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Scientist to Implant Electrode in His Own Brain?
BartlebyScrivener writes to tell us the MIT Technology Review is reporting that even thought scientists know quite a bit about the brain, one researcher is trying to take it a step further towards understanding consciousness by implanting an electrode in his own brain. From the article: "Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent the last twenty years studying how neurons encode information and how they use it to make decisions about the world. In the 1990s, he and collaborators were able to change the way a monkey responded to its environment by sending electric jolts to certain parts of its brain. The findings gave neuroscientists enormous insight into the inner workings of the brain."
I'm a PhD student in neuroscience, so let me comment. The human brain has around 100,000,000,000 neurons and 1,000,000,000,000,000 individual synapses (rough estimates, no one knows for sure). That makes the brain by far the most complicated structure in the known universe. Furthermore, techniques for studying the brain have only existed for around 80 years. So the apparent lack of real progress in neuroscience is understandable, given the complexity of the problem. Also, we do know more than you might think, but we still have a very incomplete picture of how the brain works, partially due to the lack of robust experimental techniques, as you point out.
I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Well, I was at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC in November, and there were around 28,000 neuroscientists in attendance. Judging by the number of people from my department who did not attend, I'd say that represents 5-10% of the total neuroscience research community in this country. I'd challenge you to find another research field with that much active research.