From the Vault: The Bene Gesserit of Dune

The Bene Gesserit of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” use advanced mental and manipulative tactics to further their ends across the galaxy. In this classic 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. (originally published 11/09/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a Vault episode. This one originally aired November nine,
and it was about the Binny jesseret of Dune. Yeah,
this was of course a lot of fun to put together.
Dune fans, especially be if you having to be fans
of of the books or fans of the new movie

(00:28):
adaptation which would have come out last year. And so
now we're all eagerly awaiting done part two. Well, while
you're waiting, while you're waiting for more details about that
production to to roll in, or while you're rereading done novels,
why not fire this episode up and get in touch
with the bennijest. Put your hand in the box, Yeah,

(00:49):
put it in there. You've heard of animals chewing awful
leg to escape a trap. There's an animal kind of trick.
He men would remain in the trap, endure the pain,
feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove
a threat to his kind. Once men turned their thinking

(01:13):
over to machines and hopes that this would set them free,
but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
The Greats Revolt took away a crutch. It forced human
minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.

(01:40):
Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind 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 Dune movie came out,
you have been just itching to do another Science of

(02:03):
Done episode 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. It was about the original release date for
the new Done adaptation. Oh my god, you're right. Yeah.

(02:27):
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
um 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 and do some new Doune episodes. Um, because

(02:51):
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 some more of those. We'd like to hear
more of those. So well, here you go. You asked

(03:12):
for it, You're gonna get it. 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 ingesti
it um with a with a particular focus on the
gom Jabbar awareness test. So this is a pivotal early
scene in the book, and it's also a memorable sequence

(03:33):
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 Dune and didn't
finish it, you probably read this part because it happens
almost immediately. I read this scene several times before I
actually made it all the way through the book. I

(03:53):
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
the Orange Catholic Bible version. It's not very fun to read. Uh,

(04:16):
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,
before we're going further though, I want to drive home
a few different points here. So first of all, as
much as possible, we're focusing on the first book and
its adaptations, uh, the stuff that most people are going

(04:37):
to 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
much as we we like uh the world here, um,

(04:57):
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.
Another thing I want to stress here is that I

(05:18):
have not read Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's prequel
in 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

(05:38):
probably reference the Nine 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 time

(05:59):
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

(06:20):
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. Uh. It was. It was an approved work

(06:40):
at the time, with an encouraging intro from Frank Herbert Um,
but it was written by various other authors. But if
you get a chance to look through it, um, you know,
grab grab it. Because it has recipes, it has wonderful
illustrations that has all of this additional background info. It
seems this is just me looking in for them as
part from the outside, but it seems like as a whole.

(07:03):
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
prequel novels. Oh no, So, now that there's a big

(07:25):
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 h I think there's a
certain amount of control held by m by Brian Herbert.

(07:47):
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 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,

(08:08):
but what I want to know is, like, is the
Done 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 on. I think Disney came in and simplified
matters to a certain extent. So I don't think there

(08:29):
is many classifications. But um so, I 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

(08:53):
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, 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,

(09:14):
maybe you picked up on most of this, 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

(09:35):
there are no intelligent life forms in the 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

(09:56):
by all different types of intelligent aliens like say the
star Wars universes, 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 Done Universe is
people left Earth and started colonizing other worlds. But the

(10:17):
other big one, uh, and this one, you know, sets
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

(10:40):
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. Uh, Computing tasks
in the Done Universe are done by humans who specially
train their brains to do the kinds of things computers
with norm only have to do. So you have figures

(11:01):
like the men Tats, you know, sort of human computers,
or 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 doon Um to the

(11:22):
novel 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 there's an interesting touch the
idea that, uh, that it's not just like the war

(11:42):
with the machines imagined and say the Terminator films, where
it's well, the machines wanted to destroy us, so we
fought back 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

(12:04):
human resentment of what the thinking machines represented within human culture. Yeah, yeah,
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

(12:26):
years ago and is now the basis of of major
religions of the of the Empire in Dune. Now. The
Butalerian Jahade is said to have lasted from the year
two hundred b G 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

(12:47):
without thinking machines, humans had to turn largely inward in
order to manage this interstellar civilization, and without thinking machines
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 faction. So we have the Spacing Guild.

