Brain in sentence

4290 examples of Brain in a sentence

So I am indeed a neurosurgeon, and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery, and what I'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain, being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients.

Now, in the course of time, we've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things.

So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on.

Now, the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are.

So what we've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain, and we've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down.

So what I'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients.

And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation.

So what we're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain.

Again, we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime, putting an electrode in, and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest, and with a remote control very much like a television remote control, we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain.

Now, about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation, and I'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement, disorders of mood and disorders of cognition.

So this looks something like this when it's in the brain.

You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain.

I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now.

Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on.

We did not know what operation to do, where to go in the brain, but on the basis of our results in Parkinson's disease, we reasoned, why don't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in Parkinson's disease, and let's see what happens?

So the first thing we did was, we compared, what's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal, and what we did was PET scans to look at the blood flow of the brain, and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals, areas of the brain are shut down, and those are the areas in blue.

The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive, area 25, seen there in red, and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain.

If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up.

It is the sadness center of the brain.

The area of the brain for sadness is on red hot.

The thermostat is set at 100 degrees, and the other areas of the brain, involved in drive and motivation, are shut down.

We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression.

I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia.

Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter?

So what we've decided to do is we're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain.

So we've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix, which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit, with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit, and whether that can, in turn, help these patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain.

The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose.

Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose.

And indeed, what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely.

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