very complicated power seeking plot
that they have about essentially trying to create a galactic Messiah. Right. So, um,
I guess in short, the benidgester, I mean, you say
all these things out loud in a quick summary, it's
it's it's an awful lot um uh, you know, in
terms of like, you know, you're gonna fit this faction

(19:03):
into a movie along with all these other interesting factions
and families and so forth, and not to mention the
various technologies and organisms, um, you know, all all all
the more credit to any of these adaptations that have
pulled that off. Uh. They have a lot of tricks
up their sleeve, many of which might seem like witchcraft
of the casual observer. But we're gonna come back to that.

(19:25):
That that first big one that we see the sort
of our in our real introduction to the Benegestrate is
of course the gom Jabbar awareness test. All right, this
is the scene we were talking about right at the
beginning of the novel that I've read multiple times. Yeah,
I even read up to around this part to my son,
thinking like I picked up soon after many years, and
maybe it's maybe he'd like it. Uh, And we got

(19:47):
made about that fire and I was then I was reminded, oh, yeah,
this is maybe a little this is too dense for
him right now. You know, it will save this one
for later. But but yeah, it's a great scene, and
we're not gonna we're not gonna spend I guess too
much time explaining what happens. You know, beat I beat.
But but here are the basics. Quick note by the way, um,
we're probably gonna end up saying a tradees instead of
a trades. We're probably gonna if we get into the

(20:09):
the the hearkenings Harkonan's, we're gonna mix those pronunciations up
as well. Um, there's of course kind of a back
and forth I guess about how you're supposed to say
these things. The main character of Dune is Paula Tradees.
I've always said a tradees. We. When we didn't add
for this movie, they were like no, you really need
to say a tray Eddies, which you said is apparently

(20:29):
how how Frank Herbert said it at some point, But
I don't know. I've always heard of Tradees, That's how
I've always said it. Yeah, Herbert said a Treedes and
he said hearken. And but you know, I'm of the
mind too that ultimately these books live in our brains
and sometimes there's a pronunciation there that doesn't match up
with with reality, and it's just how it goes, all right.

(20:51):
So in this scene we have Paula Trayedes, the son
of Duke leto Trades, and he's there with Lady Jessica
Um a Binny sr Its sister installed in the Tradees
household Um as part of the breeding program, Jessica was
supposed to have a daughter who would then go on
to birth the Quizatts Hoderratch, but then she defied them

(21:12):
and had a son instead Um. And then that son,
of course, is Paul. And Paul has dreams and sometimes
those dreams come true. So the Benejesterate send Reverend Mother
Guias Helen Mahaam to test him. And Moham is not
only a high ranking Bena Jessriate. She is the Imperial
truth Sayer and probably one of the most dangerous humans
in this entire fictional galaxy. So she's like a mega

(21:35):
Bennie Jesterrich. She knows all the tricks, all the secret skills.
You do not want to get on her bad side, right,
And Charlotte Rampling did a great job, by the way,
I really hope her performance. Yeah, she's really good. So
what does she do? She conducts this gom jabbar awareness
test on Paul. He's told to place his hand into
a small, curious green box and then she holds this

(21:58):
like she has this little needle thing called the gone jibar.
She holds it to his neck. Uh. And here's the situation.
She lays it out. If you take your hand out
of this box, I'm gonna jab you in the neck
with this pointy thing. Um. The gone jibar here is
essentially a poison needle that will just absolutely kill you dead.
It contains a meta cyanide I think she says, yes,

(22:19):
meta cyanide, so you might be prepared for sanide, but
not meta cyanide um. The box so meta. The box
is far more subtle, though, So you stick your hand
in this box, and it will begin to tingle with sensation,
you know, like maybe you know, just some maybe eventually
an itching begins. But eventually, and rather quickly, this is

(22:41):
going to grow into an all consuming feeling of pain.
And generally speaking, I think people stick their hand in
the box, they just they imagine that their hand is
just on fire, just crumbling into ashes, and there eventually,
right it says, I think specifically that when when the
pain increases in intensity, Paul believes that his hand is
being charred away and just turned into a stump. Yeah.

