While that's insidious enough when you think about it, wouldn't it even be worse if a means were discovered where surgically activating or deactivating certain parts of the brain could manipulate human behaviour? What if you could convince somebody that when they felt pain they were feeling pleasure, or trigger them to be continually terrified? In his latest book, Neuropath, published by Penguin Canada, Scott Bakker postulates that very horrifying reality.

Professor Thomas Bible teaches psychology at Columbia University in New York City. His marriage has just ended. He's trying to deal with the repercussions of that, and maintain a relationship with his two young children in spite of the limited access he has to them through the custody arrangements. When his old friend from University, Neil Cassidy, turns up at his door unexpectedly one night he's thrilled to see him. As the night wears on, and Neil describes the work he's been doing for the government, Tom becomes more and more disturbed.

Neil had gone into the practical side of working on the human brain, and become a neurosurgeon. Instead of going into surgery, though, he had taken to researching the brain and how it worked: what parts controlled what aspects of a person's behaviour. Eventually his research attracted the attention of the National Security Association and they set him to work on devising new and better ways of "interrogating" terrorist suspects. As is always the case when there's a military application, unlimited money and resources were at his disposal, and he could now trigger almost any reaction he wanted in a person by manipulating parts of their brain.

While this is disturbing enough on its own for Thomas, the worst is yet to come. Leaving Neil sleeping off the booze they drank, Thomas heads into work the next day to find three FBI agents waiting for him. They show him a videodisc that had been mailed to their office, of someone who has had their brain re-wired in such a way that she couldn't differentiate between pain and pleasure. It's only after they've shown him the disc that they tell him that Neil is their prime suspect. He vanished from NSA a couple of weeks earlier, and when the disc showed up at FBI headquarters, two and two were added up to make Neil.

They've come to Thomas to ask the big question: Why the hell is he doing this and what is he hoping to accomplish? The answer is that he is proving to the world that free will doesn't exist; the brain does what it wants, not what we want, and we have no control over it. Environment, outside stimuli, and anything else that triggers a reaction among our synapses does so because of the brains construction, not because of us exerting any "will". As more discs are mailed to the FBI showing people doing things that they obviously have no control over, it becomes obvious that Thomas is right.