www.cracked.com/blog/a-wo...-has-existed-since-1960s/

A highlight to entice you further:

'Delgado could use his device to make people feel happy or sad, sure, but it was more than those base emotions. The states of happiness could range from "feeling good" to "slight euphoria" to "the euphoria was beyond natural limits."... He could also manipulate the areas of the brain responsible for arousal, and bring people damn close to climax (not like, manually; using the stimoceiver). The dude had mastered rudimentary mind control and could give people boners at the press of a button, all in an era when you had to spin the wheel from The Price Is Right to enter one number into a telephone.'

Sounds like exactly the type of device you mad hypnotists would want to get your hands on. I hope we one day get to see the line 'your electricity is stronger than my will' used in a picture on the Hub :)

That's fascinating. Truly bizarre that no state attempted to keep using his research, though. Maybe the US would have had better results with MK Ultra if they'd used actual mind-control chips, instead of LSD.

Im a little off put by the lack of sources, save for the video?

The topic seems worth diving into outside of a cracked article.

Here's a tribute to Jose Delgado from Scientific American, which seems to back up the article. blogs.scientificamerican....-pioneer-of-mind-control/

I think the reason it didn't go further was probably because it was not practical for long term use. I mean, brains are not designed to be filled with wires, despite what we see on the Hub :P

Well, it's body control and electrical signals. From what I gathered, it seems like the signals relayed, were they even real, would have to be continuously supplied, and could only manipulate very basic functions or behaviors. Eliciting things like hunger and arousal are generally understood as easy, from a biomechanical standpoint, in neuroscience. It was possible to probe the open brain for those effects even before this Delgado guy came around. He just made it the system compact for its time, if he actually did anything. Sure, moving limbs and stuff is cool, but without any more tangible evidence, I find it incredibly hard to believe he's any more believable than the guy in Europe who claims he can do a head/brain transplant. It seems that all this evidence was just what Delgado himself said he could do. And realistically, the bull or monkey could have easily been trained to repeat behaviors vaguely in line with his remote or subtle cues. When he turns away more patients than he accepts, you gotta know his practice isn't right.
I mean, there IS electro-convulsive therapy for epileptics, but doctors still don't fully understand how it works. They get the surface level, but the deeper comprehension is still not fully understood.
Not to mention the horror that is electroshock "therapy" for asexual and homosexual individuals, which is about the same as what this Delgado guy claims. It's broadly targeted electrical signals that "reset" certain segments of the brain to activate. It's arguable whether those shocks cause increased chemical flow, or increased blood flow, either of which could probably have a massive effect for a short period of time. This could be used to achieve short-term behaviors, such as calming or inciting rage, elicit feelings of adoration, or making an individual think they're hungry when they're not.

Reading further, it seems like half his research was just electrical shocks used for classical conditioning. Way ahead of its time, if real, sure... but still just classical conditioning (citing the monkey he claims to have calmed via shocks when his device detects certain behaviors). Basically, the censoring chip they put in Cartman's head in South Park.

I think the only thing he's said I can actually not call bullshit on is when he said "... Where is the area of the brain essential to consciousness? That’s a silly question. The whole brain is involved in everything!” because that's generally known to be true.


/rant

I've been a fan of Jose Delgado's work for a long time. I used to work in the medical field and kept up with various information about brain implants along the way. I never got into neurology proper, but I know some about the history of it.

Delgado was basically the first, but there were also experiments in the 50's and 60's on prisoners by other scientists. They were highly unethical and I wish I could remember the names of the scientists involved. Some of them involved things like giving someone a burst of pleasure every few seconds, for instance, to quell violent behavior.

The implants never disappeared and the knowledge didn't disappear. The modern brain implants dedicated to "deep brain stimulation" are used to treat various conditions. They're vastly more advanced than just putting wire in your head and delivering shocks - that doesn't work forever.

They can do all the same things old brain implants could, though, and do have to be calibrated in some cases so they don't activate random emotions or mental states.

In other words mind control technology already does exist in the modern day. It's just:

1: Used only for medical applications
2: Requires a skilled team of medical professionals to implant
3: Requires a cooperative patient who helps the team by communicating what is happening to them and changes to their mental state as surgery occurs.

Even if you do everything right, of course, brain sugery is brain surgery. You risk killing the person or lobotomizing them even if you do everything right with the best intentions and full cooperation.

In other words, it's completely impractical as a means of mind control on anyone unwilling. You could certainly play brain butcher but you'd almost certainly just kill the patient. There's much easier ways to coerce people into doing what you want, so this potential thankfully hasn't really been developed.

The truth is that the brain is a complex system of organs that live in one place. Each one has a different function, and if damaged or stimulated they can have wildly different effects. It's not any stranger than playing around with other organs like your heart or liver and it having an effect on your body as a whole. We understand it very well now, but practical mind control technology is thankfully still impossible.

In the future however, that's not going to be the case. New less invasive methods for brain surgery are being developed and many technologies that could make it practical are on the horizon. I can't say how far off it is, though.

Just remember first and foremost: We might like this, but we're not the ones that will get it first. The ones that get it first will be the rich guys and the Chinese government, and nobody wants to see what happens when they've got it. Though the wrong one of us getting it first would be reaaaally bad.