(23:03):
So you know, Paul, Paul has a lot of questions
and he's maybe a little bold and asking them at times.
And during this this session, uh, he asked what's in
the box? And she's like, it's pain, pains in the box.
And he's like okay, and but she keeps on going. Um,
she says, you've heard of animals chewing off a leg
to escape a trap. There's an animal kind of trick.

(23:23):
A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain,
feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove
a threat to his kind. Okay, So she's making a
distinction here about ways of responding to a threat, responding
with just sort of with with panic or with with strategy, right,
and Mahiam explains that this this is a testacy if

(23:44):
Paul is a human or an animal, and why when
Paul asked, why are you testing for humans? He replies
to set you free? And and then she goes back
to the whole butt Larry and Johada a bit and says, quote,
once men turned their thinking over the machines and hopes
that this would set them free, but that only for
men and other men with machines to enslave them. The
Great Revolt took away a crutch. It forced human minds

(24:05):
to develop. Schools were started to train human talents. And
from here she goes on to explain that the two
main schools to emerge from this ancient shift where the
Guild focusing on mathematics and the Benegesserate focusing on politics.
Now that word kind of rings strange in the context,
but I think I think it makes sense if you
work it out. Yeah, like to to reach this point

(24:26):
where you're like, oh, they're there there, which is their
psychic they have they have crazy technology, they they have
martial arts, they're super into politics. That makes them sound like, oh,
oh my good god, what topic are they going to
insist on talking to me about? Um? Right, um it? Politics,
I think can sound a bit lame as the superpower
of the benagestrate, but yeah, we have to I think

(24:48):
we have to realize they're talking about politics here in
the grander scheming sense, and not a shake hands and
kiss babies sort of thing, or a um, you know,
the sort of politics that one sees on television every day. Yeah. Well,
I mean there are multiple ways in which that could
be misleading. I mean, one thing I think it's worth
noting is that when I hear the word politics, I
automatically tend to assume a kind of basically democratic electoral context,

(25:13):
where even when the word has negative connotations, those negative
connotations are against that background. So it might have to
do with people lying or misrepresenting their priorities, or engaging
in petty corruption, or putting their private interests above the
public interests, and so forth, all things that are bad,
but on a different frequency than the political situation of

(25:33):
the done universe. Because the political system of the done
universe is hard to describe succinctly, but I think could
best be seen as something like techno feudalism or maybe
sort of interplanetary fascist imperialism with it with a special
political difference to trade guilds. But whatever it is, it
is certainly not electoral democracy. It's not a good political situation.

(25:57):
So that the use of politics and the bien ejeserate since,
I think, should be understood as expertise in manipulating human
institutions and seeking power and authority within a ruthless, hierarchical empire. Yeah,
I think that sums it up pretty well. So this test,
this Gonjibar awareness test, we learn, is ultimately about giving

(26:18):
the proctor of this test the chance to see how
the individual reacts to intense stress, and in doing so
test them on their use of benajesterriate teachings, which Paul
had been instructed in by his mother. Mild spoiler, Paul
passes the test. He does not die like you know,
five minutes into the film. Good job, Paul. Now, at

(26:38):
this point I thought we might get into some explanations
for what's actually going on in this test, or supposed
to be going on in this test, how we might
interpret it. Um, you know, I guess in many respects,
the test is pretty simple. You know, you got a
needle with a drop of poison on it, You've got
this box. And Mahaim says that the secret of the
box is something lots of folks would love to have,

(26:59):
you know, because clearly there there are plenty of bad
characters in the universe who would like to cause pain. Uh.
It's said to work via nerve inducers, creating a sensation
of intense you know, ultimately burning pain without actually causing
physical damage. Now, I mentioned the Dune Encyclopedia, and I
just want to point out that, interestingly, interestingly enough, it

(27:20):
does not really tap tackle this topic at all. It's
a book that goes all in on things like how
the molecular structure of milange might work, or exactly how
excon no rooms might function. But they pretty much left
the gone Jibar awareness test alone, which I was I
was kind of surprised that. I was like, there must
be a huge entry to this about this that I

