about us | advertise | inkstand | inkyblog

Sharing is caring

Email a Friend

Your Email

Your Name

Friend's Email

Your Message

-----------------------------------------------

The Promise and Perils of Brain Massage
Deep brain stimulation offers hope to many patients, but changing the brain’s signals can have unintended effects.
by, Meera Lee Sethi
07 October 2009

The annals of science are stuffed full of stories about researchers who were trying to achieve one thing and ended up accomplishing something entirely different. Fortunately for both scientists and science writers, the serendipitous find is a cliché that manages to retain its fascination no matter how many repetitions it goes through. That fascination arises from a fundamental truth about science: the more we think we understand, the more there is to know.

Nowhere is this more true than in the field of neuroscience. Over the past few decades, scientists have made great strides in teasing apart the workings of the brain’s structures on a micro level. We now know, to an astonishing degree of detail, how neuronal cell bodies direct basic functions such as breathing, walking, and other motor functions. We can diagram, model, and even predict how the long, thread-like axons projecting from each brain cell carry electrical impulses from one neuron to another. Yet our fundamental grasp of how the brain’s signals operate on a larger scale—how they interact with each other to create the web of ideas and feelings we call experience—is much less robust. Recently, for instance, two separate teams of researchers were testing a technique called deep brain stimulation to treat obesity on the one hand and Parkinson’s on the other. In the process, both teams made discoveries about the nature of memory and personality.

The phrase “deep brain stimulation” can’t help but sound bizarrely risqué, like some kind of sexy, subversive cerebral activity that’s intended to lead to a throbbing intellectual orgasm. The reality of this increasingly common medical procedure can be almost as difficult to wrap your mind around. The therapy involves a neurosurgeon tucking a tiny electrode deep into a particular location within the spongy, yielding tissue of your brain. Once it has been activated, the implant faithfully delivers a brief but intense pulse of electricity to the surrounding tissue, in regular intervals, for as long as it continues to reside there. The treatment has been described by more than one scientist as being a little bit like a “pacemaker for the brain.” Early forms of deep brain stimulation have been around since the 1960s, and the therapy is now used to treat everything from

Inkling on Facebook

Our kickass tees

The most popular inklings