Wilder Penfield: A Therapeutic Analysis

The progress of neuroscience has been significant in the past 500 years. and with the advance of technology, there is yet a multitude of chapters left to write in the history books of neuroscience. The book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: written by Sam Kean was an engrossing and captivating read. It gives the reader a better appreciation for the growing pains of neuroscience and provides an educational, albeit entertaining overview of the anatomy and physiology of the brain and nervous system. From the early life and discoveries of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and his fascination with Golgi’s method la razione nera, which allowed Cajal to deduct after observing

Have you ever been shocked or electrocuted back to life? In December 1818, Andrew Ure claimed, “by stimulating the phrenic nerve with electric charges life could be restored in cases of suffocation, drowning, or hanging”. The medical advances accomplished throughout all the years has been truly amazing, from discovering blood cells, using human skin cells to create embryonic stem cells and many more.

Brain stimulation therapies are non pharmacological method which involves activating or touching the brain directly with electricity, magnets, or implants to treat depression and other disorders. Among many techniques, electroconvulsive therapy is the most researched stimulation therapy.

The above mentioned procedures are known as brain stimulation therapy where electrical and magnetic impulses are administered to the patient. Moreover, the procedures are completely painless and last only a few minutes. The treatments are once a week, usually lasting six to eight weeks. Nowadays, with the advancements in medical and psychological treatment, a combination of both prescription medicine and psychological help, has shown the greatest

Cortical stimulation therapy. This stimulates your brain with electrical currents to make it work better.

and James Olds, neuroscientists. They placed a small electrode in the brains of rats at the

The history of the BCI all started in 1924, when Hans Berger, a German physician and professor at the University of Jena, made a stunning discovery. He found that he could obtain a reading generated by the human brain simply by attaching silver-foil electrodes on the scalp and connecting them to a galvanometer. Berger proceeded to record brain activity in a variety of conditions, including in patients suffering from epilepsy, and learned that a series of global brain rhythms were associated with routine behaviors. He discovered the alpha rhythm, an oscillation of ten cycles per second in brain potentials recorded over the occipital bone when patients sit quietly and immobile with their eyes closed. Berger named his method the electroencephalography

The second argument for the use of ECT is that successful treatments induce remission in episodes of illness (Gabbard, 2001). The evidence supporting this conclusion is compelling and includes a sizable number of well-controlled “sham-ECT” studies. In these studies, patients were randomized to receive real ECT or sham-ECT (which involves anaesthesia but no electrical stimulation), thus providing for precise double-blind tests of efficacy (Gabbard, 2001). One misconception is that it provides a “cure”. This is not the case - it does not produce a “cure” any

In the late 1880’s, evidence that patients who were mentally ill could be controlled through surgical manipulation of the brain first emerged. Gottlieb Burckhardt, a Swiss physician, removed parts of the brain cortex on mentally ill patients in the insane asylum he supervised. Burckhardt performed his operation on six patients with the goal of calming patients so that they were more controlled but not necessarily sane. Many of his patients more manageable after the surgery but one died several days after the surgery and some patients suffered severe seizures (Stone, 2001). In 1935, Dr. John Fulton, a respected Yale neurophysiologist, who founded the Journal of Neurophysiology and Journal of Neurosurgery, presented his findings of animal

To begin with, according to an article written by Lyons, MD, “Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has developed during the past 20 years as a remarkable treatment option for several

During the early 1970’s something called Computed Tomography (CT) Scanning was introduced into medicine. The CT scans were able to provide the first clear image of the brain and brain tumors. This was done by using X-Rays which provided doctors with images of a section or “slice” of the brain. In the following decades, CT Scanning becomes more and more refined and is now also being paired with other imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which was invented by Damadian in 1977 (Filler, 2009).

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With Volta having successfully disproved the animal electricity theory, Galvani focused his attention on how electricity could be used to cure diseases. He was specifically interested in using electricity to cure paralysis. Electricity had previously been successfully applied, by the Bolognese physiologist Giuseppe Veratti, to curing both paralysis and arthritis (Montillo 4). Unfortunately, Luigi Galvani died before he was able to experiment further with the idea of a reliable cure for paralysis (Luigi n.pag). Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who was an avid supporter of his uncle’s experiments, continued experimenting with galvanism after his uncle’s death. Aldini believed that galvanism could be used to cure melancholy madness. In 1801,

The groundwork for the development of electroshock therapy was laid in 1935, when a Budapest psychiatrist, Von Meduna, observed that

The neurons in the brain tissue communicate with each other via electrical signals, generating measurable action potential activity. Electrophysiological techniques have been developed to measure this electrical activity. Electrophysiological techniques are some of the classic methods of brain research, partly because they are very sensitive and accurate. They provide quite a number of insights into the subject’s mind as well as allow for study of how the brain works. They can be used during brain surgery as well as when the patient is awake and conscious, as the brain itself does not sense pain during the measurements. Although electrophysiology has been around for close to half a century, it has attained appreciable advances only in the last two decades. These advances have revolutionized the study of brain structure and functions, allowing neurophysiologists to monitor the brain’s activities directly during experiments (Sutler et al., 1999). Even with its significant impact in neurology, however, its presence has been so commonplace that many people no longer realize its ubiquity. This essay explores three electrophysiological techniques namely patch clamp, sharp electrodes, and brain slice recording. It describes how each of these techniques works as well as how advances in the techniques have