Theodore Schwartz: evaluation

Transcript context

…Deep brain stimulation — people tell me all the time, it has great potential. What’s your opinion? Is it made up? Is it fraud? Does it have potential? It not only has potential, but that’s what we do right now. The treatment of Parkinson’s disease right now is to put an electrode in the brain, and that will stop your tremor in your hand if you have Parkinson’s disease with a tremor. We use deep brain stimulation for that purpose. We also can reduce seizures. We can treat patients with epilepsy with deep brain stimulation and reduce their seizures. We’re getting to the point where we can start to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s and certain psychological issues with deep brain stimulation. We can alter someone’s behavior, someone’s desires, feelings based on deep brain stimulation because all of our behaviors derive from circuits in the brain that are firing in a particular way. One great example was a patient who had deep brain stimulation, and when they turned on the stimulator, they started to like a particular type of music, a musician. When they turned it off, they no longer liked that musician anymore. If those kinds of desires can be created and extinguished by stimulating an electrode in the brain, the truth is, really, any part of your personality can be altered with an electrode or a number of electrodes placed in the right places and altering the circuitry of your brain appropriately. Any part of your personality? Or just there are some that are flexible?…

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