Doctor Olaf Reviewed in the Archives of Neurology

Well, it's been several years since the book came out, so I was almost as surprised as I was delighted to come across a new review of Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain in the Archives of Neurology. I'm waiting for the full text of the review, but the blurb is awesome:

Intelligent, imaginative, and consummately researched.

Thank you Archives of Neurology! More when the rest of the review comes in.javascript:void(0)

The return of the lobotomy? Plus, electroshock therapy? Medicine marches forward, and back

I suppose the title of Benedict Carey's piece for the New York Times, Wariness on Surgery of the Mind speaks a caution that isn't present in most of the Olaf stories. Still, the techniques described in the article are not unlike the ones we've tried in the past:

In 2009, the government approved one surgical technique for certain severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D. For the first time since frontal lobotomy fell into disrepute in the 1950s, surgery for behavior problems seemed back on the road to the medical mainstream.

Dr. Joseph J. Fins, quoted in the article, refers to the past when he responds: “With the legacy of psychosurgery, it’s important that we don’t misrepresent things as therapy when they’re not.”

So, fifty years have past since the infamous frontal lobotomy, and we're still not sure about how and when best to operate on the brain. The article goes on to discuss deep brain stimulation (D.B.S.), in which "a surgeon sinks wires deep into the brain and leaves them in place." The use of such a treatment is also controversial, though I'm happy to see that the current device is not nearly as imposing as the magneto Dr. Steenwycks used back in the late 19th century.

Mostly, though, the article points out that most people agree that more testing needs to be done. When I think about my brain and what might be best for it, I have to admit, that makes sense to me.

It's all in the brain

In this month's Scientific American, Kent A Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckhotz report that "some of the most cold-blooded killers aren't bad" they just "suffer from a brain abnormality" (could all good and bad be just that?)

Thanks to technology that captures brain activity in real time, experts are no longer limited to examining psychopaths' aberrant behavior. We can investigate what is happening inside them as they think, make decisions and react to the world around them. And what we find is that far from being merely selfish, psychopaths suffer from a serious biological defect. Their brains process information differently from those of other people. It's as if they have a learning disability that impairs emotional development. ...

These differences show up early, as early as five years old. The good news is that once the abnormality is detected, it may be treatable with "novel forms of therapy" that "show promise."

To read the entire article, see Inside the Mind of a Psychopath

500 brains in glass jars

Hard to imagine that more than five hundred brains--cancerous brains, floating in formaldehyde and stored in glass jars, no less--could remain hidden in "various crannies" of Yale's medical school as well as the "basement of the medical school’s dorms" for over seventy years, but Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.'s article in today's New York Times states that this is the case. And even better, "after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material", the brains are now in a room designed solely for them!

The brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, a Yale professor and one of America’s first neurosurgeons. The article quotes Michael Bliss, a medical historian, who writes this of Cushing:

“Cushing became the first surgeon in history who could open what he referred to as ‘the closed box’ of the skull of living patients with a reasonable certainty that his operations would do more good than harm.”

Before Cushing's time, doctors relied on their patients for information that would lead to the site of a brain tumor. Cushing developed a test based on vision--various changes in vision caused by different tumors--to help identify tumor location. Though doctors now use MRIs to locate tumors, the article notes that "comparatively little progress has been made since Dr. Cushing’s time in actually prolonging life in brain-cancer patients." Dr. Dennis Spencer, the chairman of neurosurgery at Yale and the Harvey and Kate Cushing professor of neurosurgery, notes:

Everything we’ve done in the last 100 years has changed the progress for malignant brain tumors very little, extending life maybe eight months to two years.

To read the complete article and see a picture of the brain jars, see Inside Neurosurgery’s Rise by Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.

Cures for Autism? or evoking Dr. Olaf?

Today's New York Times ran a guest blog by Liane Carter that detailed her efforts to find a cure for her son, diagnosed with autism. Her family tried all the standard treatments as well as the fringe ones: a gluten/casein-free diet, probiotics, cranial sacral therapy, auditory integration therapy, homeopathy. Her doctor "charged thousands of dollars," offering "one cure du jour after another, quick to take advantage of our desperation." All this led to the following Olaf-like moment:

Finally, he insisted our 4-year-old had stealth birus [KMA: a condition I cannot find mentioned online, which makes me think it's either a typo or extreme madness]. He urged us to give him a cytotoxic drug called ganciclovir then being used for AIDS patients and other severely immuno-compromised people.

“How many children have you treated with this?” I asked.

“I’m treating one patient right now,” he said.

I was relieved that the author pulled her son from this doctor's care. Science continues to evolve, and quackery remains, and the post is a great reminder of that. To read the full story, see The False Prophets of Autism.

Building a Brain?

"Twenty years from now, the author envisages the brain builder industry as being one of the world's top industries, comparable with oil, automobile, and construction."
—Hugo de Garis (1996)

Can we build a brain? Hugo de Garis thinks so. Currently a professor at Wuhan University, he is working on the "China Brain Project", a four-year project that aims to develop "an artificial brain (A-Brain)". The brain, which will consist of 15,000 interconnected neural net modules, will control "the hundreds of behaviors of an autonomous robot." de Garis promises that the technology will be fast and cheap "(e.g. $1500 for the FPGA board, $1000 for the robot, and $500 for the PC, a total of $3000)" and he hopes "that other brain building groups around the world will copy this evolutionary engineering approach."

Also interesting are de Garis's predictions for the future. According to an interview on machineslikeus.com, he summarizes the views he expresses in his book, The Artilect War:

The book is very pessimistic, unfortunately, although I hope it is at least realistic. Its basic scenario is as follows. It is predicated on the rise of the “artilect,” i.e., machines that use 21st century technologies such as 1 bit per atom storage, reversible, heatless, nano-teched, self assembling, (topological, i.e. robust) quantum computers, that will have capacities zillions of times above human levels. I foresee humanity then splitting into 2 (arguably 3) major philosophical groups, a) the Cosmists (in favor of building artilects), b) the Terrans (opposed), and c) the Cyborgists (who want to convert themselves into artilects by adding components to themselves, i.e. by becoming “cyborgs” (cybernetic organisms)).

These philosophical differences will ultimately lead to a major war, "using 21st century weapons, and hence probably billions (not millions) of people will be killed."

Still, de Garis supports continuing with the research. "If you are a strong Cosmist, you will place higher priority on the creation of godlike artilects than the survival of the human species."

To read the full interview, see Machines Like Us.

Finding truth in the brain?

Technovelgy published an interesting article about the use of lie detectors tests in India, where results from the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) tests are now accepted in courts of law. The case described is of a young woman, Aditi Sharma, who was accused of poisoning her former fiance in a McDonalds. She agreed to undergo the test, and:

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma’s head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald’s”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to Mr. Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph’s assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

Proof that she is guilty? The verdict is still out. The National Academy of Sciences states "Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy..."

To read the full article, see Indian Court Says Brain Scan Proves Murder.