Viva — Considering the CNRS’ Revolutionary Neural Implant
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
The role of the artist or mediator tends to be of a darkening vision; as crevasses of insight are found or otherwise fissured into the landscape of an issue, a good commentator — or else a lucky one — finds that it is their turn in the mines, as miner or canary. The return journey from the deepest considerations of the human estate or circumstance has often yielded to experienced writers the richest of stories to report back on.
Then there are some chasms of experience so deep that writing has neglected them, either because they do not spare enough of a human to return and provide account, or are just too unimaginable for the mercied. Imagine being awoken from a sleep that took you at 20 and dropped you off at 35. Perhaps sleep is too light even as an analogical term, just as it is scientifically inaccurate; imagine being brought back to life after 15 years in a vegetative hibernation, a state of ‘wakeful unresponsiveness’. You may find as I did that you cannot imagine it. We needn’t; such an ambiguous miracle as this is what, ostensibly, Angela Sirigu and her team in the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Bron have conjured and contrived from the circuitry of a groundbreaking new neural implant.
Perhaps never has such a breakthrough spoken to both sides of the unimagibable as Sirigu’s has. The revival of those laid vegetative by dint of a damaged vagus was long thought impossible once the vegetative term goes through the 12 month barrier. The first test subject of this scheme, his identity as yet undisclosed, has been recalled to a reactive life from a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Under the influence of an implant that stimulates the vagus nerve and activates neuroendocrinal response, he could track movement with his eyes, demonstrated enough awareness to gauge depth and maintain attention while being read to, and, most overwhelmingly, was brought to tears upon hearing the music of Jean-Jacques Goldman, his favourite artist. As enormous as this is for those in PVS, this development could potentially have wide-ranging and even deeper significance for those who suffer from less universally affective neural disorders such as epilepsy and depression, and those who suffer beyond the brain too (superventricular tachycardia). Some have been heard going so far as to suggest how such an implant could festively affect the already fully-conscious and able.
The events at the CNRS cued great excitement among specialists in the field; that ‘locked in’ syndrome may finally be facing a progressive solution. Somewhere in the middle distance behind this initial clamour — closer than can usually be observed attending such medical breakthroughs as this one — ethical questions were already beginning to rear.
This man, should we ever have reason or means to come to know his identity, is not only a profound case for the medical sciences, but for the humanities also. This is a person who has begun to make the journey back from a place of which we have little record, and for which he himself has no meaningful map. Those who read this as healthy individuals are in possession of a blessing that goes beyond the mere inner procession of their healthy forms; they are blessed by their reprieve from the knowledge of a suffering that spirits sense and reasoning away. There are elements in reports of the reaction of previously locked-in patients to suggest that the vegetative condition freezes the patient’s responsive mind to some degree, as if a part of a natural cryonic practice; that our nightmare of an endless living oblivion in vegetation may be just that, and that our selves are not obliterated in the long, wakeful ‘rest’, merely preserved. Sirigu’s patient has only been recalled to ‘minimal consciousness’; it will take the discovery and implementation of many more stages of rehabilitation before his own testament could become anything more than the vaguest of possibilities.
But here we are following our scientific instincts up a path that, to an extent, contravenes nature every bit as thoroughly as we ever have before. PVS has long been treated as a kind of foreshadowing of death itself, insuperable and pointless to fight against; many of its sufferers have historically been euthanized through passive neglect of the patient. What we almost certainly have, in the subject of Sirigu’s breakthrough, is a man who is, whatever else he may be otherwise, now aware of the degree to which he has suffered severe injury. The spiritual within us that welcomes mortality as natural may decry such inventions as that which has given the patient only the smallest measure of agency. Presuming his recovery were to continue apace; could he be expected to learn command of his body once again? Would such a thing be possible? Grassroots commentators have noted that they have had to learn bodily command again after the merest of weeks in a coma, after suffering sepsis; not surprisingly, they found a term of 15 years without consciousness far beyond the limits of even their strong basis for empathy.
Does this man’s condition, does the miracle of its development, lay beyond our wish to hope? Would we too have the strength to wish for a return to life with awareness that 15 years of it had passed us by; that we had become a desolate orbital figure of our family’s most sternly tested intellect in that meantime? Should science here take stock of its paradigms and for once bow to the satisfaction of human banality? That which, we’d do well to be reminded, keeps all but those of us built on the most heroic scale on the line of sanity? Or should scientific understanding maintain its perennial course and show us how our bounds of humanity can be enlarged, and scoff as it always has, the only friend humanity has ever truly had in the pitilessly indifferent dimensions of the natural and physical?
It is this, far beyond that which can be accomplished with a hyperlink or an AR-enabled phone, that show us the distance we are really being taken by technology. This article is far more dense in question than it is in answering; that’s because these are questions we’d do well to ask and continue to ask for generations, until generations satisfy them. CNRS’ neural revival is not merely a gift to an individual in pain; it is, quite possibly, the deepest and most unenviable of demands, a test the likes of which would make most recoil at the thought.
There is a pragmatic compromise to be entertained here too; it speaks very ill for entire disciplines of science if this man’s first wish, upon first being able to receive and transmit communications, were to be euthanized. It is not at all unimaginable; no scientist would enjoy hearing it, either for its hypothetical definition of a boundary of human resistance, or for its impact on fields of study that keep so many intellectually, emotionally and remuneratively fulfilled. It would be no comfort either for those who have toiled in unimaginable depths each day and night, wishing on the recovery of their unresponsive injured loved one; for many it is simply impossible to wish for the death of a beloved, regardless of the degree to which reason, logistics, even pure compassion might suggest it as a course of action.
Science uses us as its testing ground just as any of nature’s familiars would. The truth abides that one of the only men who can tell us very much about any of these things we have entertained has just been brought back to some measure of life. How better for him to start than with a song? Whether it is a likelihood to be toasted or not, he is sure to be the first of many.
Part of Wonk Bridge’s Homo Digitalis series, coming soon
