Everyone: "You can't just stick electricity into your brain and expect good things to happen." Scientists: "haha deep brain stimulation go zap zap brrrrr" 

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In this episode, my friend Kayla Durand and I unpack one of the most bizarre medical implants! Starting from the basics, we discuss the fancy neuroscience, intriguing procedures, and really quite horrifying history behind Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), which is used to treat everything from Parkinson's disease to depression. 

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Works Consulted: 

Overview and Review of DBS (Perlmutter 2015) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4518728/ 

DBS for Epilepsy (Salanova 2015) doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000001334 

DBS for Depression (Crowell 2019) doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.18121427 

Detailed History of DBS (Gardner 2013) doi.org/10.1177/0306312713483678 

The Dark History of Early DBS (Oliveria 2018) doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30237-0 

Overly Detailed Neuroanatomy of the Basal Ganglia (Lanciego 2012) doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a009621 

STN vs. GPi for Parkinson’s (Liu 2014) doi.org/10.3171/2014.4.jns131711 

Mechanisms of DBS (Herrington 2016) doi.org/10.1152/jn.00281.2015 

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Notes:  I am deeply apologetic about my atrocious sound quality. I'm working on it.  In discussing the history of DBS and Robert G. Heath, I had assumed that the gay study participant was a volunteer... yeah, no. He had been arrested for marijuana and was recruited for the experiment under legal duress. Somehow, that's the worst part. 

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