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Banjo Used In Brain Surgery
Ponca City, We love you writes "Legendary bluegrass musician Eddie Adcock has undergone brain surgery to treat a hand tremor, playing his banjo throughout to test the success of the procedure. Adcock suffers from essential tremor, a condition where there is a continuing deterioration in areas of the brain that control movement, causing a tremor that usually appears when the person tries to act or move. Deep brain stimulation can be used to treat the movement difficulties of both Parkinson's and essential tremor by sinking an electrode into the thalamus, a deep brain area that is part of the motor loop — a circuit that helps coordinate movement. Surgeons placed electrodes in Adcock's brain and fitted a pacemaker in his chest, which delivers a small current that shuts down the region of his brain causing the tremors. The most sensible thing to do was to tweak the system while Adcock was playing the banjo to optimize the effect for the thing that's most important to him."
Oliver Sacks has anecdotes in his book Musicophilia about patients that have lost all interest in music, or even consider it irksome noise. Things could have been worse after brain surgery than just losing the ability to play the banjo. It's crazy to think how malleable our interest in or capability for music could be.
Did anyone else find the title more interesting without reading the summary?
Actually this isn't that unusual. In nerosurguries where the goal is not to correct some gross defect (e.g. cancer, stroke, railroad spike in a frontal lobe) the subject is often kept awake while the surgeon uses a probe to see if they can stimulate the neurological event that they're trying to surpress. I've seen it mostly with things like epilepsy, but I've been following the deep brain stim research, and it seems completely logical that they'd use the same methodology for that procedure.
That being said, watching a video (oh yes, there are videos) of someone with a big chunk out of the top of their head chattering away while a bunch of surgeons stand around behind them, poking at their brain...Lot of times the stimulation will create neurological artifacts...Memories, smells, lights...It's truly bizarre to watch. Not for the weak of stomach. //Former cognitive science major. Didn't much care for neuroanatomy.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...on whose shoulders everyone else is standing. SDs readership has never heard of him, but he's a pioneer and still a great player. A nice guy too, and a good teacher. He did a terrific banjo workshop at my school when I was an undergrad, and kept showing us licks and cracking us up with stories, for hours past the scheduled time.
As a neurosurgeon, I have been involved in procedures like this (although not with a banjo player). To evaluate the efficacy of the tremor suppression, we frequently ask the patient to sip a glass of water.
The analogy of a surgeon as a glorified human body mechanic has been used on me in the past, too. I will accept the comparison with the following conditions:
Next time you take your car in, tell your mechanic that
1. You only plan on having one car for the rest of your life and
2. When they work on your car, they have to leave the engine running.