Just why are we suddenly spending so much money on studying the brain? Is science making its final push to crack the riddle of human consciousness? Or is the answer rather more sinister?

In the 1960s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado stood in a Spanish bullring clutching a radio transmitter in one hand, a toreador cape in the other. The bull came charging. But Delgado had implanted a set of electrodes in the centre of its brain. A single push of a button brought the bull to a halt. A second saw it meekly turn and trot away.

As Steven Rose, director of the brain and biology research group at the Open University, notes, this was not the bravura performance of some lone scientific crank. Delgado was part of a generation of mind researchers who felt they were close to control over the brain. Leucotomies - the cutting of swaths of connections in the frontal brain - were already standard practice for dealing with mental patients. Prison doctors were writing enthusiastically about the possibility of similar surgery on the emotion centres to tame their more violent inmates. Memos put the cost at just $1,000 an individual. Together with the rise of new drugs and sophisticated psychological conditioning techniques, many like Delgado hailed the coming of a technologically "psychocivilised" society.