Stimulating Brains
52 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago -Andreas Horn interviews experts in the field of deep brain stimulation, noninvasive neuromodulation, functional brain imaging and neuroanatomy.
Join us on our quest to interact with the human brain and thank you for your interest in science!
Andreas Horn, M.D., Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and associate professor for neurology at Harvard Medical School.
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Episodes
#52: Amaza Reitmeier – Changing lives at scale with Deep Brain Stimulation
April 18, 2024 01:59 - 1 hour - 51.8 MBIn our ongoing exploration of the DBS ecosystem through the lens of key industry leaders, below is our conversaion with Amaza Reitmeier who is the Vice President and General Manager of Brain Modulation at Medtronic. We learn differences between life in academia and industry, with a key potential of industry work to get the ability to make change at scale. In this episode, we discuss what the future of brain modulation may offer, with some aspirational commentary on several potential opportu...
#51: Alfonso Fasano & Benjamin Stecher – A Unique Collaboration Between a Patient and his Doctor
April 05, 2024 19:56 - 1 hour - 61.7 MBIn this very special episode, we are thrilled to welcome back Ben Stecher, marking his remarkable third appearance on StimBrains (you can find him previously featured on episodes #12 and #14). Today’s discussion takes a profound turn as we delve into the unique collaboration between Ben and his neurologist Dr. Alfanso Fasano, who is a Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Neurology) at the University of Toronto. Together, they’ve co-authored ‘Reprogramming The Brain‘, a book ...
#50: Andreas Horn – Toward Connectomic Deep Brain Stimulation
March 19, 2024 18:41 - 1 hour - 87.1 MBWhen I interviewed Marwan Hariz for episode #4, he wrote in an email: "When you finish the series and all interviews, please let me know because then I should interview you as the Grand Finale of this series…". Throughout the recordings, I heard similar remarks from other guests but also, increasingly, from listeners of the show. After Nico Dosenbach suggested the same in #39, Mike Fox called me and offered to interview me for a round episode of the podcast. With this episode, Stimulating Br...
#49: Dora Hermes & Kai Miller – Discovering the secrets of invasive stimulation signal recording.
March 16, 2024 02:11 - 1 hour - 195 MBDora Hermes and Kai Miller are associate professors at Mayo Clinic, where they have become a powerhouse on neuroscience, due to their strong collaboration and work in neural signal processing and analysis. Dora has a mathematics background, while Kai studied physics, including a PhD in physics, before becoming a functional neurosurgeon. Last year, both of them last authored a paper each at Nature Neuroscience, each with remarkable and groundbreaking findings about pretty different topics. Th...
#48: Binith Cheeran: From Clinical Neurology to Industry Leader
March 06, 2024 15:55 - 1 hour - 61.1 MBIn our ongoing exploration of the DBS ecosystem throughout the podcast, we've engaged with leading voices in academia, clinical practice, and the patient community, each offering invaluable perspectives on the transformative impact of DBS. Yet, the journey from laboratory to bedside is a collaborative endeavor that requires another critical player: the industry. The symbiosis between innovative scientific research and robust industry support is crucial for the successful transition of ground...
#47: Marwan Hariz & Joachim Krauss – Toward a third wave of pallidotomies?
February 23, 2024 20:22 - 2 hours - 154 MBMarwan Hariz and Joachim Krauss need no introduction. First, because they are famous, and second, because they have been on the show, before. In fact, Marwan Hariz is the first to have been on the podcast three times, first, as an early adopter and trustee in episode 3, second, together with Joachim Krauss and Christian Moll in episode 33, and now again with Joachim in the present episode. I met Joachim in Grenoble at a meeting celebrating the 30th year anniversary of STN-DBS. He mentioned t...
#46: Todd Langevin – Establishing Deep Brain Stimulation - the industry perspective
February 16, 2024 23:01 - 1 hour - 103 MBSo far, in the podcast, I have been interviewing key opinion leaders from academia and clinical practice, and sometimes individual patients that graciously shared their insights after undergoing DBS. However, beyond patients and clinicians, there is a third component necessary for DBS to be successful, which are our partners in the industry. Without great industry leadership, it is hard if impossible to translate scientific findings into clinical practice. For instance, when the Grenoble tea...
