Introducing the brain: deep brain stimulation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 06, 2021, 17:36 (1022 days ago) @ David Turell

One study on OCD with deeply implanted electrodes:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-deep-brain-stimulation-changes-a-persons-sense-of-confidence...

"Our group specialises in deep brain stimulation (DBS), an innovative treatment in psychiatry offered to a small but significant number of patients who don’t respond to psychotherapy or medication. DBS involves the implantation of electrodes that deliver pulses of electrical stimulation to areas deep inside the brain.

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"Since 2005, our research group has treated 85 patients with OCD. As the trained philosophers on the team, our interest has naturally been piqued by the instantaneous changes in lived experiences we’ve observed in these patients. But we’re also puzzled: how could applying an electrical current to neuronal cells deep in the brain lead to such complex changes in the patient’s experience, like those we’ve just described? Why would electrically induced changes in the brain have an immediate impact on the suffering of patients for whom all other treatments in psychiatry have failed? If anxiety can be turned down in a split second, just by modifying the electrical activity of neurons, what does this tell us about the mind and its relation to the brain?

"To learn more about how DBS has changed the lives of the patients we’re treating for OCD, we decided to carry out interviews with a group of them, eliciting responses that reflected as closely as possible these patients’ own personal stories of struggle and transformation after treatment with DBS. They told us that following DBS they felt more certain about themselves in their transactions with the world. They trusted in their own abilities for dealing with the world. Several patients told us they felt empowered by DBS:

"DBS certainly has done something, because I am much stronger and powerful now. And much more like, you know, this is what I want, and this is what I will pursue, making my own choices. Before, I would never have done that, I didn’t dare.

***

"Why does electrical stimulation of the brain restore the ability to project a possible future not determined by a patient’s illness? Direct impact on brain function and neuronal mechanisms might provide an answer. The patients being treated in our hospital, for instance, receive stimulation of brain areas located in the ventral striatum, leading to changes in the large-scale connections that form between the striatum, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, brain areas that play a role in decision-making, memory and thinking. One might hypothesise that the transformation following DBS can be explained by changes to this once-dysfunctional neural network. (my bold)

"But this cannot be the whole answer. The changes the patient experiences following DBS go far beyond a decrease in their obsessions and compulsions. They include a wholesale change in the person, including an increase in self-confidence; yet loss of self-confidence is not among the symptoms currently used to diagnose OCD."

Comment: Much of this article is psychiatric discussion of how this stimulation works, but never reaches the 'why' at a neuronal level which is described in my bold just above. OCD is an anxiety disorder which drives patients to repeated habits, such as a person who constantly washes hands and always wear sterile gloves in fear of encountering germs. The patient described at the start of this article had a compulsion to kill her newborn, cured by the therapy. My view as a dualist is the network, described in the bold, is sick and misinterprets thoughts received from the consciousness, and the electric stimulation corrects the reception ability of the sick neuron network. dhw will claim this is pure materialism=. It isn't. Malfunctioning neurons are material and misfiring receivers of an immaterial consciousness. Thus two-part dualism. Neurons don't create consciousness as dhw seems to imply.