|
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 |
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