#45: Mac Shine and Paul Cisek - Exploring the evolution, integration and complexities of the brain: basal ganglia, dopamine, and beyond
December 07, 2023 07:46 - 2 hours - 118 MBIn this special episode of Stimulating Brains, we dive deep into the intricacies of the human brain with two esteemed guests, Mac Shine from Sydney University and Paul Cisek from the University of Montreal. Building upon our earlier conversation with Mac in episode 9, this episode sees these brilliant minds sharing their insights on the basal ganglia, the role of dopamine, and the fascinating interplay between various brain regions. In addition, we explore the modulation of the thalamus by t...
#44 Jennifer Thomas & Michael Stanley - The creative spark: Switching on the inner artist in the face of Parkinson's Disease
November 24, 2023 22:33 - 1 hour - 136 MBIn this conversation with Jennifer ('Niffy') Thomas and Dr. Michael Stanley, we talk about how Niffy became an artist after undergoing DBS surgery to treat her early onset Parkinson's Disease. Dr. Michael Stanley is a cognitive neurologist at the Brigham & Women's Hospital and has special interest in art and the brain: He studies how lesions or other neurological conditions can lead to cessation of artistic behavior or how they can change the artistic style of artists. When he read about Nif...
#43 Vanessa Milanese - Bridging Anatomy and Neurosurgery: A Deep Dive into White Matter Dissections and Legacy of Dr. Al Rhoton
October 19, 2023 23:55 - 1 hour - 82.1 MBIn this conversation with Dr. Vanessa Milanese, we cover the importance of anatomy in neurosurgery and explore her intriguing work in both fields – and how they cross-informed one another. Vanessa is a functional neurosurgeon at A Beneficencia Portuguesa Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil and holds an adjunct assistant professorship of neurosurgery at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. We talk about her stellar work in combining her neurosurgical activity with anatomical work – which involves ...
#42: Kullervo Hynynen – A conversation with the inventor of MR-Guided Focused Ultrasound
October 13, 2023 15:07 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBIn this episode, we sit down with Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, a key figure in biomedical ultrasound and image-guided therapeutics. Starting from his academic roots at the University of Aberdeen to his current roles at the Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto, Dr. Hynynen has played an instrumental role in advancing medical imaging. He has been at the forefront of investigating the use of focused ultrasound for various medical procedures such as non-invasive surgery, vascula...
#41: Christelle Baunez – The role of the subthalamic nucleus in brain stimulation
October 07, 2023 17:12 - 2 hours - 222 MBIn this intriguing dialogue with Dr. Christelle Baunez, a neurobiologist at Aix-Marseille University, we discuss a mysterious and small structure, the subthalamic nucleus. Christelle is known as the STN woman in France, due to her dedication to study this structure over the years. Christelle is a pioneer in the side effects related to STN stimulation in Parkinson Disease patients. Now, she is working towards understanding how STN stimulation can help people with addiction. We cover, with an ...
#40: Casey Halpern – Novel indications and approaches to invasive neuromodulation and neuroscience
September 22, 2023 19:25 - 1 hour - 132 MBIn this engaging conversation with Casey Halpern, a functional neurosurgeon at Penn Medicine. Casey is a pioneer in both deep brain stimulation and focused ultrasound and with his lab has recently had some fantastic breakthroughs, especially, but not exclusively in the field of loss-of-control eating in severe obesity. We cover a lot of ground from optogenetics at Stanford, basic science research about the nucleus accumbens and translation of findings into patients, serendipitous discoveries...
#39: Nico Dosenbach – A BOLD Challenge to Penfield’s Homunculus based on resting-state fMRI
September 18, 2023 01:29 - 2 hours - 114 MBIn this engaging conversation with Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a clinician-scientist at Washington University, we dive into his personal journey from the Black Forest in Germany to his adventures in the US. Nico generously shared insights into his educational and career path, recounting his experiences studying biochemistry in New York City, making the decision to pursue an MD/PhD, and eventually specializing in pediatric neurology. The conversation delved into his early days as a researcher at Was...
