The Implant That Can Control Your Brain

Shaun Patel has such a tranquil voice that it’s easy to see how he convinces patients to let him experiment in the depth of their brains. On the phone, in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital (he is also on faculty at Harvard Medical School), the neuroscientist spoke about gray matter almost as if he were guiding me in meditation. Or perhaps that was just the heady effect of him detailing a paper he had just published in Brain, showing how, using implants on his patients, he could enhance learning by stimulating the caudate nucleus, which lies near the center of the brain.¹ You have to time the electric pulse just right, he told me, based on the activity of certain neurons firing during an active learning phase of a game. A perfectly timed pulse could speed up how quickly his patients made the right associations. Using similar methods, he said he has induced people to make more financially conservative bets. His patients don’t even realize what’s happening. Their behavior feels like their own.

This sort of power is prelude to what Patel and his Harvard colleague Charles Leiber, a nanotechnology pioneer, call “precision electronic medicine.” Patel has been working with Leiber to design a new kind of brain-machine interface, one the brain doesn’t recognize as foreign. In , they explained how their neural network-like mesh will offer new ways to treat neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric illnesses, control state-of-the-art prosthetics, and augment human cognition. It read to me like a page out of the playbook of Elon Musk who, with his company Neuralink, is betting that if humans merge with machines, we won’t have to worry what AI