The neurosurgeon who hacked his brain and made himself a cyborg

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The brain surgery began on the afternoon of June 21, 2014 and lasted eleven and a half hours, stretching out into the Caribbean predawn minutes of the next day. In the afternoon, when the anesthesia ceased to work, a neurosurgeon entered the room, took off his thin-rimmed glasses and showed it to the bandaged patient. "How does is called?" - he asked.

Phil Kennedy looked at the glasses for a moment. Then his gaze went up to the ceiling and moved to the TV. "Um … oh … ay … ayy," he stuttered.

“It's okay, take your time,” said surgeon Joel Cervantes, trying to sound calm. Kennedy tried again to answer. It looked like he was making his brain work like someone with a sore throat making an effort to swallow.

In the meantime, a terrible thought was spinning in the surgeon's head: "I shouldn't have done this."

When Kennedy flew into the Belize airport a few days earlier, he was of sound mind and good memory. A solid 66-year-old man who looked like an authoritative doctor on TV. Nothing in his condition required Cervantes to open his skull. But Kennedy demanded surgery on his brain and was willing to pay $ 30,000 to have his demand fulfilled.

Kennedy himself was once a renowned neurologist. In the late 90s, he even hit the headlines of world publications: he managed to implant several cable electrodes in the brain of a paralyzed man and teach him to control the computer cursor with the help of his mind. Kennedy called his patient "the first cyborg in the world," and the press greeted his achievement as the first human communication through the brain-computer system. Since then, Kennedy has dedicated his life to the dream of assembling more advanced cyborgs and developing a method for completely digitizing human thoughts.

Then, in the summer of 2014, Kennedy decided that the only way to move this project forward was to personalize it. For his next breakthrough, he will connect with a healthy human brain. His own.

And so the idea of Kennedy's trip to Belize was born. The current orange farm owner and former nightclub owner, Paul Poughton, was in charge of logistics, while Cervantes, the first Belizean to become a neurosurgeon, wielded a scalpel. Poughton and Cervantes founded Quality of Life Surgery, a medical tourism clinic that treats chronic pain and spinal problems, as well as abdominoplasty, nose surgery, male breast reduction and other medical enhancements.

At first, the procedure that Kennedy hired Cervantes to do - implanting a set of glass and gold electrodes under his cerebral cortex - went quite well, without even severe bleeding. But the patient's recovery was fraught with problems. Two days later, Kennedy was sitting on the bed when suddenly his jaw began to gnash and tremble, and one hand began to shake. Poughton worried that Kennedy's teeth might be broken because of this attack.

Speech problems also continued. “His phrases didn’t make sense,” said Poughton, “he only apologized - 'sorry, sorry' - because he couldn’t say anything else.” Kennedy could still mutter sounds and incoherent words, but he seemed to have lost that glue, that would put them together into phrases and sentences.”When Kennedy picked up a pen and wanted to write something, random letters scattered carelessly on the paper.

At first, Poughton was fascinated by what he called "an Indiana Jones approach to science," which he saw in Kennedy's actions: to fly to Belize, violate every conceivable requirement of research, risking his own mind. Now, however, Kennedy was sitting in front of him, perhaps locked in himself. “I thought we damaged something in him, and that's for life,” said Poughton. "What have we done?"

Of course, the Irish-born American doctor was much more aware of the risks of surgery than Poughton or Cervantes. In the end, Kennedy invented those very glass and gold electrodes and oversaw their implantation of four or five other people. So the question was not what Poughton and Cervantes did to Kennedy, but what Phil Kennedy did to himself.

As many computers exist, there are as many people trying to find a way to control them with their minds. In 1963, a scientist at Oxford University reported that he had figured out how to use brain waves to control a simple slide projector. Around the same time, José Delgado, a Spanish neuroscientist at Yale University, made headlines after a massive demonstration at the bullring in Cordoba, Spain. Delgado invented a device he called the "stimosiver" - a radio-controlled implant in the brain that picks up neural signals and transmits small electrical impulses to the cortex. When Delgado entered the arena, he began to irritate the bull with a red rag so that he would attack. When the animal approached, the scientist pressed two buttons on his radio transmitter: with the first button he acted on the caudate nucleus of the bull's brain and slowed it down to a complete stop; the second turned him around and made him gallop towards the wall.

