Brain Re-Boot?

Scientists in Israel have developed a way to implant a computer chip in a rat's brain that helps it learn things. While the market for rat-cyborgs is probably pretty limited (we hope), the scientists believe that their research may one day allow for implants that help stroke victims regain lost mobility, memory or other brain function.

According to the story, the scientists put the chip in a rat's brain and then disabled a certain section of the brain itself. They then tried to teach the rat to blink its eye when a certain tone sounded by good old Pavlov's method -- they blew a puff of air into its eye (my least favorite part of my eye exam) when they sounded the tone and eventually hoped to make the rat blink when they sounded the tone.

But with its brain impaired, the rat couldn't learn to associate the tone with the required movement. Scientists could sound the tone all day and Mr. Rat blinked whenever he darn well pleased. Then they switched the chip on, which allowed the neurological connections their surgery had artificially blocked. Lo and behold, Mr. Rat was now able to learn how to blink when the tone sounded.

Such an achievement obviously has awesome possibilities for stroke victims or other people whose brains have been damaged by accident or disease. It is, of course, also potentially dangerous -- since the brain works mostly by means of electrical impulses, it could be possible to encode particular sets of commands on a chip that could turn our recovered person into some sort of robot by sending a particular signal. There's a taut action novel lurking in here someplace.

In fact, one has already been written; Michael Crichton's 1972 The Terminal Man, about a fellow who has electrodes and a computer implanted in his body to help control his epileptic seizures and blackouts. The computer will help him by stimulating a pleasure center in his brain when a seizure strikes, defusing the man's violent behavior that accompanies the seizures. But the brain learns if it has a seizure it gets a jolt of feel-good, so it begins initiating more seizures in order to get more happy jolts. And the violent behavior only accompanied the seizures; it wasn't caused by them, so more frequent seizures equaled more frequent violent psychotic outbursts.

Unforeseen consequences of scientific breakthroughs were also at he core of Crichton's novels Jurassic Park and Next, as well as his movie Westworld. I think the potential good of the Israeli scientists' work is amazing and I hope it bears out. I also hope they've read their Crichton and they're very, very careful.

(H/T Histories of Things to Come)