Word: thalamus
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...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...
...thalamus, a sort of relay station, transmits nerve impulses to & from the 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...
...insane. But Psychiatrist Louis Lipschutz, clinical director of the hospital, decided to try psychosurgery. (She consented.) A surgeon carefully opened her skull (using a local anesthetic), sliced into the frontal lobes of the brain, cut most of the nerve connections to the thalamus (crossroads of the brain's nerves). The patient said: "I feel dopey." After the operation she cried, sucked her thumb, splashed in her bath like a two-year-old. But in a month, she acted like an adult...
...prefrontal cortex is the seat of mental power which restrains the thalamus -foresight, self-consciousness, social adjustment, imagination, etc. The reasoning, self-conscious cortex is integrated via thousands of millions of nerve cells with the emotional thalamus, so that a normal mind is a more or less harmonious mixture of intellect and emotion. But sometimes this integration takes on a fixed, unhealthy pattern: foresight becomes anxiety, anxiety becomes fear, and the psychotic victim may head for lunacy unless treated by psychoanalysis, shock therapy (e.g., with electricity or insulin) or-as a last resort -psychosurgery...
...surgeon's incisions radically disrupt the connection between the prefrontal lobes and the thalamus. Not all the connections are severed, since a patient might then become a victim of his unrestrained thalamus. But old ideational patterns are destroyed. The brain is forced to reintegrate itself, to form new internal pathways...