The neurologist hacked his brain and almost lost his memory

The reason he did that, because brain surgery is not as difficult and dangerous as everyone thought, and above all for scientific purposes, sometimes you have to do something yourself that you think is right.

Long before the computer appeared, there were people trying to figure out how to control them with the brain.

In 1963, a scientist at Oxford University said, he found a way to use the human brain to control a simple projector.

From small electrodes on the brain .

At the same time, at Yale University in the US, neuroscientist José Delgado invented a device called stimoceiver - a radio-controlled device implanted in the brain. This device can catch signals and transmit small vibrations to the cortex. He tested this device on a bull. The signal transmitted is enough to make the goose running rampant to slow down and turn to flee.

Neurologist José Delgado.

Not only did he stop there, he tried to implant his device on mental illness experiments, with the dream of using implant electrodes to not only read the human mind , but also edit and improve them. "Humanity is at a turning point in evolution. We are very close to the power to build our own mental functions." However, Delgado's research also worries many people. In the following years, his research was gradually surrounded by controversies, limited funding and hindered by the brain more complicated than he imagined.

Meanwhile, there are other scientists who have more modest goals, they just want to decode the brain's signal instead of changing civilization. By the 1980s, by implanting electrodes to record signals from a group of cells on the monkey's cortex, neurologists could visualize parts of the monkey brain used to move the limbs. This is seen as an important step towards the development of brain-controlled prosthetics for patients.

But the electrode implant method has its drawbacks: when the received signal is unstable, the cells can move away or collide with the metal pieces of the electrode, killing the cell. cell or signal bias.

But neuroscientist Phil Kennedy has achieved a breakthrough in research methods to address these fundamental problems.

Phil Kennedy's conical glass electrode design.

His idea is to place electrodes deep inside the brain instead of outside the cortex. To do this, he slid the Teflon-coated gold wires inside a hollow cone-shaped glass tube. In that tiny space, he inserted a very important component: a thin slice of the sciatic nerve. This biological material will play a role in connecting nearby nerve tissue, attracting tiny branches of the original cells to encapsulate the glass tube. Thus, instead of putting a bare wire into the cerebral cortex, Kennedy would let the nerve cells weave so that the fringes surround the implant, fixing the location of the implant. (For human experiments, he will replace the sciatic nerve with a mixture of chemicals to stimulate neuron growth).

. to a longer step

After the invention of this "neurotrophic electrode" , Kennedy dropped out of his studies at Georgia Technological University and founded a biotechnology company called Neural Signals. In 1996, after several years of animal experiments, Neural Signals was approved by the FDA for human testing. In 1998, Kennedy and his medical collaborator Roy Bakay, performed neurosurgery for Johnny Ray, 52, a patient of stroke. The injuries caused him to use a breathing machine, stay paralyzed in bed and only answer questions by winking, once meaning "no" and twice meaning "yes".

Illustrating placing Kennedy's electrodes in the brain.

Because Ray's brain has no way of sending signals to the muscles in the body, Kennedy tries to wrap the wire around Ray's head so he can communicate. Kennedy and Bakay put electrodes into Ray's main motor cortex. Earlier, in order to identify this cortical region, they had to place Ray in the MRI Resonance scanner and ask him to think about the movements. The cortex of the motor cortex will be the brightest region on the results of the scanner. When the conical glass tubes were in place, Kennedy connected them to a radio transmitter, implanted on top of Ray's skull and beneath the scalp.

After a while, under the guidance of Kennedy, Ray was able to adjust the signal from the implant only by thinking. When connecting Ray to a computer, he can even control the mouse on the screen from left to right, and click. In this way, Ray can pick words in a letter and spell his sentence. But it is also a great progress in the world. "This device is a significant step forward, like Star Wars objects". Bakay said so to an audience of colleagues in neurosurgery in October 1998.

Challenges difficult to overcome

However, their research was almost never progressed when the transplant on two other patients failed. The incision on an unopened patient dropped the implant, and another patient's disease progressed differently so the device became useless. In the fall of 2002, Ray also died of aneurysm.

Undeterred, he still seeks to develop his own project, as well as the direction of application for this research. While other colleagues aim at the ability to control artificial limbs for people with disabilities, he pays more attention to the patient's ability to speak, although this is much more complicated than motion. The emission of basic tones requires the coordination of more than 100 different muscles, from diaphragm to tongue and lips.

However, difficulties were still coming to Kennedy. His new patient, Erik Ramsey, due to eye problems made him unable to check the reactions to the experiment. Research grants were cut, his partner, Roy Bakay also died. In addition, the FDA also forced him to ensure safety and sterility requirements when testing, so he was prohibited from using electrodes on patients.

