It's interesting that these brain chips are being researched more. Hopefully they will find an area of the brain that's inhibitory to the kind of overactivity in parkinsonian patients and those with schizophrenia.

Yeah, that would be cool, but the fact is these above chips were for behavior modification. That's what Delgado was interested in.

hi Michael,

well movement disorders are a failure of inhibition through degeneration of specific neurons (substantia nigra) in the basal ganglia. there are also some other populations of cells that deteriorate too. we are just able to "up regulate" until the s.n. population of neurons drops below about 25%.

so, while there probably wont be some other "built in" but inactive motor inhibitory circuit or area of the brain, one pretty successful technique to alleviate the tremor of PD is deep brain stimulation - DBS. a wire is implanted in the basal ganglia, and a power pack sends a frequency in, which disrupts normal excititory function a bit and alleviates symptoms. also, sometimes that area of the brain is zapped with juice to create a surgical lesion.

and schizophrenia also seems to be a degenerative disorder that is strongly genetically based. we probably aren't going to solve these problems in an elegant way until we understand how all the genetics work.