(27:41):
just never read. That's interesting. But of course there was
an article about the gonjibar that got into some interesting
stuff in another book we've referenced. This one definitely came
up in our previous episodes. On the science of Dune,
and the book is actually called The Science of Dune,
published in two thousand and eight. It is edited by

(28:01):
Kevin R. Grazier, and there is a chapter on the
gom Jibar called The Black Hole of Pain by an
author named Carol Hart. This is still very much in print,
by the way, so if you're interested, you can definitely
grab a copy. Oh yeah, A lot of the essays
in this book are pretty interesting. Mostly what they do
is they take one of the concepts explained in Dune

(28:22):
and they talk about its situation within the Dune universe,
but then try to relate it to real world science
or sort of situate its uh, its role in the
narrative within the context of real world science. And so
that this essay by Carol Hart is all about the
gom Jabbar scene and UH and and how it relates
to some of the neuroscience of pain. So one of

(28:42):
the things she says at the beginning of this essay
is that, of course the hand is quote exquisitely sensitive
to painful and non painful stimuli. And I think we
all know this from experience. Generally, you know, the hands
are there's just so much more complexity of tactle feel
ling going on there, then there is in many other
parts of the body. I remember when I was a

(29:05):
kid and you would have to go to the doctor
and get a finger pricked um in order to give
a blood sample. I remember I used to think, why
can't they just like prick you on the back or
on the leg or something to get the blood sample,
because it seems like it's on the fingertip it hurts
almost more than it would just about anywhere else. I
don't know. Maybe some places I'm like, you know, the
face or a few other key points in the body

(29:26):
might might be as distressing, but the fingertip just it
seemed unnecessarily cruel to me. Yeah, I know exactly what
you're talking about. I I try to regularly give blood
at local blood drives, and um, you know, I I
don't want to stare at the needle in my arm.
Uh that's involved in the actual blood draw. But I
think if I had to choose, like, what is what's
my least favorite between the needle in my arm and

(29:50):
that that prick that they do just to test your blood. Initially,
it's always that that prick because it's just it's just
like this sudden punching, and there's this you know, the
sharp since the pain is very fleeting. Uh. And it's
not you know, it's not bad in terms of you know,
as far as all things go, but it is a
stark reminder of just how sensitive the fingers are. Yeah.
And I think there are multiple things going on here

(30:11):
with this exquisite sensitivity in the hands. I mean, one
thing is that the hands have to be very sensitive
in order to be dexterous. But there's also I believe,
a conceptual sensitivity in that you you realize that the
hands in a way are more fragile than than other
parts of the body. You know that, uh, that you
you need them to do all kinds of things. So

(30:31):
an injury to the finger will will limit the things
you can do more more so than an equivalent, say
prick or injury on like the thigh or the or
the back or something would. Yeah. Now, from here in
Heart's essay, she goes on to talk briefly about the
ways that pain pathways function within the body. What actually

(30:52):
happens when a pain sensation is triggered, say by an
injury to the hand. Uh. And so the first thing
she says is that most types of injury to the
hand will result in triggering more or less identical pain
sensing receptors in the in the nervous system called NO
susceptors pain sensors uh. And the one exception she cites

(31:12):
is certain kinds of like deep mechanical pressure or crushing pain.
But generally, she says, these NO susceptors are going to
detect injuries without much reference to discriminating it's it's type. So,
for example, while different receptors in in the tissues of
the hand will be able to tell the difference between
a range of warm and cool temperatures, extremes of heat

(31:36):
or cold that would trigger these pain receptors, they just
register as undifferentiated pain and use the same neural pathways.
And so I thought that was kind of interesting. And
she uses that to tie into some of the ambiguity
of of what's going on with the box, because of
course Paul cannot see his hand in the box, and
he doesn't know what's happening to it. He just knows

(31:56):
something painful is happening. And so she uses this to
explain that the intense burning sensation he experiences could be
other things. It could that could include like extreme cold. Yeah,
I always always liked this. Uh, it's kind of a
model of an exploration of just pain in general, because,
as we've touched on before, there's always the sensation of pain,