Delgado dreamed of using these electrodes to connect to human thoughts: read them, edit them, improve them. “Humanity is on the verge of a turning point in evolution. We are close to being able to engineer our own cognitive processes,”he told the New York Times in 1970, after trying to implant his electrodes in mental patients. "The only question is, what kind of people do we, ideally, want to design?"

Unsurprisingly, Delgado's work has made a lot of people nervous. And in the years that followed, his program stalled, faced with controversy, underfunded and cornered by the complexities of the human brain, not as easily hacked as Delgado had assumed.

Meanwhile, scientists with more modest plans, who simply intended to decode brain signals rather than grab civilization by neurons, continued to place cables in the heads of laboratory animals. By the 80s, neuroscientists had discovered that if you use an implant to record signals from a group of cells, say, in the motor cortex of a monkey's brain, and then average their electrical discharges, you can figure out where the monkey is going to move its limb - a find that many have perceived as the first major step towards the development of mind-controlled prostheses for humans.

But the traditional electrode implants used in most of these studies had one big drawback - the signals they picked up were downright unstable. Because the environment of the brain is like jelly, the cell pulses sometimes went beyond the recording limit, or the cells died from trauma caused by collision with a sharp piece of metal. Ultimately, the electrodes could become so stuck in the surrounding damaged tissue that their signals were completely extinguished.

Phil Kennedy's breakthrough - one that would later define his career in neuroscience and ultimately lead to an operating table in Belize - began with a way to tackle this basic bioengineering problem. His idea: to stick an electrode into the brain so that the electrode is securely hooked inside. To do this, he placed the ends of a Teflon-coated gold wire inside an empty glass cone. In the same small space, he inserted another necessary component - a thin layer of sciatic nerve tissue. This particle of biomaterial will serve to pollinate the surrounding nerve tissue, attracting the microscopic arms of local cells so that they envelop the cone. Instead of burying bare wire in the bark, Kennedy "begged" nerve cells to wrap around the implant, securing it in place like a lattice wrapped in ivy (when working with people, instead of sciatic nerve tissue, he used a chemical cocktail that stimulates neuronal growth).

The glass cone design offers an incredible advantage. It allows researchers to leave these sensors in the patient's head for a long time. Instead of capturing snippets of brain activity in one-off sessions in the lab, they can tune in to life-long electric chirping soundtracks from the brain.

Kennedy called his invention the "neurotrophic electrode." Soon after he invented it, he left his university post at Georgia Tech and founded the biotech company Neural Signals. In 1996, after several years of testing on animals, Neural Signals received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implant Kennedy Cone Electrodes in humans as a possible way out for patients who have lost the ability to move or speak. And in 1998, Kennedy and his medical colleague, Roy Bakay, a neurosurgeon at Emory University, tackled a patient who would turn them into scientific stars.

52-year-old construction worker and Vietnam War veteran Johnny Ray suffered an ischemic stroke. Due to the injuries he received, he remained connected to an artificial respirator, bedridden and paralyzed throughout his body, able only to twitch the muscles of his face and shoulder. He could answer simple questions by blinking twice instead of yes and once instead of no.

Since Mr. Ray's brain was not capable of transmitting signals to muscles, Kennedy tried connecting his head to electrodes to allow him to communicate. Kennedy and Beckay positioned electrodes in Ray's primary motor cortex, a piece of tissue that is responsible for basic voluntary movement (they found the perfect place to connect by first placing Ray in an MRI machine and asking him to imagine moving his arm, and then placing implant in the place that was brightest on the MRI scans). Once the cones were in place, Kennedy attached them to a radio transmitter implanted on the apex of Ray's skull, just below his scalp.

Kennedy worked with Ray three times a week, trying to decipher the waves emanating from the motor areas of his cerebral cortex so he could convert them into movements. Over time, Rei learned to modulate his implant's signals through thought alone. When Kennedy connected it to a computer, he could use these modulations to control the cursor on the screen (even if only along a line from left to right). Then he jerked his shoulder to click the mouse. With this setup, Rei was able to select letters from the on-screen keyboard and spell words very slowly.

