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."

Comments

Awesome,

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

I've been looking for a remote controlled neuroscientist for years!!!

Darwin award?

[slavemowgli]

Hmm, I wonder how likely it is that he'll end up with a Darwin award...

Monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

n 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.

Hey, I can get a monkey to respond differently to its environment by sending electric shocks to any part of its anatomy, why go to the bother of wiring up its brain directly.

Re:Monkeys

[hkgroove]

The lines between this article and The Far Side are getting pretty blurry.

Re:Monkeys

[halltk1983]

We have enough studies already on the differences between women and men...

Re:Monkeys

[Mr. Bad Example]

> Hey, I can get a monkey to respond differently to its environment by sending electric shocks to any part of its anatomy,

Or as scientists call it, the Peter Gabriel Principle.

Ghostbusters reference

[Psykechan]

That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.

Farnsworth Parabox

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking the brain out was the easy part. The hard part was taking the brain out.

We need to be careful

[amstrad]

I mean, what will happen when the implant is turned on and the neuroscientist becomes self-aware?

Re:We need to be careful

[Mr. Bad Example]

> I mean, what will happen when the implant is turned on and the neuroscientist becomes self-aware?

I'm guessing something along the lines of "Holy SHIT--I put a what in where?"

And from this we have come to the conclusion...

[flickwipe]

"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."

And from this we have come to the conclusion that the monkey really hated it

Re:Hardcore.

[Anonymous Coward]

there are no nerves in the brain

Speak for yourself, buddy...

(I think you mean there are no sensory nerves...)

Interesting, but not really news.

[Rob T Firefly]

The article is full of how he wants to do it, but would probably have trouble getting approval and so on. If this is news, alert the media that one day I "want" to fly around in a jetpack while robot slaves do all my work and it rains Kool-Aid.

Alot of information

[squoozer]

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.

Re:Alot of information

[SlayerDave]

I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually

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.

Re:Alot of information

[cosmic_gravy]

A professor of mine once said, "If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be too simple to understand the human brain."

Isaac Newton did similar

[Noel Coward]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Will he get fired?

[Coppit]

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. ;)

can we even scientifically study consciousness?

[mrpeebles]

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.