(32:17):
but then there's the mental world of thinking about the pain,
worrying about the pain, interpreting the pain. And in this,
you know, Paul's hand is literally in a in a
green but you know black box where you can't actually
see what's going on in there. Well, it's actually both.
It's green on the outside, but then he says on
the inside, no light penetrates that. He says, it's like

(32:37):
a perfectly black interior that you can't see at all. Yeah.
But to review, like the sensations that the narrative says
Paul experiences while his hand is in the box, uh,
it says, first he feels cold, and then he feels
slick metal, and this is presumably contact with the inside
of the box. One thing I don't know if you

(32:58):
remember this, but it's kind of range that the dimensions
of the box are said to be very small. I
think it's said to be fifteen centimeters to to a side,
which means that's like six inches I mean, I mean,
that's really small to get the hand in there. But anyway,
after this, it goes on to Paul saying that he
feels prickling, as if his hand were asleep. And then

(33:21):
this prickling turns into an itch, and then from an
itch it turns into burning, and then the burning just
increases and increases in intensity until it is excruciating. And
from here Carol Hart compares this to the sequence of
sensations when pain is usually felt from an injury to
the hands, such as burning or cutting. And there are

(33:42):
actually two different processes that go on here. I thought
this was kind of interesting. So the first one is
you get a very fast response that travels on what
she calls fast pain fibers. These are sometimes called type
three nerve fibers or a delta fibers and uh and
this response is is very quick, so this would be like,

(34:03):
you know, a tenth of a second uh and and
it's also usually not experienced as like a miserable, ongoing experience.
It is a quick, sharp sensation, usually something that prompts
you to immediately withdraw your hand from the source of
the injury. And I think this is one of the
interesting things about pain when compared to other types of

(34:24):
sensory input, which is that in some cases at least,
pain is almost synonymous with the behavioral reaction to it.
So what I mean by that is, uh, you know
a lot of other types of sensory input, you need
to process them and then you know, judge your reaction
based on the situation. But if you if you say,

(34:47):
touch a hot stove or something, your hand is withdrawn
before you have even thought about it, and it's like
after your hand is off it, then you're like, oh wow,
what just happened? You know, you have to process it backwards,
which is interesting. I mean I can't really think of
much other sensory information that works that way. Just just
prompting absolutely immediate, unthinking response that you can only reflect

(35:10):
on backwards. Yeah, it is that that that that sharp,
intense message. I'll say, it's basically saying, finger is in
contact with something that is burning finger, remove finger from
said substance their object. You know, uh, immediate reaction. But
then Heart goes on to explain that there's a secondary
type of pain actually that that travels via a different

(35:31):
neural pathway. So this would be what she calls the
slow pain fibers. These are also known as type four
or sea fibers, and this refers to the pathway from
the nerve endings in the tissue actually flowing all the
way up the spinal cord and connecting to the brain,
and these fibers, the slow pain fibers, they take longer

(35:51):
to get running. They need, she says, at least a
full second to get the message to the brain. And
then from here these turn into a more bill ding
persistent sensation. That is the pain we're usually thinking of
as as the the ongoing experience of pain when we've
been injured. So this might be a kind of burning
or aching pain that persists. It will usually grow gradually

(36:14):
worse over time. It often spreads out from the original
site of the injury, so you might have a cut
on the hand, but then you know by the time
it builds over the course of seconds or minutes that
you know the whole hand is aching. Is that there's
this radiating uh quality to it. And then also has
something to do with the immune system's inflammation response, which

(36:36):
is the sort of all purpose first responder two cellular
trauma and the body inflammation is of course also highly
associated with pain and sensitivity to further stimuli causing even
greater pain. And so this transition from the initial fast
pain fibers to the slow pain fibers is what Heart
refers to as the double pain response. But there's another

(36:57):
way in which the information we get via the sea
fiber pathways, the slow pain pathways, how they differ from
other kinds of sensory input, and uh, and the and
the point that Heart makes is that, unlike many other
kinds of sensory input, they really persist with repeated exposure.
So you know, we've talked on the show before about

