• World Neurosurg · Sep 2013

    Review Historical Article

    Surgery of the mind, mood, and conscious state: an idea in evolution.

    • R Aaron Robison, Alexander Taghva, Charles Y Liu, and Michael L J Apuzzo.
    • Department of Neurological Surgery, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA. Electronic address: rrobison@usc.edu.
    • World Neurosurg. 2013 Sep 1;80(3-4):S2-26.

    AbstractSince the beginning of recorded history, humans have sought a physical means of altering disordered behavior and consciousness. This quest has spawned numerous innovations in neurosurgery and the neurosciences, from the earliest prehistoric attempts at trepanation to the electrocortical and anatomic localization of cerebral function that emerged in the 19th century. At the start of the 20th century, the overwhelming social impact of psychiatric illness intersected with the novel but imperfect understanding of frontal lobe function, establishing a decades-long venture into the modern origin of psychosurgery, the prefrontal lobotomy. The subsequent social and ethical ramifications of the widespread overuse of transorbital lobotomies drove psychosurgery to near extinction. However, as the pharmacologic treatment of psychiatric illness was established, numerous concomitant technical and neuroscientific innovations permitted the incremental development of a new paradigm of treating the disordered mind. In this article, we retrospectively examine these early origins of psychosurgery and then look to the recent past, present, and future for emerging trends in surgery of the psyche. Recent decades have seen a revolution in minimalism, noninvasive imaging, and functional manipulation of the human cerebrum that have created new opportunities and treatment modalities for disorders of the human mind and mood. Early contemporary efforts were directed at focal lesioning of abnormal pathways, but deep-brain stimulation now aims to reversibly alter and modulate those neurologic activities responsible for not only psychiatric disorders, but also to modulate and even to augment consciousness, memory, and other elements of cerebral function. As new tools become available, the social and medical impact of psychosurgery promises to revolutionize not only neurosurgery, but also humans' capability for positively impacting life and society.Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…