[cf141q5325]

The headline is quite a bit of clickbait. And the frame of the article is aimed at clicks and keeping the reader hooked by creating the impression he had made some monumental mistake.

He had some brain swelling shortly after the surgery. Thats it.

Still great to have posted it, amazing guy

[rjh29]

Thanks, headlines like these I always go straight to the comments to find out why the headline is totally wrong. It's quite satisfying.

If you like this sort of thing check out the 'savedyouaclick' subreddit for more!

[mwattsun]

This is the greatest thing about Hacker News in my opinion. Obviously, there are limits on what I know so I depend on people here to help me out. Thank you! That said, I've learned that headlines are often not written by the authors of the article, but the magazine editor to drive clicks.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.”

Gell-Mann Amnesia

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

[cf141q5325]

Its also a great danger. I didnt aim at giving a summary, i just called out the frame the author created. Something that "fao_" pointed out well when coming to the authors conclusion as well.

[mwattsun]

I wasn't responding to the contents of the article, but the usefulness of Hacker News as a reality check.

I skimmed the article. It's from 2016 so it's outdated and doesn't include comments about Elon Musk's Neuralink

[fao_]

Have you tried reading the article? Because he literally gave himself severe brain damage / trauma from the operation:

    """
    At first the procedure that Kennedy hired Cervantes to
    perform—the implantation of a set of glass-and-gold-wire
    electrodes beneath the surface of his own brain—seemed to go
    quite well. There wasn’t much bleeding during the surgery. But
    his recovery was fraught with problems. Two days in, Kennedy was
    sitting on his bed when, all of a sudden, his jaw began to grind
    and chatter, and one of his hands began to shake. Powton worried
    that the seizure would break Kennedy’s teeth.

    His language problems persisted as well. “He wasn’t making
    sense anymore,” Powton says. “He kept apologizing, ‘Sorry,
    sorry,’ because he couldn’t say anything else.” Kennedy
    could still utter syllables and a few scattered words, but he
    seemed to have lost the glue that bound them into phrases and
    sentences. When Kennedy grabbed a pen and tried to write a
    message, it came out as random letters scrawled on a page.

    At first Powton had been impressed by what he called Kennedy’s
    Indiana Jones approach to science: tromping off to Belize,
    breaking the standard rules of research, gambling with his own
    mind. Yet now here he was, apparently locked in. “I thought we
    had damaged him for life,” Powton says. “I was like, what have
    we done?”
    """


    """
    Kennedy’s recovery had continued to go poorly: The more effort
    he put into talking, the more he seemed to get locked up. And no
    one from the US, it became clear, was coming to take the doctor
    off Powton and Cervantes’ hands.

    """

From that description:

    - Motor control impairment
    - Extreme language impairment to the point that subject is unable to write coherently
    - Literal fucking seizures
    - Possible prefrontal damage

While it was just "postoperative brain swelling" and the brain "can heal". It's unlikely that he made a completely full recovery, indeed later in the article it is alluded that he has permanent motor damage:

    """
    When I meet Kennedy there one day in May 2015, [...] Kennedy says
    with a slight Irish accent [...] “The retractor pulled on a
    branch of the nerve that went to my temporalis muscle. I can’t
    lift this eyebrow.” Indeed, I notice that the operation has left
    his handsome face with an asymmetric droop.

    """

And likely, prefrontal damage from his inability to refrain from commenting the first thing on his mind[0]:

    """
    Kennedy said when we first started watching the video. But now he
    deviates from our discussion about evolution to bark orders at the
    screen, like a sports fan in front of a TV. “No, don’t do
    that, don’t lift it up,” Kennedy says to the pair of hands
    operating on his brain. “It shouldn’t go in at that angle,”
    he explains to me before turning back to the computer. “Push it
    in more than that!” he says. “OK, that’s plenty, that’s
    plenty. Don’t push anymore!”
    """

The reporter later refers to his "garbled answer", indicating that he still has language formation problems, and that actually seems well-indicated from the snippets of quotes we see from him.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_injury

[derangedHorse]

The original commentator's point still stands. The initial post-operative complications were chalked up to brain swelling in the end and the lasting damage was fairly minor for the procedure being conducted. All mentions of fear from the operation were attributed to the surgeon performing the operation rather than Dr.Kennedy who was undergoing the surgery.

