deep brain stimulation

  Two or three years ago, Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg, whose experiments using deep-brain stimulation for depression I check in on now and then, told me that Karl Deisseroth's work using light to fiddle with brain circuits had huge potential both as a replacement for DBS and for much else. As Lizzie Buchen ably reports in Nature, that potential is now being realized. This is a very slick tool that seems almost too far out to actually work. It lets you use light to turn brain circuits on and off at will, and with great precision. It's not simple to construct. But once constructed, it…

I've got a story about Helen Mayberg's work on depression circuits in the new Scientific American Mind. I first wrote about Mayberg in the Times Magazine three years ago, in an article about her experimental use of deep brain stimulation to treat depression, and I later profiled her for SciAm Mind. This new article looks at her effort to further refine the neurocircuitry associated with major depression. Working with fellow imaging experts Heidi Johansen-Berg and Tim Behrens of the University of Oxford and others, Mayberg used DTI to produce detailed images of area 25's "tractography," the…

FromMind Hacks: We've reported before on brain imaging research that shows brain activity in those in a 'persistent vegetative state'. What I didn't know until today was that one subject in this research, Kate, has since woken up. This YouTube video tells Kate's story: Sometimes firm ground proves to be slippery.