Stimulating Brains

It was my great pleasure to talk with Veerle Visser-Vandewalle, who is the Head of the Department of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at University Hospital of Cologne. As a unique setup, she chairs the stereotactic department with access to their own operating theaters in which they have carried out a wide variety of surgeries, including DBS for Parkinson's, Tremor, Dystonia, OCD, Alzheim...

It was my great honor to talk with Suzanne Haber about the importance of anatomy in neurosurgery and neuromodulation as a whole. Among many other topics, we discussed her seminal work on the subthalamic nucleus, the anterior limb of the internal capsule and briefly present work on the zona incerta, also in synopsis with earlier work from Mahlon DeLong ( #22 ) and Anne Young ( #23 ). Crucially, Suz...

Mike Fox leads the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at the Brigham & Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The center is unique in that it houses colleagues from neurosurgery, neurology, psychiatry and neuroradiology under the same roof – with the aim to collaboratively work on novel neuromodulation treatments. It is a great honor to interview Mike about his earlier work w...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Marie Krüger, who is currently leading the stereotactic surgery unit in St. Gallen but is on her move to join the team at UCL / Queensquare London. Marie trained in Freiburg, Germany, with Volker Coenen and Peter Reinacher, where she ran multiple studies about segmented electrodes and how to localize their directionality. After that, she carried out a fellowsh...

One of five adults in the United States suffers from a diagnosable mental illness at any one point in time. The burden of psychiatric diseases is massive on both personal and economic levels. It was a great honor to talk to Dr. Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. We covered finding a balance between i) running this entity with a budget of 1.6 billion USD and 3000 gr...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Nolan Williams, who is the mind behind the Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy (SAINT) protocol for treatment of depression. In this drastically intensified protocol, Fifty sessions of 1,800 pulses are delivered as 10 daily sessions over just 5 days – condensing what usually takes months to a single week. After making hands-on experie...

The tenth DBS Think Tank is about to happen in Gainesville, Florida next month – so it's timely to talk with the masterminds behind it: Michael Okun and Kelly Foote need no introduction in the field & represent a role-model power-couple of how neurosurgery and neurology can join forces to build something unique. In Gainesville, they built one of the most important DBS programs in the world, es...

Following a fascinating talk Aryn gave at OptoDBS 2022, we talk about her work on optogenetically inspired deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's Disease. In a first paper (2017 Nature Neuroscience), Aryn's lab could establish that a specific lineage of cells in the external pallidum needed to be stimulated (or a second one suppressed) to achieve symptom relief in the 6-OHDA mouse model of Parkins...

In this episode, I had the tremendous honor of speaking with Anne Young about the many highlights of her career, including key evidence that established Glutamate as a neurotransmitter, as well as her work on Huntington's Disease. Directly building upon the preceding episode with Mahlon DeLong, we now hear about the Ann Arbor Side of the so-called “Albin-Delong” model, which was equally informed b...

In this episode, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Mahlon DeLong about the past and future of our field, the most influential model of the basal ganglia circuitry, microexciteable zones in the striatum, the role of the nucleus basalis in Alzheimer’s Disease and many other topics. We also touch upon the role of the basal ganglia model for psychiatry, more recent topics such as psychedelics...

In this episode, Aysegul Gunduz & Julian Neumann speak about Ayse's exciting work on closed-loop DBS in tremor, their tic-detector, and thriving as an engineer in a medical field such as DBS. They also touch upon minority groups in the field. The main focus of their 2020 Science Translational Medicine study, in which Ayse's team developed and studied a chronically embedded cortico-thalamic clo...

In this episode I had the honor to speak with Christian Lüscher about his exciting work on neuromodulation in addiction as well as the upcoming OptoDBS conference which he has been organizing since 2015 in Geneva. We cover Christian's milestone works in creating and refining a model of addiction in the brain, ways to counteract addiction using both optogenetics and DBS and why only about twenty pe...

In this episode I had the honor to speak with Sameer Sheth about recent advances in deep brain stimulation for psychiatric indications. We focus on two recent publications, a paper published in Biological Psychiatry that introduced a revolutionary novel concept of treating depression by inserting stereo-EEG electrodes to determine the individual circuitry involved in each patient's disease. The se...

