#15: Peter Snyder about Jose Delgado: Remote-controlling the brain

Stimulating Brains

In this episode, Peter Snyder and I talk about Jose Delgado, one of the inventors of deep brain stimulation. Peter's father, Dr. Daniel R. Snyder, served as Delgado’s last American-trained post-doctoral fellow at Yale in the early 1970s – and took over the laboratory at Yale when Delgado moved back to Madrid. We get a good feeling about Delgado as a scientist, his many inventions, his relationship with the media and his grand-plan toward a 'psychocivilized society' that would control behavior by means of neuromodulation.

Together with others, Peter wrote a book called 'Science in the Media', in which he uncovers a quite spectacular deceit in the way Delgado communicated to journalists and the media about his famous 'brave bull' demonstration at a bull ranch in Cordoba, Spain. The bull demonstration – in which Delgado remote controlled a 'brave, angry, and dangerous beast' into a docile animal by the push of a button – is certainly a famous cornerstone in the history of neuromodulation. In this episode, we can learn from Peter that, in a way, it was a certain scam – or at least has been overinterpreted by the media and even most researchers in our field.