Comment by reallymental | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reallymental | Hacker News Reader

Most people have heard of this "method" of performing invasive brain surgery (so that the surgeon knows he/she's not messing with the patient's ability to play the guitar, which may be linked to other abilities etc.).

But I've literally never seen a story where they did this, and they found that the patient stopped playing the guitar/stumbled playing it/played better than ever before.

So what happens in any of those cases?

1) If they stop playing ? Does it mean they have 'damaged' a part of the brain ? Can you actually fix it ?

2) If they stumble/forget parts of the tune? Have you partially damaged the part of the brain that's responsible for that muscle memory?

3) If they suddenly become Hendrix? Have you found a way to turn mortals into gods with a metal stick ?

I'd think the distribution leans heavily towards 1) than 2) or 3).

But I've never seen any (1, 2 or 3), either they don't occur (i.e the surgery is just routine without any adverse effects) or I've not bothered to dig that deep into medical journals.

Any links would be appreciated.

My wife does these surgeries. I'm not going to ask her for journal citations on Christmas, but paraphrased answers:

1. You use electrodes to interfere with each piece they are are going to resect, and see if it interferes with the task they are having the patient perform. This is a mostly non-destructive way to test before doing something that damages the brain. It is not completely perfect for a bunch of complex reasons, but it works pretty well.

2. It's somewhat more complex than that (especially "the part of the brain that's responsible for that muscle memory"), but the goal is to identify the regions you want to avoid removing before you damage them.

3. "Becoming Hendrix" doesn't happen, but it's common for people to be able to perform the task in question better post-surgery than before. The reason for this is simple: you do these surgeries because the tumor is very close to the region whose function you want to preserve, and it tends to be interfering with the normal operation of that region already due to that proximity (if it wasn't interfering, you would try to delay surgery until it was). Removing the tumor removes that interference.

Not exactly the same but there are a few documented examples of people developing astonishing creative abilities as a side effect of degenerative brain disorders:

http://brainblogger.com/2012/09/23/what-is-creativity-art-as... https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-bolero https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188

I interpreted the text as saying that the doctors would probe with an electrode to stimulate the areas of the brain (or tumor) that they intended to remove, and use that response to judge whether or not to remove it. They don’t do any damage until they’re confident using that metric.

So as far as I understand, they can use an electrode to probe what part of the brain they're dealing with, then periodically probe again to see if they've weakened or damaged it. Even if they have, they can stop before they've done serious permanent damage, at which point the damage can heal on its own over time.

We could trust them not to be too harmful by design. From memories, probes move by fractions of mm and brain tissue is soft so it can bend without tear. I'd say they're more tuning part of a brain rather than operating.

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