(37:19):
different types of neural desensitization to two inputs that you know,
if you just repeatedly get the same sense information over
and over again in an unchanging way, it very often
fades into the background of consciousness. It somehow becomes invisible. So, uh,
this can be common with smells in your environment. So

(37:40):
you know, when you first come around the paper mill,
you can really smell it, but over the course of
some amount of time, probably a matter of minutes, you
just kind of get used to it and then you
don't really notice that you smell it anymore. Yeah, or
like cooking smells another example of this. You know, you say,
cook a bunch of onions. You don't really notice how
this is affected they sent inside the house until you

(38:01):
step outside for a little bit and come back exactly. Yeah,
the same is true of sounds in your environment. So
environmental sounds, you know, the rain coming down outside or
the refrigerator humming. If it's just the same static sound
input for a long time, you will pretty quickly become
accustomed to it and not notice it anymore unless you,
you know, stop to look for it or something. And

(38:23):
of course the same is true with tactle sensations in
the body, which would be the most analogous to pain sensations. Uh. Pressure,
as long as it's not painful will will work in
this case. So the pressure, think about the pressure of
your clothes against your skin, or your feet against the
floor or your butt against the chair. It all kind
of disappears from your consciousness after a few moments unless

(38:45):
you either stop to think about it or it happens
to become uncomfortable. So all of these sensory stimuli tend
to fade away rather quickly. But sea fiber pain has
a sticky quality and consciousness. It often just keeps hurting
until something changes, either the painful stimulus is removed or
the swelling goes down or healing takes place. And in fact,

(39:08):
not only does it persist, it actually does exactly the
opposite in many cases. So you repeat the same sensory
input in terms of most sounds or smells and so forth,
and you will eventually become desensitized to them until they disappear.
But Heart notes that pain sensations are subject to this
opposite phenomenon that sometimes known as pain wind up or

(39:30):
temporal summation, and this is where the body becomes increasingly
sensitive to unchanging painful stimulus. The same painful stimulus is
not getting more intense in terms of what's happening to
your body. It just the same thing keeps happening, and
it feels more and more painful upon repetition. And Heart
actually argues that increasing pain from repeated nerve stimulation sounds

(39:54):
very similar to what is described in the scene, except
with the interesting feature that the pain stop completely in
an instant. When when the reverend mother completes the test,
she says, okay, Paul is past. It's done, and then
it says that Paul experienced the pain going away as
if you know, somebody flipped a switch, and pain in
the body rarely does this. It rarely goes away that

(40:15):
fast than now. Part of the whole point of this
scene in the book is the reverend Mother's claim that essentially,
you know it's it's all in your head. She she
mocks the idea of pain, and she says to Paul,
a human can override any nerve in the body. And

(40:38):
so she's saying, Oh, you're afraid of pain, that just
means you're weak. You know that you haven't figured out
how to how to overcome it like I can. And
so the question is is it true that you know
a human can override any nerve in the body, the
idea that that pain is is all mental. Well, I
don't think that's entirely true. But the grain of truth

(40:59):
to it is that the experience of pain is subject
to more inputs than simply the pure sensory stimulus applied
to the body, that is, you know, causing the injury
or causing the pain. In terms of the environmental input,
you know, the knife cutting the skin, or the the
you know, the stick poking you, or the hot iron

(41:19):
against your hand or whatever it is. Uh and and
some of these inputs are cognitive. And so I think
it's a good way to approach this to reimagine pain
not as a sensory input in itself, but actually as
an experience. UH. And So here's the analogy I would use.
It's much the same way that vision is not an

(41:41):
input from the eyes but an experience. The environmental input
for vision would be light, But if you've listened to
this show for a while, you probably know that actually
all kinds of other inputs contribute to our experience of vision,
such that a person can see things with no input
of light. So think about the the UH studies we've

(42:04):
talked about with hallucinations that occur in total darkness. A
person can have can be blindfolded, or can be down
in a cave or something where there's no light at all,
and yet they can experience vision. They can see things,
and sometimes these things they see are not just you know,
hallucinations unconnected from reality. Sometimes these hallucinatory visions can include