A decisive step

By the summer of 2014, Kennedy decided, the only way to get progress for his project was for him to do it for himself. To achieve the next breakthrough, he will conduct transplants on a healthy brain. His own brain.

Neurologist Phil Kennedy.

So he went to the Belize city of Honduras to undergo surgery. His two surgeons included Paul Powton, a local farmer and owner of a night club, in charge of the operation of the surgery, and Joel Cervantes, Belize's first neurosurgeon. , who held a scalpel. Both are the founders of the medical center for the quality of life.

The brain surgery lasted more than 11 hours, starting at noon on June 21, 2014. Earlier Mr. Kennedy had to agree to spend up to $ 30,000 to hire Cervantes to implant a set of electrodes down the surface. his brain. The surgery seemed to go well, Kennedy did not lose much blood during the transplant. However, the recovery seems to have problems. Two days later, when Kennedy was sitting on the bed, suddenly, his jaw clenched and chattered, one of his hands began to tremble.

Mr. Powton recalled "he kept apologizing, apologizing", "because he could not say anything else". Although Kennedy retains the ability to pronounce, but it seems that his phrases and sentences have no cohesion. He couldn't even write in words, instead, just a few lines scribbled on the page.

Surgeon in Belize city, Honduras, Mr. Joel Cervantes.

Gradually, Kennedy's language ability improved, for example: when he saw a pencil, he could call it a pen. Afterwards, Kennedy was also able to go home, when Cervantes felt his patients were halfway through recovery. It turned out that worries that the sequelae of surgery would destroy Kennedy's life, was unfounded. Difficulties in using language are only symptoms of postoperative brain swelling. Controlling that symptom, he will be fine. Only a few days after returning home, Kennedy was able to return to the patients in his clinic. But he still had to continue taking antiepileptic drugs for several months waiting for neurons to grow around his three cone electrodes.

By October of that year, Kennedy returned to Belize for a second operation, to place a induction coil and a radio transceiver, connected to the wire protruding from his brain. The surgery went well, though both Cervantes and Powton were still confused about the ingredients Kennedy wanted to hide under his brain.

Returning home from the second surgery, Kennedy quickly began collecting data from his brain. In a week before Thanksgiving, he kept going to the lab to balance the magnetic coil and signal receiver in his head. Then he began recording brain activity when he spoke loudly to different sentences, both synchronized with a nerve impulse monitor. The diaries kept showing that he was in the laboratory on the evening evenings from Thanksgiving until Christmas.

The experiment ended

This experiment did not last as long as he expected.

This experiment did not last as long as he expected. The incision on the scalp is never repeated due to the thickness of the implanted electronics. So after just 88 days, Mr. Kennedy was once again under the scalpel. But this time instead of going to Belize, he went straight to the local hospital. An operation to ensure your health will not require FDA approval, and will also be covered by insurance costs.

On January 13, 2015, Kennedy's experiment officially ended, when a local surgeon opened his scalp to remove the electric coil and transceiver. However, the electrodes remain in his brain permanently, because it is too dangerous to take them out. In addition, the surgery also left a sequela on his handsome face: "The shrinkage muscles have pulled a branch of nerves on my yang. Now I can't get my eyebrows up." .

Finally, Kennedy published the data he collected from his own experiments, for colleagues at Emory University's neuroscience seminars, in May and in the next ten years. 2015. By experimenting on his own brain, he received support from several colleagues. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon and surgeon in San Francisco, said: "These are very valuable data, whether or not it holds the secret of speaking function. This is a non-event. usually " . But many other colleagues think that this experiment is crazy and violates ethical issues in science.

Other solutions

Currently, invasive brain transplantation is no longer a suitable method. The main fundraisers for neuroscience are favoring a different approach. Scientists use a flat electrode grid (square grid, each of 8 or 16 electrodes) on the surface of the brain. Called ECoG (electrocorticography), this method has many advantages over Kennedy's, allowing to "hear" the sound of hundreds of thousands of neurons, instead of just a few separate neurons. These electrodes are so thin that it can be safely in a patient's brain for a longer time than Kennedy's cone electrodes.

Electrocorticography implant method.

From this method, the New York Wadsworth Center developed an application, called Brain-to-Text , that could learn pronunciation from the human voice, and recreate it as text. Its operation is similar to the Spech-to-text software on the phone, but it is more effective due to the signal being recorded directly from the brain instead of the sound as before.

There are also other simple and more functional methods available to help patients with speech difficulties. For example, they can write their message with Morse code. Or if they can move their eyes, they can use eye tracking software on smartphones to rewrite the sentences they intend to say.

As Kennedy commented on his unique plan "Scientists must be individuals". He said: "You can't do science with a committee." Whether or not you agree with this scientist's experiment, this is what you should draw from him: You cannot always plan your path to the future. Sometimes you have to do it yourself first.