Another thing to take note of is that Kennedy mentioned the permanent damage had occurred "when he was putting the electronics in", which implies it happened during the second operation (the first operation with the seemingly severe symptoms were for the electrodes).

No where in the article does it indicate his mind was ever close to being lost besides the headline. It even took note to say he stayed in a villa during recovery which the surgeon made daily visits to (with the implication being a hospital would have been best for around-the-clock monitoring if his well-being was truly in danger).

Also, it's against Hacker News guidelines to ask whether someone read the article or not:

'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[cf141q5325]

>While it was just "postoperative brain swelling" and the brain "can heal".

As i said, brain swelling from the surgery. The article first gave me the impression it was because of what was implanted, ie his implant not working. Which wasnt the case, it worked and he collected his dataset with his ancient hardware till it had to be removed again.

I indeed read over the part of the sentence with the facial nerve though. His wording seemed fine though, i have met quite a few people who talk like this. People who go to Belize for brainsurgery are expected to be a bit eccentric.

[fao_]

> As i said, brain swelling from the surgery.

Which constitutes brain trauma!

> Which wasnt the case, it worked and he collected his dataset with his ancient hardware till it had to be removed again.

Unfortunately as others have pointed out, his dataset is pretty worthless and the claims around it have been largely unsubstantiated. From your earlier post,

> And the frame of the article is aimed at clicks and keeping the reader hooked by creating the impression he had made some monumental mistake.

IMHO he had, and if you ask literally any neurosurgeon or anyone working in neuroscience I'm willing to bet that they would say the same.

[fundamental]

> his dataset is pretty worthless and the claims around it have been largely unsubstantiated.

The really sad part of it is that with fairly minor changes it could have been a landmark dataset IMO. Having better recording equipment, a lower noise floor environment for data collection (e.g. don't run fluorescent lights while recording), having precise timestamps integrated into the recording, better temporal separation between recording of various phrases, adding simultaneous EMG/EEG, etc would have resolved quite a few data related issues. It's a unique situation (for good reason), but bad data...

From seeing the data, I suspect the electrode placement was in a good enough location that novel things could have been done with a cleaner data source. I guess the major limiting factor is that absolutely no one would want to be involved with the project at that stage. What sort of IRB would approve any of this? Better data would answer some key questions that could generalize to lock-in patients (theoretically) and worst case it would provide a strong indicator that no significant BCI can be made for the task given the electrode placement.

[cf141q5325]

>Which constitutes brain trauma!

Yes, i got that from your post the first time. Like i said, brainswelling from the surgery. It read to me as if the article wanted to create another picture. The author not mentioning up front that it was only the probes that got implanted left to me the impression that the speech problems were due to an error with the implant. Which it wasnt.

>Unfortunately as others have pointed out, his dataset is pretty worthless and the claims around it have been largely unsubstantiated.

One said the approach was worthless, because there exist better (less invasive and cheaper) approaches using eye movement tracking apps today. It was also as the reason given why nobody else researched into this. That wasnt however aimed at the dataset. The feedback to the dataset started at

>When Kennedy finally did present the data that he’d gathered from himself ...

Notably >By taking on the risk himself, by working alone and out-of-pocket, Kennedy managed to create a sui generis record of language in the brain, Chang says: “It’s a very precious set of data, whether or not it will ultimately hold the secret for a speech prosthetic. It’s truly an extraordinary event.”

>IMHO he had, and if you ask literally any neurosurgeon or anyone working in neuroscience I'm willing to bet that they would say the same.

He was 66 and was first left hanging waiting for a willing subject who could still talk to validate earlier results. He then couldnt afford recertification of his invention and was faced with nobody else working on this approach.

You are skipping over the fact that it worked. His lifes work and deep obsession turned out to work. He did it, what more is there to say other then good for him? Even if the dataset would turn out to be without practical implications, you can see at his pondering at the very end, whether to put an implant into the other site, that he would have regretted it deeply to have it sit there and stare at him for the rest of his life.