Way back in 1998, a reader asked, Is it possible to implant a microchip in somebody’s brain?. Cecil’s answer was more or less “no”. It should have been, “no problem!” The New York Times reported that Jose Delgado stopped a bull in mid-charge via a brain implant way back in 1963! Scientific American recently had a great articleabout this “forgotten era of brain chips”…
Cecil’s article addresses the paranoid delusions involving alleged chips that affect the human brain at the intellectual layer, which is far beyond both current technology and current science. “Lift leg” and “go to sleep” are another thing altogether.
The particular example I cited was perhaps inapt. Nonetheless, the reader’s question should have been answered in the affirmative. The question concerned, among other things, whether implants could control someone’s “state of mind”. Controlling state of mind was well within the ability of brain implant technology many decades ago.
From the SciAm article referenced above:
By stimulating different regions of the limbic system, which regulates emotion, Delgado could also induce fear, rage, lust, hilarity, garrulousness and other reactions, some of them startling in their intensity. In one experiment, Delgado and two collaborators at Harvard University stimulated the temporal lobe of a 21-year-old epileptic woman while she was calmly playing a guitar; in response,
she fl ew into a rage and smashed her guitar against a wall, narrowly missing a researcher’s head.
The answer to the question is no. It’s true that by opening the skull and physically probing the cortex and even subcorital regions you can incite sensation, seeing, hearing, vivid memories, etc…, and this is a valid procedure that has been used by neurosurgeons to ensure they are where they think they are.
But an electronic chip for “making a person commit a crime, commit suicide” is obviously unethical, so there isn’t any published research with which to make it happen. We don’t understand the brain well enough to make it work, anyway.
The other part of the question was, can we control “a person’s inner thoughts or voices by planting an electronic implant in a person’s eyes or skull.” Ehm, well, being generous and assuming that by in the skull the questioner meant, anywhere in the brain, the answer here is simply no as well.
The closest we have come to understanding biologicaly plausible neural networks, e.g., the brain, is IBM’s Blue Brain Project (which is really just getting started, and only with small columns of neurons in neocortex). Even if we can kind of figure out how these things work on a large scale we are a far cry from causing people to think what we want them to by electrical stimulation, or whatever it is a chip would do.
There is a science of brain-computer interfaces, but these need to be controlled by the “thoughts” of the user. By thoughts I mean that you can learn to selectively activate areas of the brain in order to control some utility. See research of, e.g., Niels Birbaumer. He uses this stuff to try and get in contact with “locked-in” patients, those who have lost even sphincter control (the last to go) and thus have no means of communication. Sometimes they can do neat stuff by raising the ph balance of saliva by thinking of a lemon…anyway…i’m tangenting =) A decade later, I say this column holds.