(February 13, 2011) A bull is charging at full speed, riveted in
its fury, straight at you. Rather than running for your life, you calmly flip a
switch on a remote control you’re holding. Immediately, the bull halts its
furious charge and awkwardly trots away. This sort of mind control is not
science fiction – it was an actual experiment performed by one of the earliest
practitioners of brain implants – José Delgado, a neurophysiologist at Yale
University from 1946 to 1974.
Trained in the venerable
tradition of neuroanatomists, José Delgado was a physiologist who primarily
studied the neural anatomies of animals. After reading about how Nobel Prize-winning
neurologist Walter Hess was able to induce various emotions through electrical
stimulation, Delgado chose to further explore this concept. Over the next
thirty years, he constructed increasingly sophisticated devices that would
deliver measured electrical pulses to specific targets in the brain. For
example, one of his innovations was a device known as a stimoceiver, a
pacemaker-like device that could electrically stimulate a certain area of the
brain when triggered by a remote electrical receiver. The device provided
Delgado unprecedented control of an animal’s movement and emotional state. In
his mind, the final purpose of these devices was to be able to control mental
illnesses, such as schizophrenia or depression, by stimulating various parts of
the brain, a less invasive and destructive alternative to a then-popular
surgical procedure known as a lobotomy. Using this device, he dramatically
demonstrated his control of behavior by stopping a charging bull just a few
feet away.