“This is the latest technology, akin to Star Wars,” Buckeye told his fellow neurosurgeons in October 1998. A few weeks later, Kennedy presented the results at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference. It was enough to make an incredible story Johnny Ray - once paralyzed and now typing with the power of his mind - hit newspapers around the world. That December Buckeye and Kennedy were invited to the Good Morning America Show. In January 1999, news of their experiment appeared in The Washington Post …The article began: "When physician and inventor Philip R. Kennedy prepares a paralyzed person to work on a computer with the power of thought, it quickly begins to seem that something of historical significance is happening in this ward, and that Kennedy may become the new Alexander Bell."

After his success with Johnny Ray, it seemed like Kennedy was on the cusp of a major discovery. But when he and Buckeye placed implants in the brains of two more paralyzed patients in 1999 and 2002, their cases did not take the project any further. (One patient's incision failed to close and the implant had to be removed; and another patient's illness progressed so rapidly that Kennedy's notes were useless.) Rey himself died of a cerebral aneurysm in the fall of 2002.

In the meantime, other laboratories have made progress with brain-controlled prostheses, but they used different equipment - usually small plates, about 2 mm2 in area, with dozens of exposed wires connected to the brain. In a format war of small neural implants, Kennedy's tapered glass electrodes increasingly resembled Betamax: it was a viable, promising technology that just wasn't took root.

It wasn't just the hardware that set Kennedy apart from other scientists working on brain-computer interfaces. Most of his colleagues focused on one type of brain-controlled prosthesis, funded by the Pentagon with the help of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency): the implant helped a patient (or a wounded war veteran) to use prosthetic body parts. By 2003, a laboratory at Arizona State University had placed a set of implants in a monkey's brain, allowing the animal to bring a slice of orange to its mouth using a brain-controlled robotic arm. Several years later, researchers at Brown University reported that two paralyzed patients learned to use implants to control robotic arms with such precision that one of them was able to sip coffee from a bottle.

But robotic arms interested Kennedy less than the human voice. Ray's mental cursor showed that paralyzed patients could share their thoughts using the computer, even if those thoughts oozed out like tar in three letters per minute. What if Kennedy could design a brain-computer interface from which generated speech would flow as smoothly as a healthy person?

In many ways, Kennedy challenged a bigger test. Human speech is much more complex than any movement of any part of the body. What seems to us to be a common action - the formulation of words - requires the coordinated contraction and relaxation of more than a hundred different muscles: from the diaphragm to the tongue and lips. To design such a working speech prosthesis as Kennedy envisioned, the scientist had to come up with a way to read all complex combinations of speech sounds from the signals transmitted by a group of electrodes.

So in 2004, Kennedy tried something new by placing his implants in the brain of the last paralyzed patient, a young man named Eric Ramsey, who had a car accident and suffered a brain stem stroke, which Johnny Ray also had. This time, Kennedy and Buckeye did not place tapered electrodes in the part of the motor cortex responsible for the arms and hands. They pushed their wires deeper into the brain tissue, which covers the sides of the brain like a bandage. Deep in this area are neurons that send signals to the muscles of the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. This is where Ramsey placed the implant, 6mm deep.

Using this device, Kennedy taught Ramsey to pronounce simple vowels using a synthesizing device. But Kennedy had no way of knowing what Ramsey was really feeling or exactly what was going on in his head. Ramsey could answer yes-no questions by moving his eyes up or down, but this method soon failed because Ramsey had eye problems. Kennedy also did not have the opportunity to validate his trials with speech. He asked Ramsey to imagine the words while he was recording the signals emanating from his brain, but Kennedy, of course, had no way of knowing if Ramsey was actually "speaking" the words in silence.

Ramsey's health was failing, as was the electronics for the implant in his head. Over time, Kennedy's research program also suffered: his grants were not renewed; he was forced to dismiss his engineers and laboratory technicians; his partner, Bakai, is dead. Kennedy now worked alone or with temporary assistants he hired. (He still spent working hours treating patients at his neurology clinic.) He was confident he would make another discovery if he could find another patient - ideally someone who could speak out loud, at least at first. Testing his implant, for example, on a patient with a neurodegenerative disease such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in the early stages, Kennedy would have a chance to record signals from neurons during a person's speech. So he could see the correspondence between each individual sound and the neural signal. He would have had time to improve his speech prosthesis - to improve his algorithm for decoding brain activity.

But before Kennedy could find such a patient, the Food and Drug Administration withdrew its approval for his implants. Under the new rules, if he cannot demonstrate that they are safe and sterile - a requirement in itself requiring funding that he did not have - he will be prohibited from using his electrodes in public.