(13:08):
We're told it's a mental physical training school aimed at
developing humans capable of handling space travel, particularly the dangerous
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

(13:31):
uh the role and so I think a lot of
people have, you know, critics have compared spice to oil,
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 Dune, but not by being an energy source

(13:54):
that powers spaceships, but rather the spice is a drug
that makes the naval gaition of space by human minds possible.
That's right, Yeah, we're told 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

(14:15):
various disasters that are can occur during this, uh, this
sort of space travel. Yeah, so like you, you take
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,

(14:37):
but it's how they travel between the stars, right. And then,
like we mentioned O there, they're also the mintats, the
humans bread and trained to act in the place of
computers and thinking machines. Uh, kind of futuristic savants, 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

(14:59):
CONCEI leary, who has an internal computer within their brain. Right.
I have to say, I like in the new film
how they they had a ment AT's sort of rolling
their eyes back in their head while computing things. This
is kind of a nice visual touch, totally, I can.
I think that's one of the challenges of any of
these adaptations of of Done is that there's a lot

(15:21):
of written material that you either have to, you know,
just commit to including a lot of narration 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

(15:41):
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 difficulties in adapting Dune 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 this tablish.
It's like a really richly imagined, an interesting alternate world.

(16:05):
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 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

(16:28):
communicate some of these rich, strange details of the situation. Yeah,
or it's seen that way to me as well. Though,
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'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

(16:50):
on not knowing what to expect or um, if that's
you know, just something that this individual had, Well, I mean,
that could be a totally fair criticism. If you go
in unfamiliar 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,

(17:12):
a lot of that detail is going to be in there,
and so it can be easy to miss things than
all right, Well, let's come back to the Beni Jessa.
So the Benagessri are related to these other groups, but
they till they predate both of them. Uh. They so
they expanded with humanity across the stars and the whole

(17:35):
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 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

(17:58):
really potent operative in combatants. So you know, they can
really hold their own and we see them do that
in the movie, of course, um at least in what
we see Jessica Paul's mom to it. She is of
course a Bennie jess Rate. 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

(18:21):
Bennie Jesser it is they exist within the Dune universe
kind of at the boundary of of hard science 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 majores or casting spells or anything.

(18:41):
But the Bennie jesser It in particular, can do a
lot of things that it is assumed that there is
no magic involved, 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
to But this also the to their critics saying, oh, well,
they're a bunch of witches. That's witchcraft what they're doing now.

(19:05):
One of their big games in the in the books,
of course, is especially the first book is the selective
breeding of the Quissot's 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

(19:25):
a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and
use higher order dimensions. 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 Benidgesster, I mean, you say all these
things out loud in a quick summary, it's it's it's

(19:47):
an awful lot um, you know, in terms of like,
you know, you're gonna fit this faction 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

(20:09):
which might seem like witchcraft of the casual observer. But
we're gonna come back to that. That that first big
one that we see, the sort of our int our
real introduction to the Benegestraate 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

(20:30):
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 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 by beat. But but
here are the basics. Quick note. By the way, Um,

(20:53):
we're probably gonna end up saying tradees instead of the trades.
We're probably gonna if we get into the the heark
and Harconan'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,

(21:14):
they were like, no, you really need to say a
tree eddies, which you said, is apparently 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

(21:35):
there that doesn't match up with with reality, and it's
just how it goes, all right. So in this scene
we have Paula Trayedes, the son of Duke Leto Trades,
and he's there with Lady Jessica Um Benny jess as
sister installed in the Tradees household Um as part of
the breeding program, Jessica was supposed to have a daughter

(21:56):
who would then go on to birth the Quizatts Hotter atch,
but then she defied them 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 Maham is not only a high ranking Benajesterriate, she

