By Quinn Norton / Source: Wired.com
Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick may have best anticipated neuroengineering in his most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the movie Blade Runner. The main character and his wife get up in the morning and select their moods on what Dick called a Penfield mood organ.
We're a long way from building a Penfield mood organ, but we already have ways of prodding our brains. Sometimes we achieve miracle cures, sometimes just trim the edge off the pain, but even the little tweaks can mean the difference between the livable and unlivable life.
Next to the microscopes and viruses at Dr. Ed Boyden's MIT lab is an electronics bench littered with half-finished breadboards, bits of wire and solder. From a drawer, Boyden lifts a twisted mess of connectors and wires hooked to a copper coil the size of a golf ball. This is a transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, machine. When held to the head it's capable of electrically affecting areas of the brain within a few centimeters of the surface.
Luigi Galvani, a physician and natural philosopher of the 18th century, was the first to figure out that nerves were electrical in nature. His assistant tapped a dissected frog's leg with a scalpel he'd picked up from a statically charged table. The static electricity arced to the nerve of the dead frog's leg, making it twitch like living material. From then on it was understood that the brain and its attendant peripheral nerves ran on electricity.
Inspired by the twitching dead nervous system, Mary Shelley had Frankenstein's monster raised from the dead by a lightning bolt. But her approach, while a nice literary touch, was overkill: All you need is a very weak current to activate brain cells in a given region. In fact, TMS gets electricity into the brain peacefully, without either cutting it open or shocking it with millions of volts.
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