But Kennedy's ambitions have not gone away; rather, on the contrary, there have been more of them. In the fall of 2012, he published the science fiction novel 2051, which tells the story of Alpha, a pioneer in neural electrodes, like Kennedy, who had Irish roots and who lived for 107 years as a champion and model of his own technology: a brain implanted in 60 - a centimeter robot with all vital functions. This novel represented a kind of mock-up of Kennedy's dream: his electrodes will not be just a communication tool for paralyzed patients, but will become an important component of a developed cybernetic future in which a person will live as a consciousness in a metal shell.

By the time the novel was published, Kennedy knew what his next step should be. The man made famous by implanting the first brain-computer interface in the human brain will once again do what no one else has done before. He had no other choice. Damn it, I'll do it myself, he thought.

A few days after the operation in Belize, Poughton paid Kennedy one of his daily visits to the inn, where he came to his senses - in a dazzling white villa a block from the Caribbean Sea. Kennedy's recovery was slow: the harder he tried to speak, the worse he succeeded. And as it turned out, no one from all over the country was going to free him from the hands of Poughton and Cervantes. When Poughton called Kennedy's fiancée and informed her of the complications, she didn’t show much sympathy: “I tried to stop him, but he didn’t listen to me.”

However, it was during this meeting that Kennedy's condition improved. It was a hot day, and Poughton brought him lime juice. When the two of them walked out into the garden, Kennedy threw back his head and sighed in satisfaction. “Okay,” he said, taking a sip.

Researcher as guinea pig

In 2014, Phil Kennedy paid a neurosurgeon in Belize for surgery to insert multiple electrodes into his brain and insert a set of electronic components under his scalp. At home, Kennedy used this system to record signals from his own brain in a series of experiments that lasted several months. Its goal: to decipher the neurocode of human speech.

After that, Kennedy still had a hard time choosing names for objects - he could look at a pencil and call it a pen - but his speech became more fluent. As soon as Cervantes realized that his client was already halfway to recovery, he allowed him to return home. His initial fears of irreparable damage to Kennedy did not materialize. The loss of speech that his patient experienced for a short period was only a symptom of postoperative cerebral edema. Now that everything was under control, nothing could happen to him.

A few days later, when Kennedy returned to work and saw patients again, his adventures in Central America were only evidenced by a few pronunciation problems and a shaved, bandaged head, which he sometimes covered with a multicolored Belizean hat. Over the next several months, he took seizure medication and waited for new neurons to grow in the three-cone electrodes inside his skull.

Later that October, Kennedy flew back to Belize for a second operation, this time to attach an electric coil and radio transmitter to wires protruding from his brain. The operation was successful, although both Poughton and Cervantes were struck by the components Kennedy wanted to stuff under his skin. “I was a little surprised at their sheer size,” said Poughton. The electronics looked bulky and old-fashioned. Poughton, who makes drones in his free time, was amazed that someone sewed such mechanisms into their heads: "And I was like," Man, have you heard of microelectronics?"

Kennedy entered the data collection phase for his great experiment as soon as he returned from Belize for the second time. The week before Thanksgiving, he went to his lab and hooked up a magnetic coil and receiver to the polygraph. Then he began to record his brain activity, saying aloud and to himself various phrases, such as “I think she’s having fun at the zoo” and “enjoying work, the boy says wow,” while simultaneously pressing a button to synchronize the words with the recordings of the neural activity of the device like how the director's clapperboard helps synchronize picture and sound.

For the next seven weeks, Kennedy typically saw patients between 8:00 am and 3:30 pm and ran through his own test questionnaires after work in the evening. He is listed as a "PK Contributor" on laboratory records, allegedly for anonymity purposes. From these records, he went to the lab even on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

The experiment did not last as long as he would have liked. The incision in the skin of the skull did not completely tighten due to the protruding electronics. Keeping the implant in his head for only 88 days, Kennedy went under the knife again. But this time he did not fly to Belize: the operation to protect his health did not require FDA approval and was covered by standard insurance.

On January 13, 2015, a local surgeon cut open the skin on Kennedy's skull, cut the wires protruding from his brain, and removed the coil and transmitter. He did not try to find the ends of three tapered electrodes in the cortex. It was safer for Kennedy to leave them in place for the rest of his life, in his brain tissue.

