Smooth Pebbles : Neurologist Helen Mayberg in SciAm Mind

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Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

BOOKS by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.â€

The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

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Neurologist Helen Mayberg in SciAm Mind

Category: Brains and minds
Posted on: August 6, 2006 9:47 PM, by David Dobbs

My profile of Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg is out now in Scientific American Mind. You can read either a text-only version at my website, or get the full published version, with photos and such, at the Scientific American Mind site (free to subscribers, $5 for the article for non-subscribers).

Mayberg made headlines last year when she, psychiatrist Sidney Kennedy, and neurosurgeon Andres Lozano, as the story put it,

cured eight of 12 spectacularly depressed individuals ... by inserting pacemaker-like electrodes into a spot deep in the cortext known as Area 25.

I previously wrote about this trial, and one of its patients, in the New York Times Magazine; you can read that story here. The SciAm Mind profile focuses more on the development of Mayberg's career and its place within the larger development of neuropsychiatry. There are a few new pieces about the Area 25 trial as well.

Comments

I actually had to go look up where 25 was, I never see anybody do anything with subcallosal areas.

Posted by: Evil Monkey | August 7, 2006 12:44 AM

Area 25, aka the subgenual cingulate, is rather obscure. It had been largely overlooked before Mayberg -- and Wayne Drevets of Washington University, working independently -- found during the 1990s that this pea-sized area seemed to be a crucial conduit between the limbic areas (including the amygdala, which essentially fires fear mechanisms) and the "thinking" frontal cortex -- a sort of bridge between emotion and thought, in a way. Its position -- a bit of cortex just above the limbic area --suited it well to this function. And Mayberg and Drevets both found it to be particularly hyperactive in depressed people.

That part of Mayberg's story is told more expansively in the article I wrote about the DBS study for the Times Magazine. It's a lovely piece of sustained detective work. Neurogeeks may enjoy reading Mayberg's 2003 theoretical paper that came out of all this work, "Modulating dysfunctional limbic-cortical circuits in depression," published just as she was putting together the DBS trial, or the March 2003 Neuron article in which she and her colleagues reported on the DBS trial.

You can also find more about Area 25 via the Answers.com entry.

Posted by: David Dobbs | August 7, 2006 10:27 AM

Hi David, welcome to ScienceBlogs! I'm hosting the homegrown neuroscience carnival The Synapse, please submit, if you like.

Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 10, 2006 5:11 PM