(42:28):
real information based on other senses. The classic example I
think we've talked about on the show is, for example, UH,
the body using appropriate reception, so it's natural sense that
allows it to know where its own limbs are to
feed into the visual system, allowing you to in the
total absence of light, hallucinate the vision of your own

(42:50):
hands in front of your face. Or then on the
other end, you can think about the way that vision
can receive inputs of light uh in and at least
part really working visual system and have no conscious experience
of vision. So think about cases such as blind site
where a person is blind. In terms of their conscious experience,

(43:11):
they do not experience vision, but they can still do
some things that show that the brain is getting visual
inputs in some way and reacting based on them. The
person is just not able to see it with the
conscious part of their brain. And so I think pain
is not equivalent to this in every respect, but it's
close in some ways. So you can think about, I

(43:31):
don't know, you know, the hot thing on your hand,
is that's the external stimulus applied to the body. That
would be the environmental input, kind of like the light
in vision. But then this input is conducted through pain
fibers and brought to the brain and is one of
a number of contributors to the subjective mental experience of pain,
which itself consists of multiple independent components that can behave

(43:54):
somewhat independently. So they think about, you know, the different
parts of pain that you can sometimes even even sense yourself,
like the the physical sensation of pain versus the emotional
component of pain, and they usually blend together into a
unified experience, but there can be you can you have
sort of moments of clarity where you feel them, uh

(44:15):
in their own different ways. You get the texture of each,
if you know what I'm talking about, Rob, Yeah, yeah,
I think so. I mean there's this whole to like
the emotional context of of pain. Like you you slip
and fall, you you know, you hurt your back in
in the moment. Yeah, there's certainly they the sensation, but
then there's all there are these added levels of like, well,

(44:35):
am I gonna be able to walk after this? Um?
Is this going to be a pain that sticks with me? Um?
You know? How long is it gonna take for me
to get get over this? Um? As well as even
considerations like does this mean my evening plans are off?
Is this gonna cost me you know a lot of money?
Are you embarrassed? Are you embarrassing? Yeah? So there's there's

(44:58):
so many things going on with you. Even you know,
I think I guess to fall under your back can
be quite dramatic. But even two simple things like um,
you know, papercut, you can you can have some of
these thoughts like oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to
put wear a band aid now if I have a
band aid on, that's gonna affect my typing. How's that
going to impact my job performance today? Right? So, addressing
this question of like, what are the other measurable inputs

(45:21):
on the subjective total experience of pain in the brain
heart offers a really interesting example that's been backed up
by some studies, and uh the example she gives is
your belief in the significance of the injury that is
causing the pain. Uh So, she cites behavioral studies showing

(45:41):
that if you you take people and you subject them
to the exact same sensory input The example she gives
is a hand immersed in water that is too hot
to be comfortable, so not not hot enough to actually
like burn your skin at least for the time of
exposure used in the experiment, but more hot than feels
a you take people their hand in that hot temperature

(46:04):
of water, and apparently people report less emotional experience of
pain if the only variable you alter is informing them
that they will not be injured by the hot water.
So if you say this will sting, but it's not
going to burn your skin, it's not going to injure
your hand, Apparently in that condition, people report less emotional

(46:24):
experience of pain. So, according to this example, you can
use verbal cues. You can use information that you recognize
cognitively to regulate your own pain response. And so, if
you have more reason to worry that you may be
injured by this thing that feels uncomfortable, then it actually
hurts more. If you're assured that you won't be injured,

(46:46):
it hurts less. And then on top of this, heart
identifies a couple of other inputs on the subjective experience
of pain. One I thought was interesting was the idea
of the locus of control um so. The locus of
control is a term used in psychology to explain whether
or not you feel like you are the agent in
control of a situation. Do you have the ability to

(47:08):
decide whether this pain stops or not? Uh so? One
one good example would be, uh say, voluntarily grabbing a
hot dish out of the oven with only a thin
towel to protect your hand. That might be briefly painful,
but then you, you know, put it down. I'm not
recommending people do that, by the way, but but you know,
so that that would be a thing that you decided

