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Scientist to Implant Electrode in His Own Brain?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the self-sacrifice-for-science dept.

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."

7 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Alot of information by squoozer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can you really gather that much information from a single electrode in a single location? I would have thought this would be of pretty limited benifit. Still I'm not a neuroscientists - maybe it's going to give stacks of data.

    I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually. It feels like all our attempts to understand it (PET, MRI, electrodes, etc), while amazing, as still at the caveman stage of development e.g. hit it with a rock until it does something. I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.

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    I used to have a better sig but it broke.
  2. Isaac Newton did similar by Noel+Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Isaac Newton poked a bodkin through his eyelid and prodded the outside of his eyeball to convince himself that sensations of light originated in the eye.

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    . implicit all IIRC IM*HO £0.02 YM?V ;-) ...
    1. Re:Isaac Newton did similar by ljw1004 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I saw a copy of his original lab-notes on the eye-poking experiment. (I attended a talk by someone in the History and Philosophy of Science dept at Cambridge who was doing her research on them).

      His actual goal was to prove that there are two kinds of motion: that caused by external forces and that caused by "the will". First he moved his eye using "his will" and made it point to an object, and he could see the object. Next he used an external force (the blunt pin) to move his eye to point to the object, and it looked blurred and out of focus. Therefore there really are these two different kinds of motion, as witnessed by their qualitatively different effects.

      (I think he concluded that God exists.)

  3. Throwing conciousness into the wind by abes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I should point out that Newsome is a fairly well known name in the Neuroscience field. And however crazy this idea is (which, IMHO, is really high up there), he wouldn't be the first neuroscientist to do an experiment on himself. I can't remember his name, but another person vivesected his own arm to understand how sensory nerves worked. Not to mention, researchers put themselves in TMS machines, that essentially shuts down parts of the brain by means of large magnetic fields.

  4. Will he get fired? by Coppit · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The guy who gave himself a heart catheter got fired for it. From A History of Cardiac Catheterization:

    In 1929, a German surgical trainee, Werner Forssmann, experimented on a human cadaver and realized how easy it was to guide a urological catheter from an arm vein into the right atrium. He went so far as to dissect the veins of his own forearm and guide a urological catheter into his right atrium using fluoroscopic control and a mirror. With the catheter in place, he walked to the x-ray room with no ill effects to have his chest x-rayed. This made Forssmann the first to document right heart catheterization in humans using radiographic techniques. In return, he was fired from his position at the hospital and won the Nobel Prize in 1956.
    Yikes! I wonder if during his Nobel acceptance he gave the hospital the finger. ;)
  5. can we even scientifically study consciousness? by mrpeebles · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can we even scientifically study consciousness? A large component of what most of us mean by consciousness is probably metaphysical. Certainly it is inherently subjective. While I think that neurobiology and neuropsychology are worthy enterprises, it seems like they should invent a new term for what they mean by consciousness.

    This is a huge undertaking though. It took physics a long time (what, ~170 years after Newton) to be able to understand how microscopic physics related to the behavior of a simple macroscopic gas. They really even didn't really get it right until after Planck. The brain is, of course, much more complicated than a simple gas, and the chemistry controlling the action of individual neurons is much more complicated than Newton's physics. Maybe the standards for "understanding" are lower, but all the same, this is going to be extremely difficult, I imagine, if it is even possible. (As I understand it, there are certain philosophers who think it is not, but I am not in a position to have an opinion.

  6. Hot Holodeck Action? by Drunkulus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "When he went deeper into the brain, into the temporal cortex, he could elicit complex perceptions. A patient would say things like, 'I'm sitting on the back porch of my mother's house and she's calling me to dinner.'"

    Could this be developed further? How realistic was the perception? I guess that's exactly the question Newsome would like to answer. The mind reels.