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Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces
21 May 2025 27 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 14evaluation 7prediction 3recommendation 2commitment 1
Evidence policy
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Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
27 published records
“I don’t think that raw IQ is what makes a great neurosurgeon. It is psychologically very demanding because you are taking care of people at a moment in their lives that is the most critical, where they’re in most need of help, and they basically hand over to you their most prized possession for four hours, six hours.”
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“I think we’ll have a very effective treatment for depression and certain mental diseases, things where it’s circuitry that’s involved but the biology is still intact.”
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“I’m not saying that should be done because I think we’d all like our freedoms and not like to be under that kind of scrutiny.”
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“Like the food pyramid — it used to tell us, in essence, eat more carbohydrates. It’s not obvious that was the right thing to say.”
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“I would say the middle of that bell-shaped curve is going to be late 60s, early 70s.”
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“I think the Holy Grail for us is to put down the scalpel and to not have to drill through the skull and to be able to deliver energy into the brain without opening up the head.”
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“I think we’re as happy as our last operation went, honestly. Yes, if you go to a neurosurgery meeting, people have smiles on their faces, and they’re going out and shaking hands and telling funny stories and enjoying each other’s company.”
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“One thing that I realized is, no matter where I am, there’s always part of me that’s thinking about the patients that are in the hospital that I operated on last week and how they’re doing, and maybe one of them is struggling a little bit, and I have to be aware of that.”
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“Why do so few women go into neurosurgery? This surprised me when I learned it from your book.”
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“I think that the undergraduate education — liberal arts — I was a philosophy and English major, which was wonderful, and I loved the expanding universe that I explored.”
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“I think, yes, there’s always going to be politics involved, and we always come to any problem from a unique single perspective, and institutions are going to have their biases.”
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“If you can show me better evidence, I will change my mind, but based on what I know now, this is what I’m saying.”
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“I think that changes person to person. I know some neurosurgeons who are quite talented, and they are humble, sweet.”
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“Again, I’m not arguing with the training part. I think we could do it much more quickly, for sure.”
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“” I think you have to be confident, but you have to be humble at the same time, and you have to have just that right balance.”
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“If you look at Freud from a feminist perspective, and you don’t like penis envy, or you look at the Oedipal complex and just judge him that way, then sure, there’s a lot to criticize. But if you look at his structure of the mind and how he subverted the power of the ego and validated the unconscious, I think he was brilliant.”
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“I think the sweet ones in other areas — they’re often the most arrogant. It’s a kind of front.”
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“I think the best thing to do is try to find someone that you know, a friend of yours who’s in the healthcare profession, and have them call around and ask their friends because they’ll know someone who is a neurosurgeon.”
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“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.”
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“I think that there are hundreds of different modules processing information in the brain and determining what behaviors we should do and making decisions for us, and then we carry out that behavior.”
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“We want people who are going to improve what we do because medicine is constantly evolving, and we need to get better.”
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“What that means is, instead of doing the procedures that I had learned, where you open up the side of the head and take off the skull and pull down the muscle and go around the brain, I was learning and pioneering surgeries where we go in through the nostrils with endoscopes or make little incisions in the eyelid.”
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“I think you become more efficient at things as you get older because you become better at them.”
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“The economics of medicine are quite different than other things because most doctors will take most insurance plans.”
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“I think that in the interpretation of MRI scans — when a patient comes into your office with a conglomerate of symptoms, and you’ve got to figure out what they have — those things in AI are very good at.”
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“When I take a drug orally, take a pill, put an IV drug in, a lot of those drugs don’t get into the brain, because there’s protection, because the brain doesn’t want poison or toxins to influence the brain, so not everything gets in.”
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“I think any part because all parts of your personality are based on brain circuitry, and once we alter that circuitry, we will alter who you are.”
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