(22:17):
is the Imperial Truthsayer and probably one of the most
dangerous humans in this entire fictional galaxy. So she's like
a mega 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 he performance. Yeah, she's
really good. So what does she do? She conducts this

(22:39):
gone Jabbar awareness test on Paul. He's told to place
his hand into a small, curious green box and then
she holds this like she has this little needle thing
called the gone jabar. 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

(23:01):
gonjabar here is essentially a poison needle that will just
absolutely kill you dead. It contains uh, meta cyanide I think,
she says, yes, meta cyanide so you might be prepared
for sanide, but not meta sanide 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

(23:22):
tingle with sensation, you know, like maybe you know, just
some maybe eventually an itching begins. But eventually, and rather quickly,
this is going to grow into an all consuming feeling
of pain. And generally speaking, I think people who 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

(23:44):
when when the pain increases in intensity. Paul believes that
his hand is being charred away and just turned into
a stump. Yeah. 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, 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

(24:05):
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. 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

(24:27):
or with with strategy. Right, And Mahiam explains that this
this is a testacy if 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 to machines and hopes that this would
set them free, but that only permitted other men with

(24:50):
machines to enslave them. The Great Revolt took away a crutch.
It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to
train human talents, and from here she goes on to
explain that the the two main schools to emerge from
this ancient shift where the Guild focusing on mathematics and
the Benagesserate focusing on politics. Now that word kind of
rings strange in the context, but I think I think

(25:12):
it makes sense if you work it out. Yeah, like
to to reach this point 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

(25:32):
sound a bit lame as the superpower of the Benagestrate,
but yeah, we have to I think 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.

(25:52):
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, 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

(26:14):
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 the Done universe.
Because the political system of the Dune universe is hard
to describe succinctly, but I think could best be seen
as something like techno feudalism or maybe sort of interplanetary

(26:36):
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. So that
the use of politics in the Binni Jessert sense, I
think should be understood as expertise in manipulating human institutions

(26:56):
and seeking power and authority within a ruthless, high hierarchical empire. Yeah.
I think that sums it up pretty well. So this test,
this Gone Gibar awareness test, we learn, is ultimately about
giving 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 benegestriate teachings which Paul

(27:17):
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
this point I thought we might get into some explanations
for what's actually going on in this test, were supposed
to be going on in this test, how we might
interpret it. Um, you know, I guess in many respects,

(27:39):
the test is pretty simple. You know, you got a
needle with a drop of poison on it. You got
this box, And Mahaim says that the secret of the
box is something lots of folks would love to have,
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

(27:59):
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
does not really tap and 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 xcon no rooms might function. But they pretty much

(28:23):
left the Gonjibar 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
just never read. That's interesting. But of course there was
an article about the gom Jabbar 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.

(28:44):
And the book is actually called The Science of Dune,
published in two thousand and eight. It is edited by
Kevin R. Grazier, and there is a chapter on the
gom Jabbar 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

(29:05):
in this book are pretty interesting. Mostly what they do
is they take one of the concepts explained in Dune
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

(29:25):
com jibar scene and UH and and how it relates
to some of the neuroscience of pain. So one of
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 feeling

(29:49):
going on there than there is in many other parts
of the body. I remember when I was a 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.

(30:11):
Maybe some places I'm like, you know, the face or
a few other key points in the body 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

(30:33):
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 that that prick that
they do just to test your blood initially, Uh, 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
sense of pain. It's very fleeting. Uh. And it's not
you know, it's not bad in terms of you know,

(30:53):
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
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

(31:13):
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
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

(31:34):
Heart's essay, she goes on to talk briefly about the
ways that pain pathways function within the body, what actually
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 injuries to the
hand will result in triggering more or less identical pain
sensing receptors in the in the nervous system called no

(31:56):
susceptors pain sensors uh and the The one exception she
cites 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

(32:17):
the tissues of the hand will be able to tell
the difference between a range of warm and cool temperatures,
extremes of heat or cold that would trigger these pain receptors,
they just register is 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