(47:29):
to do and you control when it stops, versus having
somebody say, press your hand against your will against something
that's equivalently hot. Heart argues that the impression of helplessness
would actually increase the experience of pain in the second scenario,
And it is kind of interesting to apply that to
Paul's situation because on one hand, he can stop the

(47:52):
pain the second he pulls his own hand out, but
he's being held you know, hostage essentially here. You know,
it's like there's a there's an inherent threat that you
will die if you if you pull that hand out. So, yeah,
it's interesting, right, He's not being physically prevented from removing
his hand, but he, I mean, he does have the knowledge,
he has cognitive awareness that he that the consequences will

(48:14):
be dire if he does remove his hands, so he
has to internally self regulate. Uh, yeah, that's weird. I
don't know. Where you would put the locusts of control
in that situation. Yeah, I guess that's that's very much
a ben Adjestent trick, right, obscuring the locusts of control.
That's kind of the thing. Yeah, right, Is it with
him or is it with her? It's kind of hard
to say. There and then another input that hard identifies

(48:37):
his attention. So she says, if if something urgently demands
your attention, the brain is usually going to find a
way to at least partially ignore pain until the important
business is taken care of. Again, I think we all
know this from experience, that you can be really injured,
but you're right in the middle of something incredibly important,
and then it's once that task is done it suddenly

(49:00):
how you realize how much it hurts. Yeah, And you
see plenty of examples of this, like in the sports world,
where somebody suffers an injury, but then they keep going,
they press on um and they can in that moment,
but in some cases they end up doing more damage. Uh,
and then they feel the effects later. Right, And that
might not even be deliberate like that. Yeah, you might

(49:21):
not even be aware that you're actually hurt until yeah, yeah, yeah,
one more example that Heart site says, a piece of
evidence for how pain to a large extent is something
that happens within the brain as opposed to something that
happens actually at the site of injury is the idea
of phantom limb pain. So of course this is you know,

(49:42):
this would be pain that is felt in a missing
limb after that limb has been lost or amputated. And
the interesting thing here is that this is pain not
only in the absence of actual ongoing tissue injury, but
pain in the absence of actual tissue. Heart rights quote.
These pains were originally thought to be the result of
trauma to the severed nerves of the stump, but attempts

(50:04):
to treat by a second nerve sparing amputation frequently made
them worse. The more extreme surgery of severing the sensory
nerves at the spinal cord also proved to be ineffective
in most cases. So Heart argues that whatever the source
of pain in the body, the experience of pain, the
subjective experience, largely happens in the brain. And this is

(50:26):
why I think in some cases it's it's plausible to
imagine how the experience of pain could be regulated up
or down by various types of you know, other mental stimulation,
apart from just stuff happening to your hand inside the box. Now,
another big thing she gets into in the in this
essay is what could actually be happening in the box, Like,

(50:48):
you know, if the if the box is in a
sense causing the pain, what are some plausible technologies? And
I don't think she really lands on anything very solid here,
I mean, and admittedly she talks about how like, uh,
you know, we we we don't really know what could
cause this kind of pain without any actual injury to tissues.
She talks about some rumors of Pentagon interest in different

(51:09):
types of UH technology is known as active denial systems.
These would be things that supposedly a you know, a
police force or military would use to disperse crowds by
inflicting pain without tissue damage on them through supposed mechanisms
like you know, beams of microwaves or fimtosecond lasers. But
I think she rightly points out that in reality these

(51:32):
things would be not only painful, but if you were
repeatedly subjected to them, they probably would actually cause injury.
They would cause burns, right, and I and since this this,
uh this has been published, I mean, I think we've
seen more and more evidence for that based on uh,
some of the possible uses of this technology in the world.
It's weird remembering some of the uh, the press these

(51:54):
things were getting back in the day. You know, it
was like, oh, it's so nice that it doesn't cause injury,
but somebody is even if that were true, what they're
saying is I created a pain gun. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Like that's a pain gun that leaves no mark. Like
that's your your best possible scenario based on some of
those uh those those those early articles and whatnot. But

