Newsome Wants Electrode In Own Brain
Stanford Neuroscientist Bill Newsome wants to implant an electrode in his own brain to study consciousness in ways that would be difficult with volunteer human subjects.
When considered alongside the story of Kevin Warwick who had a 100-electrode array implanted in his arm in 2002 in order to study electrical signals from his hand, one must wonder: is this a starting trend?
From the article:
TR: Do you really want to do this?
BN: Well, I’ve thought about it very carefully. I’ve talked to neurosurgeons, both in the United States and outside the country where the regulatory environment is less strict, about how practical and risky it is. If the risk of serious postsurgical complications was one in one hundred, I wouldn’t do it. If it was one in one thousand, I would seriously consider doing it. To my chagrin, most surgeons estimate the risk to be somewhere in between my benchmarks.
–Stephen