文档介绍：Peer-Review Reports
FRONTIERS
Surgery of the Mind, Mood, and Conscious State: An Idea in Evolution
R. Aaron Robison, Alexander Taghva, Charles Y. Liu, Michael L. J. Apuzzo
Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have sought deep-brain stimulation now aims to reversibly alter and
aphysicalmeansofalteringdisorderedbehaviorandcon- modulate those neurologic activities responsible for not only
sciousness. This quest has spawned numerous innovations in psychiatric disorders, but also to modulate and even to
neurosurgery and the neurosciences, from the earliest prehis- augment consciousness, memory, and other elements of ce-
toric attempts at trepanation to the electrocortical and ana- rebral function. As new tools e available, the social and
tomic localization of cerebral function that emerged in the 19th medical impact of psychosurgery promises to revolutionize not
century. At the start of the 20th century, the overwhelming only neurosurgery, but also humans’ capability for positively
social impact of psychiatric illness intersected with the novel impacting life and society.
but imperfect understanding of frontal lobe function, establish-
ing a decades-long venture into the modern origin of psycho-
surgery, the prefrontal lobotomy. The subsequent social and
ethical ramifications of the widespread overuse of transorbital INTRODUCTION
lobotomies drove psychosurgery to near extinction. However, Since the beginning of human existence, the desire to modify human
as the pharmacologic treatment of psychiatric illness was behavior and consciousness through indirect or direct physical in-
established, numerous itant technical and neuroscien- tervention has been a “holy grail.” Throughout history, these efforts
tific innovations permitted the incremental development of a have taken many different directions, with the first millennia char-
new paradigm of treating the disordered mind. In this article, acterized by largely shamanistic or ritualistic interven