(52:16):
one idea that Heart gets into towards the end of
her essay, which I thought was very interesting, is the
suggestion that ultimately the pain caused by the the gom
Jabbar test is not actually from the box, Like what
if the box doesn't do anything, but the pain is
from the Reverend Mother herself. And I think the book

(52:38):
actually gives us reason to suspect this, Like when Paul
re encounters the Reverend Mother again later in the book,
he's like, I'm not going to fall for your tricks
this time, suggesting that Paul believes that it was actually
her causing the pain in his hand and not and
not the technology whatever that was inside the box. And
here the idea would be that you along the lines

(53:00):
of the other stuff we learn about the Bennie Jesser,
it's that they have these special powers of hypnosis. They
specialize again in politics, which ultimately is, you know, the
science of manipulating people and influencing them. Yeah, I mean, uh,
to a certain extent. You can see, you can look
around in the world around you, and it's like politics
is often about manipulating your perception of pain points. Uh.

(53:23):
So it makes sense that they're they're good at this. Yeah, yeah,
even even in the mundane sense. But but so ultimately
I thought this was kind of interesting because there is
some real research linking. So, you know, one of the
things that says that the Bennie Jesser It's due in
this regard is they have hypnosis techniques. Uh. And so
there is actually some research in the real world showing

(53:45):
that hypnosis, at least for people who are susceptible to hypnosis,
and not everybody is, but for people who are susceptible,
hypnosis can in many cases be shown to be effective
at a pain relief in in both onic and acute conditions.
If you want to read more about this, there was
there was a press release summarizing a bunch of existing

(54:07):
research from the year two thousand four put out by
the American Psychological Association called Hypnosis for the Relief and
Control of Pain. Uh. Now, I think there would be.
I think the effects we're talking about here, uh would
be much more modest than what is imagined in this
science fiction scenario, like, you know, making somebody think that
their hand is literally on fire burning down to a

(54:29):
piece of ash. Um. I think this would be more
along the lines of four people who are susceptible to hypnosis.
It might have some mitigating effect on sensations of pain,
but not like a totally mitigating effect. And of course
the evil corollary of that would be that if you
can deaden people's sensitivity to pain through hypnosis, you could

(54:49):
probably increase it as well, though that would be much
less ethical to study, at least in context beyond you know,
the relatively mild forms of pain people experience, would say,
a hand pludged into a bucket of ice water. I
have to say that. Um. I think another a bit
of evidence that kind of supports the idea that the
box is not generating the pain is that the box

(55:12):
doesn't have a proper name. And and Herbert was not
shy about giving uh, you know, throwing out names and
terminology in in the book. I mean, there's a whole
dictionary in the back of the novel, uh, you know,
letting you know what these various things are. Uh. The
needle at at Paul's neck has a name, but the
box is just referred to informally as the as a box. Right,

(55:33):
that's a good point. I In fact, I'm I totally agree.
If the box were they were they efficacious agent here,
the box would have its own name. I feel like
I know Herbert's brain well enough to know that. All Right, Well,
at this point, we realize it's time for us to
take our hands out of the box. Uh, We're we're
out of time for this episode of stuff to blow

(55:55):
your mind. But we're gonna be back in the next
episode with a continuation of this discussion. We're going to
keep talking about the benegescriates. Um, We're going to talk
about getting into back into that idea of politics and
what that means and if who knows we may discuss
some other topics in the Dune universe as well. That
cold open reading, by the way, is of course from
Frank Herbert's Dune and Annie Reese, co host of Stuff

(56:19):
Mom Never Told You and Savor, was nice enough to
record that for us, so thanks Annie. In the meantime,
if you like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, you can find them in the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed which is found
anywhere you get your podcast. Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
listener Mail on Monday, Artifact on Wednesday, and on Fridays,

(56:40):
we do Weird how Cinema. That's our time to just
set aside most of the serious matters and just discuss
a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other to suggest a topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Stuff to Blow Your

(57:08):
Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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