Bionic eyes are one thing, but bionic brains?
Look again at the image of the hippocampus in my last blogpost. Not just its strange beauty, but its intricacy too.
Bionic eyes are one thing, but bionic brains? Our brains are, after all, the substructure of our minds.
New Optimist Adrain Williams is a consultant neurologist. In April this year, he and his colleagues hit the BBC news with news about a combination treatment of brain implant and drug regime for Parkinson’s patients. Their article in The Lancet reported that deep brain stimulation (DBS) implant surgery along with standard drug treatment on these patients gave better results than drug treatment alone.
In fact, Adrian has been placing implants, a kind of brain “pacemaker” in the brains of Parkinsons patients for more than 10 years as this 1998 BBC archive material shows. Such interventions are now described as ‘routine‘, and a boon for people with diseases which were previously regarded as incurable.
I’ve just finished reading Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology. In his first chapter, he makes this interesting point:
“We aremoving from an era where machines enhanced the natural — speeded our movements, saved our sweat, stitched our clothing — to one that brings in technologies that resemble or replace the natural — genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, medical devices implanted in our bodies. As we learn to use these technologies, we are moving from using nature to intervening directly with nature. And so the story of this century will be about the clash between what technology offers and what we feel comfortable with.“
[...] a trainee neurological surgeon might learn to insert the deep brain stimulator that I mentioned in the blogpost about Adrian Williams’ work [...]