Can you control an animals movement with electric impulses to the brain and muscles?

Submitted by Noobstompa6000 t3_1172srs in askscience

A kinda morbid questing, since i plan on studying electrical engineering this question has been bugging me for some time. If i was to take like a brain of idk a human or a chimp and attach tiny electrodes to specific parts could i control it and move its limbs? Would this work on a dead person? Or maybe just connecting the electrodes to the muscles, like that one Micheal Reeves video. I know this sounds dumb and edgy but yeah i need to know whenever or not this is possible

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Oftwicke t1_j9b5q3i wrote

That would be very complicated, but essentially you could. You can already use electrodes to stimulate muscles for healthcare, re-education after surgery, or for bodybuilding. What you're suggesting through the brain is perhaps technically possible but impossible with modern science. Better to target motor neurons. Of course if you want it to make a normal, natural movement, you'll need to do the brain's work, and send just the correct amount of energy at just the correct frequency, which is an action potential. Ideally you'd find a way to stimulate the nerves directly like the brain or other nerves would rather than with electricity, you'd use neurotransmitters, but at this point you're just replacing the brain with a computer. This is complicated but not technically impossible. We just never made and probably never will make something that does that, and if we did it would take very, very long and doubtlessly we'd learn a lot of new things about nerves along the way that would be roadblocks for a time

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fragmentOutOfOrder t1_j9daa61 wrote

This is not dumb and is indeed a very active field of research in the broader sense of how do we control/use our own limbs and what happens when the natural pathways stop working. The research tends to focus on how to deal with living humans and their brain to muscle to computer interfaces, but the applications are broad. This fellow is particularly prominent in the field, Jose Carmena.

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barbarian818 t1_j9dr51b wrote

Yes. In fact, in some ways it's already been done. Back in the early 60s Dr Jose Delgado did experiments with brain implants. In his most famous experiment, he implanted a radio receiver into the brain of a bull wired to very precise locations in the bull's brain.

The result was that he could get into the ring with that bull, get it mad enough to charge him like in a bullfight, press a button and make the bull totally lose interest in charging.

Basically, he could use a remote control to turn off anger.

In I.T. circles there is an old adage "always mount a scratch monkey". But not everyone knows its origin. Back in the late 70s, U of Toronto researchers had a monkey trained to swim, use a scuba breath regulator and so on. Mable the monkey also had many electrodes implanted in her brain so they could record the signals that her autonomic system created.

Note that this was research using 70s era hardware and a lot of kludged together signal amplifiers and processors all feeding into basically a mini mainframe in another room.

At some point, the computer Mable was hooked up to developed a fault. The manufacturer field technician got there and ran some diagnostic tests against the hard disk. However, this also meant the same diagnostic commands were also being amplified and fed into Mable's brain.

They basically tried to run a format and reinstall on a monkey's brain stem. Mable died in a massive seizure.

More recently, there have been several efforts to help paraplegics walk again by bypassing the damaged part of their spine. Think splicing a broken wire with a patch cord. Some approaches use wires and chips, others try growing new nerves and implanting them at the site of the injury. There has been just enough success to justify further research but not a complete cure.

So from a hardware perspective, we totally could remotely control another person. But getting the exact spot, would be enormously challenging. Achieving coordinated movement would take a huge jump in technique. About the best we could do mentally is turn moods on or off. We don't know enough about cognition to actually change thought.

Now; as for the challenge of controlling a dead body. Luigi Galvani back in the 1700s successfully made severed frog legs twitch and jump in response to an electric impulse. But a key fact is that he was using very recently killed frogs in his experiments. (Publication of his results was a big part of the inspiration for Frankenstein)

But muscle movement is not a purely electrical phenomenon. Electric signals act as the catalyst for chemical reactions. Some of these chemicals get used up with each movement. Living tissue just replenishes them. (A supply of oxygen and glucose is crucial) ALL of the chemicals involved start to degrade after death. Within a very short time, the chemicals no longer respond to electrical stimulation.

This is why it is physically impossible for zombies from dead bodies to exist. Zombies as living beings infected with a sentience destroying disease is at least possible, albeit wildly improbable, at least as an overnight phenomenon.

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