Savage Breakfast Online Home of Writer Brian Reed

Today I Learned About Brains

There's a spot of neurosurgery in the story I'm writing, so I started reading up on the weird and terrible things mankind has done to their fellow man's brain meat over the centuries. I sort of love the fact that even though we know a lot about the thing that makes us us, we still don't really understand it.

My favorite (read: thing that horrified me most) surgery of the evening is bilateral cingulotomyis

a form of psychosurgery, introduced in 1952 as an alternative to lobotomy. Today, it is mainly used as a last resort for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorderand chronic pain. The objective of this surgical procedure is the severing of the supracallosal fibresof the cingulumbundle, which pass through the anterior cingulate gyrus.

That's from Wikipedia, and if you want the gory details here's a look at the surgical technique that I ran across while looking for pictures of the procedure. The quick and dirty version is this: we drill some holes in your skull, then we poke in electrodes and heat them up to create lesions on your brain so you'll feel better.

What I'll be using in the story is a slightly tweaked (poetic license, and all that) version of this surgery. And because those "slight tweaks" really translate to "more horrific," it's one of those occasions when I almost feel like I need to apologize to the character I'm about to put through this ordeal.

Oh well, he got to do lots of fun things earlier in the story. Time to pay the piper, I guess.