Science: New Horizons

“I am deaf . . . ready to undergo any treatment . . . willing to put myself and my body at your disposal . . . this on the understanding that anything that might happen to me, even death, would be my own responsibility.”

This impassioned plea was received last week by Neuroanatomist Wendell J. S. Krieg, of the Northwestern University Medical School at Chicago. The sender was a 66-year-old Montreal widow who had just read newspaper reports of Krieg’s paper, New Horizons in Brain Research. The Montreal widow was not alone. By week’s end, 43-year-old Neuroanatomist Krieg had received nearly 100 similar letters from blind, deaf and crippled people from Constantinople to California.

Unfortunately, most of the would-be guinea pigs had read into Krieg’s cautiously worded study a promise that was not there—i.e., the prospect of an immediate cure for their specific afflictions. What the carefully qualified report did suggest was the exciting possibility that experiments in the direct application of electrical stimuli to the brain or peripheral nerves may one day enable some of the blind to see, the deaf to hear and the lame to walk again—after a fashion, anyway.

Stimulated Sight. Scientists have long known that the eyes and the ears are not the actual instruments of sight and hearing, but highly selective transmission stations which pick up light and sound waves, translate them into electrical impulses, and carry them to the visual and auditory areas of the brain. In the brain, the impulses are finally translated into the sensations that are recognized as anything from a Grandma Moses painting to the radio-chant of the tobacco auctioneer. Most blindness or deafness and many kinds of paralysis are caused by the failure of the transmission station—the eyes, the ears or the nerves of a crippled limb.

Krieg’s research indicates that even when the transmission stations are permanently damaged, the brain is still capable of receiving and translating electrical impulses artificially applied. Thus, Krieg says, if a certain point at the back of the brain is stimulated, the patient will “see” a flash of light in a precise part of his visual field.*

Switchboard Movement. What Krieg cautiously proposes is a lengthy inquiry into the possibility of building substitute transmission stations, i.e., electrical apparatuses which would be worn, perhaps, on the head, through which controlled and meaningful signals could be sent electrically to the brain of a blinded man. A group of electrical contacts touching the surface of the subject’s brain, says Dr. Krieg, might enable him to read. A pattern of such impulses coming through the electrodes of the apparatus might be controlled to appear as words, moving across the blind man’s visual consciousness like the letters of an advertising sign.

Dr. Krieg wants to try the same technique with deafness and paralysis. In some kinds of paralysis, he theorizes, the patient could be equipped with an apparatus (as a substitute transmission station for damaged nerves), worn at the hip or knee and turned on or off by the patient. A manually operated switchboard might select such a desired motion as walking.

Before any real and lasting benefits for humans can be realized in this field, Krieg warns, man must first enlarge the horizons of his knowledge of the brain itself, until he knows exactly what part each tiny area plays in motor activity or sensory perception. After that, some of the great possibilities might become a reality for the lame, the deaf and the blind.

* For similar studies on stimulation of the parts of the brain controlling the functions of internal organs, Dr. Walter Rudolph Hess (TIME, Nov. 7) received this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine.