DAWGS & DINNER is a monthly gathering where Pain Labbers and their friends and dogs get together to decompress. Tonight, Nurse Tingle hosts from her homey fifties ranch house in Half Moon Bay, grilling sausages (Dawgs & Dawgs) while a mutt and a bulldog race laps from the living room out to the fire pit and back. Here, leaning across the tile bar for a piece of blue cheese, I meet Jacques Rattaire, a 47-year-old French waiter and exercise nut (racquetball, 24 Hour Fitness) with the square shoulders and flat chest of an oversized Lego man. Rattaire is a close friend of Dr. Rohlen and the Lab's star volunteer.

"So they shocked you?" I ask again, just to make perfectly clear I've heard him right. "Twice? On the temples? Forty minutes each time?"

"Yes."

"And what did it feel like?"
"Very nice, very painful."
"Seriously? What exactly did it feel like?"
"It felt like a frying pan sizzling on my forehead." Jacques sets his red wine down so he can demonstrate, pressing hard on his hairline.
"And what happened?"
"Oh, he was grumpy like an old man," Jacques's girlfriend pipes in.
"Yes," he agrees. "I had a short fuse. Not for long. A couple days."
"Why did you do it?" I ask, trying not to betray that I think this is borderline insane.
"I'm a little bit of a daredevil," he says like a perfectly blasé Frenchman.

The group drifts off into the dark, toward the fire pit, and I'm left alone at the cheese counter, thinking. Objectively speaking, I know that this transcranial-electrical-stimulation business is safe. But, still, in the way that some people have an irrational fear of clowns, I have a very strong fear of unnecessary voltage. If there's a bit of crazy in true tough, I figure, then give me my free sweatshirt and I'll keep the genes I got.