The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain—And Almost Lost His Mind

The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain—And Almost Lost His Mind

Dan Winters

Meanwhile, the surgeon’s mind kept circling back to the same uneasy thought: “I shouldn’t have done this.”

When Kennedy grabbed a pen and tried to write a message, it came out as random letters scrawled on a page. “I thought we had damaged him for life,” Powton says.

Kennedy was himself once a famous neurologist. In the late 1990s he made global headlines for implanting several wire electrodes in the brain of a paralyzed man and then teaching the locked-in patient to control a computer cursor with his mind. Kennedy called his patient the world’s “first cyborg,” and the press hailed his feat as the first time a person had ever communicated through a brain-computer interface. From then on, Kennedy dedicated his life to the dream of building more and better cyborgs and developing a way to fully digitize a person’s thoughts.

Now it was the summer of 2014, and Kennedy had decided that the only way to advance his project was to make it personal. For his next breakthrough, he would tap into a healthy human brain. His own...