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Okay so I just got off an episode of Gotham where this
electrician villain dude uses shock therapy to reprogram people to do his bidding.
Then I remembered that the brain operates on a sort of electric charge.
Anyways, going by that logic, electric manipulator mage guy <=> energy in our brains, does this compute? Can he, somehow, guide these charges in a way that suggests he is controlling the person?
I'm not a neurologist but...
It makes great comic-book science, but not real science.
In real science, neurologists can control lab animals (from insects to mice) in carefully controlled experiments and in certain carefully constrained ways, via electricity.
But these require:
From the various shows/articles I've seen/read, this isn't mind control, but triggering responses or linking behavior to responses. It is to "mind control" what "I write code for the cable company!" is to writing viruses that infect alien space ships, spread throughout those shps, and include graphics that display on alien ship screens is in Independence Day. Oh sure, both involve a similar set of precursor ideas and baseline concepts, but they aren't the same thing.
If you just fire electricity randomly at someone's brain, it will have some effects, but probably not anything controllable or predictable except in broad strokes.
Wikipedia discusses the use of electroconvulsive therapy. That article notes that it can cause memory problems, including amnesia. Note the History section and how it has been used in the past. Again, this isn't just "firing an electric beam at target."
Now, if you want to build this in a comic book or far future world, then sure. It is no greater stretch than Tony Stark making Iron Man armor in a cave or a high school kid making tiny arm-guns that shoot super-string webbing goo that he also invented to augment his spider-bite derived super powers. But I'd say this is a sci-fi technology far ahead of anything on earth now.
When your electromancer wants to control a human brain, he needs to be able to:
But there are more crude methods than real mind control which he could use to get people to do his bidding:
You can cause people (or any other animal) to make involuntary movements by simply administering an electric shock directly to an individual muscle. The victim knows that the movement is involuntary, but can't prevent it. A skilled electromancer might use this to temporarily take control of someone's body. For example, when someone points a gun at him, he could make that person point the gun at their own head and make them pull the trigger.
By the way, electrostimulation of muscles also works on fresh dead bodies, as long as rigor mortis hasn't set in yet.
So he could force the hero to kill his best friend and then use the corpse of said friend to fight the hero. If that isn't grade A comic book villainy, I don't know what is.
Theoretically, yes. We can use this kind of technology on insects and some smaller animals. There's an article on Wikipedia about remote control animals which is exactly this idea; controlling a brain through electric signals.
Doing it to humans is a question of complexity, but it's certainly viable.
The answer is probably not, for a series of reasons:
There are plenty of things that such a master could do. Causing pain would probably not be all that difficult. But bending someone's will is a very different matter.
There are different ways to control people. Some of them will work, some are not.
Controlling the thoughts. Since our neurons are communicating through electrical impulses, it is at least conceivable that by providing such impulses from outside, one can control thoughts, memories and desires of a target. This, however, is outside of realm of modern science and would require a very detailed understanding of human thought process as well as high precision of control impulses.
Control by affecting the senses and emotional state. Electrical impulses can generate senses of hunger, pleasure, light, irritation etc. This is possible to some extent today in a lab. By providing precise impulses, manipulator would be able to control his target to some extent.
Control through Pavlovian reflexes. By giving someone a small shock every time he/she tries to do something undesirable, manipulator can have some control over target behavior. Doable, but with limited effect.
Muscle control. By providing impulses directly to the muscles, manipulator can cause his target to move unexpectedly. Doable, but manipulator should be able to see his target.
Given much, much more advanced levels of technology and understanding of the human brain, one could possibly conceive of doing something very basic like stimulating the amygdala to evoke fear, stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain, or suppressing the frontal lobe to repress decision making.
However, another problem is that we often picture the brain as "sending electricity" from neuron to neuron to convey messages, but as often as not, things are put in motion by suppressing certain neurons just as you excite others. So most of the time, your efforts will probably be rewarded with a seizure.
Now, if your electromancer can detect electricity, that would be something else entirely! He would effectively be a walking fMRI, and with enough work he might be able to, in a very crude way, read someone's mind. Or at least tell how hard they're thinking. In terms of bending people to your will, this could go a long way.
It could also make him a pretty good lie detector test. If he could apply and measure current remotely, he could also monitor skin conductance like a polygraph test.
Unlikely. The brain operates by means of electrical signals, yes, but those are fed off chemical relays. Add in the microscopic size of each cell, the interconnection, which is different in each person and your master of electricity will have to work out the coding structure of a few billion nodes on the fly in order to produce an acceptable signal, that the rest of the brain won't simply ignore as a glitch. We do have [some] error correction.
Also bear in mind that the brain itself is enclosed in its own Faraday cage of sorts, which will make getting signals in to affect its internal workings difficult.
Electricity from the circuit perspective : that current can electrocute and form a new fashion like a new path works against all logic without 1's and 0's bits going forth into all of 100 of 100% of logical more console interfaces like cgi and CGI as a domain not even for 90 days but for a day there would be CGI as 1bit and 1 bit as a digit of an image even 1 day or 1 bit not a whole control unless brought into a medium or fashion : this disproves displays and makes Electro shocking SpiderMan look like a verse rather than an attack even with high quality. This disputes into rather a quark or electron can travel into the brain which by polygraphs proves that people do see the effects of radio and particles but not stimulation not even now with cartoons and a twin tower attack.
