Word: braining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Brain surgery is a tempting way to tackle insanity. When it works, the results are quick and dramatic. Recently surgeons have been concentrating on the front part of the brain, isolating the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain (prefrontal lobotomy), or cutting part of it out (topectomy). Trying a new approach, Vienna-born Neurologist Ernest A. Spiegel and Brain Surgeon Henry T. Wycis, both of Philadelphia's Temple University, decided to work on the thalamus, at the base of the brain...
...frontal lobe. When these nerve pathways get out of whack, the doctors reasoned, emotional control becomes disturbed and insanity results. Why not operate on the thalamus direct instead of risking damage to the frontal lobe? The big difficulty was getting at the thalamus without wrecking three inches of brain...
...never had a window-in-the-head to match the window-in-the-stomach that one Alexis St. Martin once gave them.* Last week, after four years' experimenting, University of Pennsylvania Physiologist Seymour S. Kety, 32, thought he had the next best thing: a way of testing the brain's blood as it comes & goes...
...Kety experimented on 400 patients in three different hospitals. First he inserted a needle in the internal jugular vein (which drains the brain), another in an artery, usually the femoral artery in the thigh. Then he had them breathe a 15% concentration of nitrous oxide, a gas that is easily traced...
...drew out a total of 60 cubic centimeters of blood in the two needles, about a tenth of what the average blood donor loses. By calculating the amount of .nitrous oxide that is absorbed by the brain, he determined the rate of blood flow. Thus he was able to measure the way the brain uses up its chief sources of energy: oxygen and glucose. Already he has demonstrated that unconscious patients use only half the normal amount of oxygen and glucose, that schizophrenics use as much oxygen for their irrational thinking as a sane person does for normal thinking...