(32:40):
of course Paul cannot see his hand in the box,
and he doesn't know what's happening to it. He just
knows 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 like this as kind a model of

(33:01):
an exploration of just pain in general, because, as we've
touched on before, there's always a sensation of pain, 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 a 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

(33:23):
the inside, no light penetrates that. He says, it's like
a perfectly black interior that you can't see at all. Yeah,
But to review, like the sensations that the narrative says
Paul experience as 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

(33:45):
of the box. One thing, I don't know if you
remember this, but it's kind of strange 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,
the it's really small to get the hand in there.
But anyway, after this, it goes on to Paul saying

(34:05):
that he feels prickling, as if his hand were asleep,
and then 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

(34:28):
to the hands, such as burning or cutting. And there
are 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 he calls fast pain fibers. These are sometimes called
type three nerve fibers or a delta fibers and uh.

(34:49):
And this response is is very quick, so this would
be like, you know, a tenth of a second. Uh.
And and it's also usually not experienced as like a
miserable ongo 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

(35:09):
one of the interesting things about pain when compared to
other types of 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

(35:32):
your reaction based on the situation. But if you if
you say, 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,

(35:54):
just just prompting absolutely immediate, unthinking response that you can
only reflect sicked 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

(36:17):
there's a secondary type of pain actually that that travels
via a different neural pathway. So this would be what
she calls the slow pain fibers. These were 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,

(36:40):
they take longer 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 building, 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

(37:03):
grow gradually 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
there's this radiating UH quality to it, and then also
has something to do with the immune system's inflammation response,

(37:25):
which is the sort of all purpose first responder to
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

(37:46):
another way in which the information we get via the
C 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, like many
other kinds of sensory input, they really persist with repeated exposure. So,

(38:06):
you know, we've talked on the show before about different
types of neural desensitization to two inputs that, uh, 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,

(38:27):
this can be common with smells in your environment. So
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

(38:48):
this is affected the sense inside the house until you
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 refriger rate or 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

(39:09):
unless you, you know, stop to look for it or something.
And 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.

(39:30):
It all kind of disappears from your consciousness after a
few moments unless 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

(39:53):
is removed or the swelling goes down or healing takes place.
And in fact, not only does it persist, 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

(40:14):
are subject to this opposite phenomenon that sometimes known as
pain wind up or 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

(40:36):
upon repetition. And Heart actually argues that increasing pain from
repeated nerve stimulation sounds very similar to what is described
in the scene, except with the interesting feature that the
pain stops 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

(40:57):
pain going away as if you know, somebody flipped a switch,
and pain in the body rarely does this. It rarely
goes away that fast. 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.

(41:21):
She she mocks the idea of pain, and she says
to Paul, a human can override any nerve in the body.
And 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?

(41:42):
The idea that that pain is is all mental. Well,
I don't think that's entirely true, but the grain of
truth 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,
causing the pain, in terms of the environmental input you know,

(42:03):
the knife cutting the skin, or the the you know,
the stick poking you, or the hot iron 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.

(42:25):
Uh And So here's the analogy I would use. It's
much the same way that vision is not an 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,

(42:46):
such that a person can see things with no input
of light. So think about the the UH studies we've
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,

(43:07):
and sometimes these things they see are not just you know,
hallucinations unconnected from reality. Sometimes these hallucinatory visions can include
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

(43:28):
that allows it to know where its own limbs are.
UH to feed into the visual system, allowing you to,
in the total absence of light, hallucinate the vision of
your own 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 an

(43:48):
at least partially working visual system and have no conscious
experience of visions. So think about cases such as blind site,
where a person is blind in terms of their conscious
experien riens, 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.

