On the Merge of Brain-Machine Interfaces: The Real Story of "The Terminal Man"
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Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Human Brain Research Center, Japan
“The Terminal Man (1972)” is one of Sci-fi stories written by Michael Crichton and mode into film in 1974. Harry Benson who suffered from a kind of “seizures” with violent and aggressive behaviors after a traffic accident. To control this seizure, neurosurgeons implanted a brain pacemaker. To prevent seizures, the devise was set to stimulate the brain when the computer senses a seizure coming on. Unexpectedly, Benson is learning to initiate seizures involuntarily because the electrical shocks and seizures caused a feeling of pleasure in his brain, which leads to him having more frequent seizures after his surgery. He escaped from the ward and returned to the hospital to make a revenge on hospital staffs, because he had a delusion and believed that machines are in hostile competition against humans and that machines will ultimately take over the world. To avoid spoiling the ending of the film, I will stop “The Terminal Man” story here.
However, this story is based on the real experimental therapy in 1960s performed by two neurosurgeons (Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin) in Boston to cure “dyscontrol syndrome” that they believed as the fundamental cause of human violence and crimes. The outcomes were later gave rise to a scandal in both the medical and ethical sense
In this presentation, I will introduce their therapeutic experiments in the context of neuroscience of emotion at that time to draw some useful lessons for neuroethics or the bioethics of neuroscience.
Conference:
2015 International Workshop on Clinical Brain-Machine Interfaces (CBMI2015), Tokyo, Japan, 13 Mar - 15 Mar, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral presentation / lecture
Topic:
Clinical Brain-Machine Interfaces
Citation:
Mima
T
(2015). On the Merge of Brain-Machine Interfaces: The Real Story of "The Terminal Man".
Conference Abstract:
2015 International Workshop on Clinical Brain-Machine Interfaces (CBMI2015).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.218.00026
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Received:
23 Apr 2015;
Published Online:
29 Apr 2015.
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Correspondence:
MD, PhD. Tatsuya Mima, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Human Brain Research Center, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan, t-mima@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp