MIND-controlling implants, plug-in memory chips for people, artificial brains made entirely of silicon: it is no accident that such inventions have become staples of science fiction. In one way or another, they all offer a handy way to raise impossibly big questions about the nature of consciousness, free will, individual identity and what it means to be human.
At first glance, the news that scientists in California have built a silicon-chip replica of the brain鈥檚 hippocampus seems to raise similar questions, except that this device is real (see 鈥淭he world鈥檚 first brain prosthesis鈥�). The project鈥檚 highly respectable, if ambitious, aim is to develop the chip into a prosthetic aid for people with damaged hippocampuses who cannot lay down new memories. Yet some will inevitably see this as a step towards a bleak future of high-tech mind manipulation, improvement or coercion. At a visceral level such fears are understandable. The indiscriminate use of electroshock therapy, lobotomies and sedatives over the past century has cast a long shadow over medical science and its competence to intervene ethically in the workings of the human mind. And as an ongoing debate about psychiatric drugs and the law shows, we still can鈥檛 agree where treatment stops and coercion begins (see 鈥淢adness on trial鈥�).
In general, however, the hype we hear about both the threat and promise of the 鈥渘ew brain sciences鈥� is embarrassingly overblown. Neuroscience is actually progressing rather slowly. We may be able to describe the physical contents of the brain 鈥� its neurons, receptors and so on 鈥� in great detail, and even mimic them, but we still have almost no idea how they generate thoughts, a sense of self or personality. Intervening, whether with drugs or implants, will always bring risks. But for now these stem from ignorance of how the brain works, rather than any newly acquired sci-fi powers of neural manipulation.
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