(44:09):
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 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

(44:31):
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
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

(44:54):
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,
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

(45:16):
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,
am I gonna be able to walk after this um?
Or 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

(45:37):
plans are off? Is this gonna cost me you know
a lot of money? Are you embarrassed? Are you embarrassed? Yeah?
So there's there's so many things going on with with you,
even you know, I mean, I guess I fall unto
your back and be quite dramatic, but even just simple
things like um, you know, paper cut, you can you
can have some of these thoughts like oh my goodness,

(45:58):
I'm gonna have to put where 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 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

(46:21):
is your belief in the significance of the injury that
is causing the pain. Uh So, she cites behavioral studies
showing 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

(46:42):
actually like burn your skin at least for the time
of exposure used in the experiment, but more hot than feels. Okay,
you take people in their hand in that hot temperature
of water, and apparently people report less emotional experience of
pain if the only variable you alter is informing them

(47:03):
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
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

(47:26):
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,
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

(47:48):
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
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,

(48:11):
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 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

(48:34):
second scenario. And it is kind of interesting to apply
that to Paul's situation because on one hand, he can
stop the 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

(48:57):
his hand, but he, I mean, he does have the
not edge. He has cognitive awareness that he that the
consequences will be dire if he does remove his hands,
so he has to internally self regulate. Uh, yeah, that's
a weird I don't know where you would put the
locus of control in that situation. Yeah, I guess that's
that's very much a ben Adjestent trick, right, obscuring the

(49:18):
locusts of control. That's kind of a 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 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

(49:39):
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 that's suddenly 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 on um and they

(50:01):
can in 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 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

(50:22):
within the brain as opposed to something that happens actually
at the side of injury is the idea of phantom
limb pain. So of course this is you know, 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

(50:43):
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 to
treat by a second nerve sparing amputation frequently made them worse.
The more extremes injury of severing the sensory nerves at
the spinal cord also proved to be ineffective in most cases.

(51:06):
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 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

(51:27):
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,
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,

(51:49):
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
types of 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

(52:10):
pain without tissue damage on them through supposed mechanisms like
you know, beams of microwaves or femtosecond lasers. But I
think she rightly points out that in reality these 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, uh,

(52:30):
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
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

(52:52):
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 early articles and whatnot. But one idea that
Heart gets into towards the end of her essay, which
I thought was very interesting, is the suggestion that ultimately

(53:14):
the pain caused by the the gom Jabar 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 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

(53:35):
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 know, along the lines of the
other stuff we learned about the Benny Jesser, it's that
they have these special powers of hypnosis. They specialize again

(53:56):
in politics, which ultimately is you know, the science of
man copulating people and influencing them. Yeah, I mean, uh,
to a certain extent, you can. So you can look
around in the world around you, and it's like politics
is often about manipulating your perception of pain points. Uh.
So it makes sense that they're they're good at this. Yeah. Yeah,
even even in the mundane sense. But but so ultimately

(54:19):
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
that hypnosis, at least for people who are susceptible to hypnosis,
and not everybody is, but for people who are susceptible,

(54:42):
hypnosis can in many cases be shown to be effective
at at pain relief in in both chronic and acute conditions.
If you want to read more about this, there was
there was a press release summarizing a bunch of existing
research from the year two thousand four put out by
the Americans Ecological Association called Hypnosis for the Relief and

(55:03):
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
piece of ash. Um. I think this would be more
along the lines of four people who are susceptible to hypnosis.

(55:25):
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
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,

(55:49):
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
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

(56:10):
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,
that's a good point. I In fact, I'm I totally agree.
If the box were the worthy, efficacious agent here, the

(56:30):
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
your mind, But we're gonna be back in the next
episode with a continuation of this discussion. We're gonna keep
talking about the benegestrates um and we're gonna talk about

(56:53):
getting into back into that idea of politics and what
that means, and I who knows, we may discuss some
other topics in the Dune universe is as well. That
cold open reading, by the way, is of course from
Frank Herbert's Dune and Annie Reese, co host of Stuff
Mom Never Told You and Savor, was nice enough to
record that for us, So thanks Annie. In the meantime,

(57:15):
if you'd 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 Friday's
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

(57:37):
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 dot com. Stuff to

(57:57):
Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to
your favorite shows,