#38: Espen Dietrichs – about Carl Sem-Jacobsen, the true inventor of subthalamic DBS in Norway
September 10, 2023 19:00 - 50 minutes - 58.4 MBIn this conversation with Espen Dietrichs, we talk about the work of Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen, who almost certainly applied deep brain stimulation to the subthalamic nucleus chronically over weeks in 1958. Notably, this was ~40 years before the application of subthalamic DBS in Grenoble by the team of Alim Louis Benabid & Pierre Pollak (episode 4) following the pioneering animal work by Hagai Bergman (episode 17) and Abdelhamid Benazzouz who had demonstrated lesioning and DBS to the subthal...
#37: Jon Nelson – DBS for Depression saved my life: Defying Stigma in Mental Health
August 17, 2023 15:20 - 1 hour - 108 MBIn this compelling episode we delve into the inspiring story of Jon Nelson, a remarkable individual who has braved the depths of mental illness and emerged as a beacon of resilience and hope. In a heartfelt conversation with Jon, he shares his lived experience with DBS device as a transformative treatment for mental illness. Against the backdrop of prevailing stigma surrounding mental health, Jon's journey unfolds as he not only navigates the challenges of his condition but also becomes an ...
#36: Béchir Jarraya & Jordy Tasserie – Unlocking Consciousness: Neuromodulation, Neurofeedback, and the Future of Brain Science
August 06, 2023 17:51 - 1 hour - 83 MBIn this episode, we delve into the groundbreaking work of the Neuromodulation Lab at the NeuroSpin center, led by Dr. Béchir Jarraya. The lab’s mission is to evaluate brain modulation using pharmacological agents and electrical neurostimulation. Combining functional MRI with new neuromodulation techniques, they train awake macaques, with a unique mock-MRI process, to study consciousness-related domains. Their activities encompass MRI, electrophysiology, and 3-photon imaging to unlock the mys...
#35: Mark Richardson – Surfing the Frontiers of Functional Neurosurgery: From Brain Modulation to Patient Engagement
June 19, 2023 12:22 - 1 hour - 52.5 MBIn this episode, we interviewed Dr. Mark Richardson, an expert in functional neurosurgery and the Director of the Brain Modulation Lab at MGH Neurosurgery. He shared insights into his career and the lab's focus on improving surgical treatments for epilepsy, movement disorders, and psychiatric diseases through a systems neuroscience approach. We discussed closed-loop deep brain stimulation in epilepsy, incision-less approaches like FUS and LITT, and the role of different nuclei in generalized...
#34: Charles Jennings – From Graduate School to Founding Editor of Nature Neuroscience and Beyond
May 09, 2023 14:00 - 1 hour - 62.9 MBWe had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Charles Jennings, an accomplished scientist and leader in the field of neuroscience. As the Executive Director of the Program for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience and the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Disease, Dr. Jennings oversees a vast network of researchers and clinicians who are dedicated to advancing our understanding of the brain and developing new treatments for neurological disorders. Dr. Jennings’ work is especially noteworthy for its coll...
#33: Joachim Krauss, Marwan Hariz, & Christian Moll – The History of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery and Serendipity
April 19, 2023 18:19 - 1 hour - 80 MBJoin us for an illuminating conversation with Drs. Joachim Krauss, Marwan Hariz, and Christian Moll, as we delve into the history of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and the impact of serendipity in driving discovery. In the first part of the episode, we explore the fascinating history of Stereotactic Functional Neurosurgery, discussing the advances in technology and surgical techniques that have led to the current state of the field. We also touch on the challenges and ethical con...
#32: Philip Mosley – Neuropsychiatric network effects of DBS in Parkinson's and OCD
November 27, 2022 15:44 - 1 hour - 94.6 MBIt was my great pleasure to talk with Philip Mosley, who is one of the most experienced neuropsychiatrists working with DBS and published seminal work on non-motor, neuropsychiatric side-effects of subthalamic DBS in Parkinson's Disease as well as DBS for obsessive compulsive disorder when targeting the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Our conversation spans many areas from public health, remarkable individual case examples, the role of caregivers in DBS surgery, whether DBS could alter ...
