REMEMBER Robo Roach, the cockroach with wires in its brain, which Japanese researchers could drive like a remote-controlled car? The unfortunate insect provided arguably the most vivid demonstration yet that we are starting to conquer the intricacies of the brain – in lower creatures, at least. It is taken for granted that we could never control a human’s behaviour in so crude a way.
Or could we? It is hard to decide whether science or fantasy has come up with the most disturbing ways to tap into the brain. Whether it’s A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or The Matrix, the reality of lobotomies, gamma rays and electric shocks is as frightening as Hollywood’s worst. Now it seems that electrodes could control our behaviour too.
Surgically implanted electrodes are used for the most severe cases of Parkinson’s disease to control disabling tremors. The tiny devices produce high-frequency electrical pulses deep within the brain, interfering with the nerve signals that drive the shakes. True, that’s not really behaviour. But just this week researchers in France, led by Yves Agid of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, announced they had found a bizarre side effect of this “deep brain stimulation”. Two of their Parkinson’s patients appear to have been cured of obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD (The Lancet, vol 360, p 1302).
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While controlling such distressing symptoms has delighted the patients, it is also crossing a boundary. This is controlling something more fundamental than involuntary tremors. It is changing people’s behaviour – their motivations, compulsions and drives. It also reinforces worries that people fitted with stimulators may have become depressed, or even committed suicide, because of their treatment, not their illness.
For now, it’s just two anecdotal cases, spotted by accident. Psychiatrists and neuroscientists can’t decide whether it means anything. Patients with OCD often recover spontaneously once they reach hospital. And there is always the possibility that Parkinson’s disease caused the anxiety disorder. The French researchers are the first to acknowledge that their results are merely a sign that electrodes, and the regions of the basal ganglia where they are placed, might be worthy of more research.
Yet the result has reawakened old concerns in psychiatric circles. Psychiatric surgery has fallen out of favour. Lobotomies are still performed, but they are no longer the common treatment for anxiety and OCD they once were. Even where they are still used, they are going out of fashion. Some look to implanted electrodes as a less drastic alternative to the irreversible “lesions” of the past.
Neuroscientists have suggested implanting electrodes to improve cognitive function in people with memory, attention or self-awareness problems triggered by head injuries or stroke. In the 1960s and 1970s they were even tested on people in a persistent vegetative state, in the mistaken belief that their state of isolation stemmed from low general arousal of the brain. Others have tried to use implants to control Tourette’s syndrome, and they have been discussed as a treatment for schizophrenia. The OCD discovery is bound to fuel the enthusiasm of advocates of the new psychosurgery.
Then there is the question of whether we need to take a surgical direction at all. The world of psychiatry is still divided between those who believe that the brains of people with mental illness are fundamentally normal – and that they need behavioural therapy or psychotherapy – and those who insist that all psychiatric disorders have biological origins. It’s a rift that opened more than a century ago when it was discovered that some cases of insanity were triggered by an external agent – the spirochaete that causes syphilis. Some say psychiatry is still looking for a spirochaete for every other illness. Neuroscience is sexy, and the idea of a quick fix for psychiatric complaints even more so.
But whatever you believe, tampering with the brain is not to be undertaken lightly. In the past, surgery has done at least as much harm as good. Early experiments to control aggression backfired. Surgery to pacify rats makes them hyper-aggressive in the long run. Even now, some people given lesions to cure OCD become addicted to all kinds of drugs. There are suicides and epileptic fits. We need to take great care and study the effects of electrodes if we are to avoid the cycle of problems that have accompanied lesion surgery.
Perhaps all this study really tells us is something we’ve known all along – that the brain will continue to surprise us with its complexity and subtlety. A surgeon’s scalpel may never be able to separate motion from motivation because they originate in the same parts of the brain. Some neuroscientists even argue that they are two sides of the same coin: motivations are internal representations of our external movements.
Where does this leave us in the quest to control humans as if they were Robo Roach? The fact is we don’t have a clue how to make someone vote a particular way, or dance well, or kill or rape. So the remote-controlled person is not someone we should be worrying about just yet.