If you had a bull rampaging at you in an arena, what would you do? Presuming you’re not trained as a bullfighter, how would you try to make a near certain collision between your soft, fleshy form and the sharp pointy ends of the bull’s horns from occurring?
If you were Dr. Jose Delgado, you would simply press a button.
Today’s Moment of Science… our super weird history with brain implants.
Human’s understanding of the brain has drastically shifted with time. Aristotle thought of the brain as a kind of radiator, regulating temperature for the heart. Famed Roman physician Galen suggested the brain was home to our thoughts. In the late 1700s, Luigi Galvini wired up frog brains and made their muscles twitch, the first real clear evidence that the brain ran on a current. Around the turn of the 20th century, we figured out neurons were a thing, and that’s where we find today’s hero.
Or villain. Depends who you ask.
Jose Delgado was born in 1915 in Spain and trained in medicine around the time of Francisco Franco’s takeover of the country in the 1930s. While in med school, he fought against the rise of the fascist regime and spent five months in prison for it before returning to finish his medical training. His plan had been to become an eye doctor like his father, but the burgeoning field of neurology was just far too exciting to resist.
Delgado was practicing medicine in the twilight of the lobotomy era. By the 1950s, we’d made headway with some new drugs, but we were still pretty damn bad at brain stuff in general. In the 1920s, researchers started showing the ability to control more than just frogs legs with electricity. Walter Hess hot wired some cats in Switzerland and showed that you could stimulate a range of responses, including rage, hunger, and sleepiness.
I like to think they were just being cats, but the pictures seem compelling.
Follow the bouncing ball: Hess won a nobel prize for this work with his collaborator, Egas Moniz, inventor of the lobotomy. The person who taught Moniz about this procedure that he’d first performed on a chimp brain was John Fulton, a professor at Yale. Jose Delgado, after finishing his medical training in Spain, went to work in the Yale physiology department under Fulton.
Naturally.
Delgado’s ideas were a great departure from those of his mentors’ generation. He found the lobotomy crude, and rightfully thought cutting into the brain to be a fraught proposition. But open up a skull and shove some electrodes into it? Sure. That seemed… fine.
If you’re working with an erratic patient or stimulating their brain in a way that might cause them to jostle the equipment, being wired up to a machine is a safety hazard. So Delgado invented a radio controlled brain implant: the stimoceiver, a silver dollar sized device that could be implanted in the brain.
If things didn’t already sound like a sci-fi movie, we’re about to start manipulating emotions with with circuitry.
Along with stimulating movement, currents delivered via this stimoceiver could produce a vast array of emotions. “Pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses,” Delgado named just some of the long list of emotional responses he’d observed.
He reportedly implanted a total of twenty-five patients in the early 1950s, mainly diagnosed with epilepsy or schizophrenia. Results were mixed. It was clear that human emotions could be manipulated, but given that we’re only ‘meh’ at treating mental health today, it’s not like they found an auto-happy button.
One woman with epilepsy who had been rather quiet started flirting with the researchers. A young boy with epilepsy who had been dour was suddenly excited and happy to stay for hours of research. Most notably, Delgado was able to treat the severe chronic pain of one patient whose pain had been unmanageable with medications.
Then there was that bull.
In 1963, in a high stakes game of ‘fuck around and find out,’ the Spaniard implanted a bull with a stimoceiver. After watching from the sidelines with the remote while someone else warded off the angry side of beef, he stepped into the arena armed only with his remote control.
The bull charged, and with the press of a button, stopped.
Delgado’s legacy is complicated. His 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, was seen by some as his support of a more sinister type of mind control. Because of a bit of a ‘wrong place wrong time’ situation, conspiracies popped up about him being involved in CIA’s MK Ultra program, and he moved back to Spain in 1974 to escape the controversy.
In an era when lobotomies and CIA operatives were on everyone’s mind, Delgado was trying to do something he thought could bring transformative and lasting comfort to our brains. His last book was simply titled ‘Happiness.’
This has been your daily Moment of Science, asking what’s in your head, zombie?
The chronic pain thing seems important. Can you do a follow-up on what happened to that area of research?
I am secretly a little disappointed that there is nowhere in our detailed applications for funding science where the phrase ‘fuck around and find out,’ can be used.