#31: Veerle Visser-Vandewalle – Operating on the first neuropsychiatric DBS case in the modern era
September 13, 2022 12:37 - 1 hour - 83.2 MBIt 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, Alzheimer's Disease and Pain; as well as spinal chord stimulation and even brachytherapy as one of the ...
#30: Suzanne Haber – Anatomists, an endangered species & their importance for DBS
September 05, 2022 21:44 - 1 hour - 73.5 MBIt 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, Suzanne is not only an anatomist but one with a particular interest in deep brain stimulation. She lead...
#29: Mike Fox – Finding Therapeutic Treatment Targets using Causal Brain Connectomics
September 03, 2022 21:07 - 1 hour - 115 MBMike 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 with Marc Raichle on anticorrelated networks in the brain, his work on TMS network mapping, lesion ne...
#28: Marie Krüger – Segmented Contacts & DBS for Dental Pain
August 26, 2022 21:43 - 1 hour - 96.4 MBIt 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 fellowship with Chris Honey in Vancouver, where she developed a protocol of DBS for dental pain and was ...
#27: Joshua Gordon – Neuromodulation from genes to cells to circuits to behavior
August 26, 2022 14:19 - 1 hour - 70.4 MBOne 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 grants at any one time and ii) pursuing his own research using optogenetic methods to dynamically ...
#26: Nolan Williams – A Noninvasive Neuromodulation Revolution?
July 19, 2022 12:07 - 1 hour - 125 MBIt 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 experience with deep brain stimulation, Nolan wanted to first work with this invasive technique in depressio...
#25: Michael Okun & Kelly Foote – DBS Think Tank, Connectedness, Closed-Loop & Tic-Detectors
July 15, 2022 12:53 - 1 hour - 111 MBThe 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, essentially from scratch, after setting their minds to this goal during residency. We talk the concept...
#24: Aryn Gittis – Optogenetically inspired DBS for Parkinson's Disease
July 05, 2022 19:08 - 1 hour - 105 MBFollowing 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 Parkinson's Disease. Crucially, these effects outlasted the stimulation, sometimes by up to eight hours...
#23: Anne Young – Basal Ganglia Circuitry, Glutamate & Leadership
July 04, 2022 23:00 - 1 hour - 74.4 MBIn 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 by the team of Anne Young & her late husband John Penney alongside Roger Albin. In 1991, Dr. You...
#22: Mahlon DeLong – The Basal Ganglia in Health & Disease
May 31, 2022 21:45 - 1 hour - 103 MBIn 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 or how instrumental the MPTP model for Parkinson’s Disease in nonhuman primates was. Mahlon nee...
#21: Aysegul Gunduz – Engineering in DBS, closed loop & brain sensing
April 02, 2022 15:55 - 1 hour - 88.4 MBIn 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 closed-loop deep brain stimulation system for treatment of essential tremor – clearly a landmark study ...
#20: Christian Lüscher – OptoDBS and how we bring back the neuron into neurology
March 13, 2022 22:41 - 1 hour - 69 MBIn 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 percent of mice with unlimited access to drugs will become addicted. We discuss examples of optoge...
#19: Sameer Sheth – Neuromodulation for Psychiatry – the last frontier?
March 03, 2022 13:31 - 55 minutes - 63.5 MBIn 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 second was published in Nature Medicine and involved long-term local field potential recordings ca...
#18: Jeffrey Hausdorff – The Present and Future of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Aging and Parkinson’s disease Research
January 24, 2022 16:26 - 56 minutes - 64.9 MBIn 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 fundamentals. Our discussion then progresses to a deep-dive inside some of Prof. Hausdorff's mos...
#17: Hagai Bergman – The Hidden Life of the Basal Ganglia: At the Base of the Brain and Mind
December 19, 2021 02:03 - 1 hour - 128 MBIn 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 Wichmann. We talk about his three-layer model of the basal ganglia, one of the first proof-of-prin...
#16: Julian Neumann – Machine-Learning for adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation
November 22, 2021 00:17 - 1 hour - 122 MBIn 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 & cognitive neuromodulation, he has recently ventured into machine-learning based applications to decode brain sta...
#15: Peter Snyder about Jose Delgado: Remote-controlling the brain
November 03, 2021 16:55 - 48 minutes - 55.6 MBIn 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 relationship with the media and his grand-plan toward a 'psychocivilized society' that would control behavio...
