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Penfield mood organ
Book
Commonly referred to as a "Penfield".
An artificial brain stimulator.
It is a device that one "dials". It has many settings. There is a "schedule" that is preset by the individual for being in
the ideal mood for whatever the occasion calls for.
Some examples mentioned in book are:
C=Brighten into optimism
A481=VERY optimistic
888=The desire to watch tv, no matter what's on it.
3=creates the desire to "dial".
I04=ecstatic
sexual bliss
594=Pleased acknowledgment of husband's superior wisdom in all matters.
Excert from book: "At his
console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant
(which would make him irked enough to win the argument)."
Deckard's wife, Iran, discovered a setting to bring-about
depression (382=comotose).
The Penfield can also be used as a non-lethal weapon. In Deckard's weapons kit he has a
nondirectional Penfield wave transmitter which he can select "catalepsy", as he did in one case, which renders both humans
and androids helpless.
It is also associated with an intruder alarm which Roy Baty put together during their stay
in Isidore's building. As Roy descrided in Chapter 14: "When the alarm has been triggered it radiates a mood of panic to the
- intruder. Unless he acts very fast, which he may. Enormous panic; I have the gain turned all the way up. No human being
can remain in the vicinity more than a matter of seconds."
FYI
The name Penfield was probably inspired by the real life
surgeon, Wilder Penfield. Penfield was a groundbreaking researcher and highly original surgeon.
In the 1950s, Penfield was trying to treat patients with intractable epilepsy. Before an epileptic seizure, he
knew, patients experience an "aura," a warning that the seizure is about to occur. Penfield thought if he could provoke this
aura with a mild electric current on the brain, then he would have located the source of the seizure activity and could remove
or destroy that bit of tissue. While patients were fully conscious, though anaesthetized, he opened their skulls and tried
to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy.
His technique was often successful, but his experimental surgery led him to an even more dramatic discovery. Stimulation
anywhere on the cerebral cortex could bring responses of one kind or another, but he found that only by stimulating the temporal
lobes (the lower parts of the brain on each side) could he elicit meaningful, integrated responses such as memory, including
sound, movement, and color. These memories were much more distinct than usual memory, and were often about things unremembered
under ordinary circumstances. Yet if Penfield stimulated the same area again, the exact same memory popped up -- a certain
song, the view from a childhood window -- each time. It seemed he had found a physical basis for memory, an "engram." 1
More about Wilder Penfield:
1 People and Discoveries
Wilder Penfield, from Wikipedia
Pris
Book/Movie
Book
We are first introduced to Pris Stratton in chapter six. She moved
into the same apartment building as Isidore, thinking it was completely vacant. Although Isidore is attracted and cares for
Pris, she is outright mean to him.
Pris Stratton is described as looking exactly the same as Rachel Rosen.
Movie
Pris is one of the renegade Replicants who escaped Off-World. She is
the "pleasure model", created for entertainment. "The standard item for military clubs in the outer colonies." Pris has an
incept date of February 14 - St. Valentine's Day.
Pris is the girlfriend of fellow Replicant, Roy Batty.
Our
first glimpse of Pris is seeing her walking the kipple-filled streets on her way to the Bradbury. She befriends "JF" in order
for Roy to meet with Eldon Tyrell.
Replicant (F) Des: PRIS
NEXUS-6 N6FAB21416
Incept Date: 14
FEB., 2016
Func: Military/Leisure
Phys: LEV. A
Mental: LEV. B
FYI
In
PKD's novel "We Can Build You" the character Pris Rock is identical to Blade Runner's Pris. She is described as having blonde
hair, with a little sharp face and dark eyes. She also is described as wearing "racoon-like" makeup, with black around the
eyes, at one point. "We Can Build You" is set in the same universe as Blade Runner, only twenty years earlier.
Role
performed by Daryl Hannah
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