Then they put the electrodes on me ¹

Floating disembodied hands have none of your new-fangled 'qualms' or 'scruples' about "ethics" or "limits to knowledge". This makes them invaluable assistants around the Riddled Research Laboratory. Here they have connected the Facial-Muscle Faradiser to a stack of Oreo biscuits and are using it to electrify some of the slower-witted clientele of the Old Entomologist.

Their contribution explains our lead in the brain-galvanising area, ahead of more squeamish researchers such as Professor Michael Persinger (whom FSM preserve) of Ontario.

Is there a team of floating disembodied hands at Substance Laboratories™? I THINK NOT. Here the hands respond with a pithy message in Sign Alphabet -- a celebration of Fuck-You Friday -- to an attempt from SL™ to lure them away.

The disembodied hands like to dress up in little labcoats but they only get to do that when there are cadavers and body parts involved.

A sense of fair play and completeness compels us to mention other brain-galvanising research directions such as TMS or Transcranial magnetic stimulation, where you use a powerful magnetic pulse to induce a transient electric current within the brain, while striking the subjects with a large clock-winding key to distract them.


And what are they conducting up at the Castle at Vic University? Why it is tDCS or transcranial Direct Current Stimulation.¹ A trickle of current through the brain -- larger than Persinger's but smaller than in TMS -- is supposed to enhance the function of the lobes closest to the electrodes. It all sounds improbable and lacking in controls (also CHIZ CHIZ they will not allow me to take part in the experiments, because of SCRUPLES).

Finally there is Dr Johan Bjorksten's electric anti-senility helmet:

using himself as a guinea pig, Bjorksten applied a low voltage current to his head, in an attempt to demetalize his own brain. (17) His parents both died from Alzheimer’s disease, and he believed that he was beginning to show some early signs. After much trial and error, he designed an electrical “skull cap,” which was moistened with a solution of sodium chloride to enhance conduction. He hypothesized that at the rate of 1/2 hour every day, it should be possible to remove the aluminum present in the neural chromatin in the brain in 1,538 days (4.3 years).

Medical-immortality thrillers should all
have Klaus Kinski in a secondary role, a
Terry Riley soundtrack, and bondage scenes

As any fule kno, Bjorksten believed that aging was simply the accumulation of molecular cross-links within the cells. This makes him a Person of Interest among the Life-Extension movement. He further believed that this cross-linking is caused by aluminium absorbed from the environment, which makes him celebrated among the Aluminati.

What brought him to the attention of Riddled, of course, was his innovations in the field of bioethics.² Bjorksten's recipe for progress was to use human subjects³; and to relocate one's research away from heavy-handed regulation and meddling stickybeaks with their obsessive concern for "human rights" -- to "countries where it can be done with a minimum of government intervention and harassment".

"But what," you ask, "became of his promising search in the early 1970s for enzymes from soil bacteria that would reverse that cross-linking?" ª

THWARTED, of course, and prematurely ROBBED OF FUNDING, due to meddling from the FDA. This always happens. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Thus forcing Bjorksten down another avenue: that of aluminium chelation.

We read that he successfully "extracted a substantial part of the aluminum present in human cadaver brains with DMSO." (it is not recorded whether a blender was required). Further studies

evaluated the ability of various concentrations of lithium to remove tightly bound aluminum from tanned leather baseball covers. Using a 0.05M concentration of lithium citrate, they were able to displace 100% of the protein bound aluminum in the baseball covers.

-- simultaneously curing the tanned leather of Alzheimer's Syndrome and of manic-depression.

Now the disembodied hands are playing pranks with the Oreo biscuits on Another Kiwi and tigris people who have over-imbibed on the Qualm's Old Scruple and are briefly resting their eyes. What little scamps they are.


¹ Title from here.
² In fact a comment from Narad.
³ Shorter-lived animals are no good because they don't die of old age. It may look like that, but the process of cross-linking happens too slowly, so in fact something else must be limiting their lifespan.
ª  Fountain of Youth should not be confused with Fountain of Girl. Not to mention Fountain of Adjectives.