#14: Benjamin Stecher & Alberto Espay – Challenging "brain fables" about neurodegenerative diseases
October 23, 2021 17:07 - 1 hour - 88.6 MBYou 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 of the common (mis)conceptions in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. The book recently won t...
#13: Mark Humphries – Basal Ganglia Models, Highs and Lows in the Brain and… how does DBS work?
July 25, 2021 12:23 - 1 hour - 81 MBIt 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 lost and forgotten. Mark has done his PhD with Kevin Gurney, who together with Tony Prescott and Pe...
#12: Benjamin Stecher – A personal account of Parkinson's and Deep Brain Stimulation
June 14, 2021 05:03 - 1 hour - 81.9 MBBenjamin 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 misconceptions of Parkinson's Disease and what should change in our field to make progress. Benjamin was diag...
#11: Katrin Amunts – A modern take on human brain anatomy and its relevance to DBS
April 28, 2021 15:40 - 51 minutes - 39.9 MBKatrin 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 Oskar Vogt, name givers of her institute. We talk about the relevance of anatomical models and ult...
#10: Cameron McIntyre – Pushing the frontier of biophysically plausible DBS models
February 28, 2021 16:27 - 1 hour - 125 MBCameron 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 VTA model was originally a step backwards and why there is a large difference between inventions...
#9: Mac Shine – A thalamus-centric view of basal ganglia, cerebellar and cortical interactions
December 22, 2020 14:18 - 1 hour - 126 MBMac 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 recruit these inputs to shape the attractor landscape of cortical activations. Mac develops this a...
#8: Mojgan Hodaie – Connectivity aided targeting in neuromodulation for neuropathic pain
December 04, 2020 06:16 - 55 minutes - 63.6 MBIn 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 targeting of) neuropathic pain. The Hodaie lab published the seminal article demonstrating the feasi...
#7: Patricia Limousin – Subthalamic Nucleus Stimulation: From Parkinson's Disease to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
November 21, 2020 21:46 - 49 minutes - 57 MBIn 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 National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery since 1997, where she is currently a Professor of Cl...
#6: Lone Frank – Robert Heath, the forgotten inventor of Deep Brain Stimulation
September 21, 2020 07:55 - 1 hour - 68 MBIn this episode, Lone Frank shares insight about her book “The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor” in which she delved into the academic life of a true pioneer of our field. Robert Heath invented deep brain stimulation in the 1950ies and was a remarkable pioneer of our field. Lone's book takes us on a trip delving deep into the discoveries – but also controversies around Heath and his contemporaries, such as José Delgado and Frank Ervin.
#5: Günther Deuschl – On the importance of transforming Deep Brain Stimulation to evidence based medicine
August 22, 2020 13:55 - 39 minutes - 45.1 MBIn this episode, Günther Deuschl shares insight about his life in neurology and the endeavors to transform deep brain stimulation for movement disorders as established treatment options supported by class one evidence. He has been instrumental in multiple major clinical trials, such as the randomized double-blind clinical trial for DBS to the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson's Disease (Deuschl et al. 2006), a similar study for modulation of the internal pallidum in dystonia (Kupsch et al. 20...
#4 Pierre Pollak – How modern-day Deep Brain Stimulation for movement disorders was introduced in Grenoble
July 05, 2020 11:41 - 55 minutes - 63.4 MBIn this episode, Pierre Pollak shares insight about his life in neurology, music and sports and how he introduced modern-day deep brain stimulation for movement disorders together with Alim Louis Benabid and the team in Grenoble in 1987. After his retirement from academia and neurology, Pierre took up playing piano and spending time with physical activity (cycling, winter sports, etc) – and he mentioned that our conversation was the first about deep brain stimulation he had in over five year...
#3: Marwan Hariz – a strong role for imaging and being critical in the field of DBS
June 14, 2020 12:03 - 1 hour - 112 MBIn this episode, Marwan Hariz shares insight about why imaging is both the past and the future for deep brain stimulation, how its role of being the “court jester” or “stereotaxy police” emerged and why critical discussions are important for our field.