All this talk of brain computer chips reminds us of 2014, when this neuroscientist hired a neurosurgeon to implant electrodes into his brain in an attempt to crack the neural code of human speech. He almost lost his mind. (From 2016)
lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine. “What are these called?” he asked.
When Kennedy grabbed a pen and tried to write a message, it came out as random letters scrawled on a page. “I thought we had damaged him for life,” Powton says. Hence Kennedy’s trip to Belize for surgery. A local orange farmer and former nightclub owner, Paul Powton, had managed the logistics of Kennedy’s operation, and Cervantes—Belize’s first native-born neurosurgeon—wielded the scalpel. Powton and Cervantes were the founders of Quality of Life Surgery, a medical tourism clinic that treats chronic pain and spinal disorders and also specializes these days in tummy tucks, nose jobs, manboob reductions, and other medical enhancements.
Of course, the Irish-born American doctor knew the risks far better than Powton and Cervantes did. After all, Kennedy had invented those glass-and-gold electrodes and overseen their implantation in almost a half dozen other people. So the question wasn’t what Powton and Cervantes had done to Kennedy—but what Phil Kennedy had done to himself.long as there have been computers, there have been people trying to figure out a way to control them with our minds.
Phil Kennedy’s breakthrough—the one that would define his career in neuroscience and ultimately set him on a path to an operating table in Belize—started out as a way to solve this basic bioengineering problem. His idea was to pull the brain inside the electrode so the electrode would stay safely anchored inside the brain. To do this, he affixed the tips of some Teflon-coated gold wires inside a hollow glass cone.
Since Ray’s brain had no way to pass its signals down into his muscles, Kennedy tried to wiretap Ray’s head to help him communicate. Kennedy and Bakay placed electrodes in Ray’s primary motor cortex, the patch of tissue that controls basic voluntary movements. Once the cones were in place, Kennedy hooked them up to a radio transmitter implanted on top of Ray’s skull, just beneath the scalp.
Human speech is immensely more complicated than movement of a limb—it requires the coordination of more than 100 different muscles. Ramsey’s health declined, as did the electronics for the implant in his head. As the years went by, Kennedy’s research program suffered too: His grants were not renewed; he had to let his engineers and lab techs go; his partner, Bakay, died. Now Kennedy worked alone or with temporary hired help. He felt sure he would make another breakthrough if he could just find another patient—ideally someone who could speak out loud, at least at first.
On this particular visit, though, things started to look up. It was a hot day, and Powton brought Kennedy a lime juice. When the two men went out into the garden, Kennedy tilted back his head and let out an easy and contented sigh. “It feels good,” he blurted after taking a sip.In 2014, Phil Kennedy hired a neurosurgeon in Belize to implant several electrodes in his brain and then insert a set of electronic components beneath his scalp.
Over the next seven weeks, he spent most days seeing patients from 8 am until 3:30 pm and then used the evenings after work to run through his self-administered battery of tests. In his laboratory notes he is listed as Subject PK, as if to anonymize himself. His notes show that he went into the lab on Thanksgiving and on Christmas Eve.
The disc takes a long time to load—so long that we have time to launch into a conversation about his highly unconventional research plan. “Scientists have to be individuals,” he says. “You can’t do science by committee.” As he goes on to talk about how the US too was built by individuals and not committees, the disc drive’s grunting takes on the timbre of a wagon rolling down a rocky trail:.
He clicks the video ahead, to another clip in which we see his brain exposed—a glistening patch of tissue with blood vessels crawling all along the top. Cervantes pokes an electrode down into Kennedy’s neural jelly and starts tugging at the wire. Every so often a blue-gloved hand pauses to dab the cortex with a Gelfoam to stanch a plume of blood.
Proponents of ECoG argue that these choral traces can convey enough information for a computer to decode the brain’s intent—even what words or syllables a person means to say. Some smearing of the data might even be a boon: You don’t want to fixate on a single wonky violinist when it takes a symphony of neurons to move your vocal cords and lips and tongue. The ECoG grid can also safely stay in place under the skull for a long time, perhaps even longer than Kennedy’s cone electrodes.
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