When I was a freshman medical student, I spent a summer working in the VA psychiatric hospital in west Los Angeles. While there, I spent many hours talking to chronic schizophrenic patients, some from World War II and one even from World War I. I watched electro-shock therapy for psychosis and spent hours listening to the professor there, George Harrington. He was one of the two or three most impressive men I met in medicine. He was convinced that psychosis was an organic disease and had no confidence in psychoanalysis to explain anything to do with psychosis. I was very interested in psychiatry for a while but my exposure to other psychiatrists in medical school soon ended my enthusiasm.
Now, neuroscience is one of the most promising areas in medicine. We have increasing evidence of the anatomy of mental illness. Obsessive-compulsive disorder can now be cured with a surgical interruption of a feedback loop in the brain. Functional MRI can show differences in the response to stimuli between schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic twins.
Now, we are getting to the analysis of normal function. The visual cortex seems to have a map of the retina contained in it. By analyzing the fMRI of the visual cortex in a subject looking at a picture, it has now been possible to reconstruct the image from the fMRI. We can look at the brain in a functional way and read what it is seeing.
The next step, and it is coming fast. is to create a biological-electronic interface. We already have one called the cochlear implant. It is able to restore hearing by stimulating hair cells in the ear. A visual implant would stimulate the optic nerve when the rods and cone cells are lost.
If I were a medical student today, I would be looking very hard at this field. When I was a medical student 46 years ago, I decided that the science of the brain and the immune system were too primitive at the time to have any implication for clinical work. I decided that, if I wanted to go into research, I would be better off as a physical chemist. That was true then but is no longer true.