The Ludovico Technique

experimentNo. 0053categoryFilm & mediarecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly is seated in a restraint chair facing a projection screen that plays any selected YouTube video or locally prepared film. Each screened frame reaches the connectome model as 32 luminance columns.

Setup

• Procedural screening room modeled on the Ludovico sequence of A Clockwork Orange (1971): restraint chair, large screen, projection booth and tiered observer seating.
• An attendant fly applies eye drops on a fixed schedule; physicians and a recording technician watch from behind a console.
• Media source: a YouTube URL, reduced to an 11-character video ID and prepared at up to 720p, or any film in the local films folder. Live streams and videos longer than six hours are refused.
• Controls: transport, speed 0.25-2x, loop, monitor sound (muted by default), restraints, eye drops and framing (screen fills the eye, or seated in the room).
• Six cameras: screening room, subject, eyes and lid locks, over-the-shoulder, observers and projection booth.

Measurement

• One held frame per measured 200 ms window (ten 20 ms steps) reaches the model as 32 column brightness averages. Colour, vertical detail and sound are not model inputs.
• The panel reports measured spikes for LC4 + LPLC2 (looming), LC10a (small target), HS + H2 (horizontal motion), DNa02 (steering) and DNp01 (giant fiber).
• Restraints, lid locks, electrode leads and eye drops are rendered objects excluded from the canonical eye image.

Limitations

• Weights stay fixed. Nothing in the activity is aversion conditioning or learning.
• Flies have no eyelids; the lid locks are modeled on the apparatus in the film and have no anatomical function.
• No footage, soundtrack or dialogue from the 1971 film is included. Screening audio is for the human monitor only.

Sources

• yt-dlp (video preparation tool)