In this guest episode, Jeffrey Hausdorff and Nathan Morelli speak about transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), its mechanisms of action, current application in research, and where the field is going in the future. In this discussion, we cover many topics which will give you insight into this area of brain stimulation. We begin with the basics of tDCS from its historic origins and therapy...

In this episode, Hagai Bergman and I talk about his new book, The Hidden Life of the Basal Ganglia: At the Base of Brain and Mind. We cover some of the many highlights of his life in basal ganglia and deep brain stimulation research. This includes his crucial discovery that paved the way to subthalamic deep brain stimulation during his work at John Hopkins together with Mahlon DeLong and Thomas Wi...

In this episode, Julian Neumann and I talk about his research toward adaptive deep brain stimulation. Julian has recorded local field potentials from DBS electrodes implanted in patients with Parkinson's Disease, dystonia, essential tremor, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression and is a true expert on the mechanism of action of DBS. With his laboratory for interventional & cognitiv...

In this episode, Peter Snyder and I talk about Jose Delgado, one of the inventors of deep brain stimulation. Peter's father, Dr. Daniel R. Snyder, served as Delgado’s last American-trained post-doctoral fellow at Yale in the early 1970s – and took over the laboratory at Yale when Delgado moved back to Madrid. We get a good feeling about Delgado as a scientist, his many inventions, his relatio...

You have met Ben Stecher in episode #12 already – today we follow up on his very own account of deep brain stimulation after Ben has now lived with DBS to his subthalamic nucleus for 3 month. Ben is joined by Alberto Espay, who is a world-renowned expert on Parkinson's Disease from UC health in Cincinnati, Ohio. Together, Alberto and Ben wrote “ Brain Fables ”, a book with the aim to debunk some o...

It was a tremendous privilege to pick Mark Humphrey's brain who has insight about broad domains of the brain like few others. His new book The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds takes us on a journey through the brain starting at the retina and ending in the spinal cord. As we follow spikes along, we learn how information is processed in the brain, but also how it's simply los...

Benjamin Stecher is doing impressive work in is role a scientific writer and patient advocate. He co-authored the book “ Brain Fables ” together with Alberto Espay, which recently won the prose award by the Association of American Publishers in the category Neuroscience . The book is truly unique in its way to combine both the views of patient and health professional on the history and misconcepti...

Katrin Amunts is the Scientific Research Director of the Human Brain Project and leads two centers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University Hospital Düsseldorf. With her internationally recognized work that includes the BigBrain and JuBrain projects and use of novel methodology such as polarized light imaging, she follows the footsteps of famous anatomists of the past, such as Cecile and Osk...

Cameron McIntyre and I talk about biophysically plausible deep brain stimulation models that his laboratory has established and continues to refine since about 20 years. Cameron shares insights from a time where DBS modeling was not a thing – how his career choice to step into the realms of medical hospitals as a biomedical engineer had been risky or at least unusual at the time. We learn why the...

Mac Shine and I talk about Mac's recent intriguing opinion paper that may have radical implications for systems and clinical neuroscience. In it, the thalamus mediates between feed-forward type input from cerebellum, sensori nuclei and cortex one one hand and input from the basal ganglia that introduces an element of randomness. By projecting to the cortex in a specific manner, the thalamus can re...

In this guest episode, Luka Milosevic talks with Mojgan Hodaie about the neuromodulation for neuropathic pain, how serendipity may lead to a whole novel research field, how our teachers shape the way we think about the brain and how we may learn from each single patient we get in contact with. Prof. Hodaie is a world-wide expert in stereotactic surgery with a special focus on (imaging guided targe...

In this episode, we talk with Patricia Limousin about the early days of DBS in the modern era to the current day and about what the future may hold. Building up on episode #4 with Pierre Pollak, we find out how Patricia experienced programming the first bilateral STN-DBS patient, and what has changed over the last 30 years. Professor Limousin has worked at the UCL Institute of Neurology and the Na...