I just saw an art­icle about how a brain pace­maker revived a man who was a ‘veget­able’ for 6 years. Pre­vi­ously deep brain stim­u­la­tion (DBS) was used to treat Par­kin­son dis­ease, clin­ical depres­sion, etc. While brain stim­u­la­tion as concept is around since 1940s, until now there was not enough know­ledge and tech­niques to identify where in the brain con­fuse or abnor­mal sig­nals are gen­er­ated, nor how to implant at mil­li­meter accur­acy elec­trodes near these areas. Note that this is quite dif­fer­ent as the his­tor­ical brain stim­u­la­tion, is not just to excite the brain, but to re-​tune and re-​modulate sig­nals. As for the side effects, lit­er­at­ure reports: apathy, hal­lu­cin­a­tions, com­puls­ive gambling, hypersexuality, cog­nit­ive dys­func­tion and depres­sion. If DBS could revive a veget­at­ive human, it would be very inter­est­ing what it can do on a (clin­ical) nor­mal human being, just think of:

• Pen­field mood organ of ‘Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick
• Tek a com­pu­ter­ised mind-​altering drug, from ‘Tek­War’ by Wil­liam Shatner
• memory implants as in ‘Johnny Mne­monic’ by Wil­liam Gibson
• Sim­S­tim enter­tain­ment and cyber­deck con­soles as in ‘Neur­oman­cer’ also by Wil­liam Gibson

If you think it will take ages to get there, just bypass the nor­mal lengthy treat­ment adop­tion in west­ern coun­tries, get your elec­trodes implanted some­where in Honk Kong, a smuggled brain pace­maker and load your favour­ite rus­sian firm­ware on it. Once you have the elec­trodes the rest is just as Steve Jobs said about the iPhone and the iPod: “it is just soft­ware.” Oh, wait — be care­ful what you load on your brain, use a bar­rier maze to pro­tect you from ghost hack­ing and beware of black ICE when you go online.