No words! Yes, communication directly through brain waves is possible. But it is incredibly slow. Other speech alternatives are faster.

Kennedy's laboratory is located in a green business park in the suburbs of Atlanta, in a yellow boardwalk. A plaque in a prominent place states that Building B is the location of the Neural Signals Laboratory. One afternoon in May 2015, I met Kennedy there. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and a blue-speckled tie, and his hair was neatly styled and brushed back so that there was a small indentation in his left temple. “It was when he put the electronics in there,” Kennedy explained in a barely noticeable Irish accent. “The abductor touched a nerve that went to my temporalis muscle. I cannot raise that eyebrow. Indeed, I noticed that after the operation, his handsome face became asymmetrical.

Kennedy agrees to show me the footage of his first operation in Belize on an old-fashioned CD. As I mentally prepare myself to see the naked brain of the person standing next to me, Kennedy inserts the disk into a Windows 95 computer. It reacts with a terrible grinding, as if someone is slowly sharpening a knife.

The disk takes a very long time to load - so long that we have time to talk about a very unusual plan for Kennedy's research. He says:

When he goes on to say that the United States was also created by individuals and not by commissions, the drive starts to make noise like a cart rolling down a rocky hill: takh-tarah, takh-tarah. “Come on already, car! Kennedy interrupts his thought, eagerly clicking the icons on the screen. - Lord God, I just put the disc in!"

“I think the supposedly dire dangers of brain surgery are grossly exaggerated,” Kennedy continues. "Neurosurgery is not that difficult." Takh-tarah, takh-tarah, takh-tarah. "If you need to do something for science, just do it and don't listen to skeptics." Finally the video player opens and reveals Kennedy's skull with the skin pushed aside by the clamps. The rattle of the drive is replaced by the strange, screeching sound of metal digging into bone. “Oh, so they're still drilling my head,” he says as his trepanation begins to unfold on the screen.

“Just helping life support patients and paralytics is one thing, but we don't stop there,” Kennedy says, moving on to the bigger picture. - First of all, we must restore speech. The next goal is to restore movement, and a lot of people are working on it - everything will work out in the end, they just need better electrodes. And the third goal is to start improving normal people."

He rewinds the video forward to the next section, where we see his naked brain - a shiny patch of tissue with blood vessels covering the top. Cervantes sticks an electrode into Kennedy's nerve jelly and starts pulling on the wire. Every now and then a hand in a blue glove touches the bark with a sponge to stop the trickle of blood.

“Your brain will become infinitely more powerful than our current brains,” Kennedy continues as his brain pulsates on the screen. "We will extract the brains and connect them to small computers that will do everything for us, and the brains will continue to live."

“Are you waiting for this?” I ask.

“Wow, why not,” he replies. "This is how we evolve."

Sitting in Kennedy's office and looking at his old monitor, I'm not sure I agree with him. Technology seems to always find new and more successful ways to disappoint us, even becoming more advanced every year. My smartphone can form words and sentences from my awkward finger swipes. But I still curse him for his mistakes. (Damn you autocorrect!) I know there's a better tech on the horizon than Kennedy's shaking computer, his bulky electronics, and my Google Nexus 5 phone. But would people want to trust her with their brains?

On the screen, Cervantes plugs another wire into Kennedy's brain. “The surgeon is actually very good, hands-on,” Kennedy said when we first started watching the video. But now he's distracted from our conversation about evolution and gives orders to the screen like a sports fan in front of the TV.“He shouldn't come in at that angle,” he explains to me and turns back to his computer. - Press harder! Okay, that's enough, that's enough. Don't push anymore!"

Invasive brain implants are becoming obsolete these days. Major sponsors of neuroprosthetics research prefer thick layers of 8x8 or 16x16 electrodes applied to exposed brain tissue. This technique, called electrocorticography or ECoG, provides a more blurry and impressionistic picture of activity than the Kennedy method: instead of examining individual neurons, it examines the overall picture - or, if you prefer, the general opinion - hundreds of thousands of neurons at a time.

ECoG proponents claim that the traces of this picture can give the computer enough data to decipher the intentions of the brain - even the words and syllables that a person intends to voice. The blurring of this data can even be useful: it is not necessary to pay attention to one fake violinist when a whole symphony of neurons is required to move the vocal cords, lips and tongue. Also, the ECoG layer can remain under the skull for a very long time without harm to the wearer, perhaps even longer than the Kennedy cone electrodes. “We don’t know the exact deadline, but it’s probably measured in years or even decades,” says Edward Chang, a surgeon and neurophysiologist at the University of San Francisco, who has become one of the leading experts in his field and began work on his own speech prosthesis.

Last summer, while Kennedy was collecting data for a presentation at a meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, another laboratory published a new procedure for using computers and cranial implants to decipher human speech. It was developed at the Watsward Center, New York, called Brain to Text, in collaboration with scientists from Germany and the Albanian Medical Center, and tested on seven epileptic patients with implanted ECoG layers. Each patient was asked to read aloud excerpts from the Gettysburg Address, the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, part of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, and an anonymous fanfiction on the TV show Charmed while their brain activity was being recorded. Scientists then used ECoG traces to translate neural data into speech sounds and convey it to a predictive language model - equipment that works a bit like the speech recognition technology in your phones - that could identify words based on what was said earlier.

Most surprisingly, the system seemed to work. The computer produced fragments of text that were very close to Humpty Dumpty, the Charmed Ones fanfiction and other works. “We made contact,” said Gerwin Schalck, an ECoG expert and co-author of the study. "We showed that the system was not just re-creating speech by chance." Work on early speech prostheses showed that individual vowels and consonants could be identified in the brain; now Schalk's group has proven that it is possible - albeit with difficulty and with a high probability of errors - to move from reading brain activity to full sentences.

But even Schalk admits it was a proof of concept at best. It will take a long time, he said, before someone starts transmitting their thoughts to the computer - and even longer before someone sees real benefits. Schalck advises comparing this to speech recognition equipment that has been in use for decades. “In 1980 it was about 80% accurate, and 80% percent is a pretty remarkable achievement from an engineering standpoint. But it is useless in the real world. I still don’t use Siri because it’s not good enough.”

At the same time, there are much simpler and more functional ways to help people with speech problems. If the patient is able to move a finger, they can beat back messages with Morse code. If the patient is able to move her eyes, she can use an eye tracking application on her smartphone. “These methods are terribly cheap,” explains Schalk. "And you want to replace one of these with a $ 10,000 brain implant with a vague chance of success?"

I'm trying to combine this idea with all the amazing cyborg demos that have been in the media for years - people drinking coffee with mechanical arms and getting brain implants in Belize. The future always seemed at arm's length, as it did half a century ago when Jose Delgado entered the arena. Soon we will all become brains in computers, soon our thoughts and feelings will be uploaded to the Internet, and soon the states of our psyche will be general and analyzed. We can already see the outlines of this frightening and alluring place on the horizon - but the closer we are to it, the more distant it seems.

For example, Kennedy is tired of this Zeno paradox in human progress; he doesn't have the patience to follow the future. Therefore, he is frantically striving forward - to prepare us for the world of "2051", which for Delgado was just around the corner.

When Kennedy finally presented the findings of his self-study - first at the May symposium at Emory University, and then at the Neuroscience Society conference in October - some of his colleagues were hesitant to show support. Taking the risk, working alone and with his own money, Chang said, Kennedy was able to create a unique recording of language in the brain: “This is a very valuable dataset, regardless of whether he uncovers the secret of speech prostheses. This is truly an amazing event. " His other colleagues were intrigued, albeit somewhat puzzled: in an area constantly bounded by ethical barriers, a man they had known and loved for years had taken a daring and unexpected step to bring brain research closer to its intended purpose. Yet other scientists were horrified. As Kennedy himself said: "Someone considered me a madman, someone - a brave one."

In Georgia, I asked Kennedy if he would repeat the experiment again. "On myself?" - he clarified. “No, I shouldn't repeat that. In the same hemisphere, at least. " Taps himself on the skull, which still hides the tapered electrodes. Then, as if excited by the idea of connecting implants to the other hemisphere, he begins to make plans to create new electrodes and more complex implants, to get FDA approval to continue working, to find grants to pay for everything.

“No, I shouldn't be doing this in the other hemisphere,” he says in the end. “I don’t have the equipment for this anyway. Ask me this question when it's ready. This is what I learned from my time with Kennedy and from his vague answer - it is not always possible to plan the route of the road to the future. Sometimes you need to build the road itself first.