Department of Neurosurgery, Gandhi Medical College and Hospital

“I am an explorer, but unlike my predecessors who used compasses and canoes to discover unknown lands, I used a scalpel and a small electrode to explore and map the human brain. Throughout my career, I was driven by the central question that has obsessed both scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years. Are mind and body one? Can the mind - thinking, reasoning, imagination — be explained by the functions of the brain? As a doctor, my first concern was always for my patients — to relieve the terrible suffering caused by diseases such as epilepsy. I found that by stimulating the exposed brain of a conscious patient with a small electrical current, the patient could tell me what they were feeling or seeing, and through this we could isolate the damaged part of the brain. I developed treatments for epilepsy based on this knowledge. But the procedure also opened a window to the mind, giving us for the first time a glimpse of how dreaming occurs, how memory works, and where speech and speech comprehension reside.”

Wilder Penfield, Explorer of the human brain 🧠

Outcomes in medical and surgical conditions needn't always be binary. There exists a wide spectrum in most illnesses, hence the differences in presentation and treatment options.

https://thejns.org/view/journals/j-neurosurg/54/6/article-p773.xml

The real 'cost' to the human spine from the ever increasing phenomenon of 'cell phone zombies'

Only time will decide the repercussions of near dangerous loads sustained by a rather beautiful construct.

A. Rohlmann , L. E. Claes , G. Bergmann , F. Graichen , P. Neef & H.-J. Wilke (2001) Comparison of intradiscal pressures and spinal fixator loads for different body positions and exercises, Ergonomics, 44:8, 781-794

Guidelines on scanning paediatric head injuries 🧠

The traditional idea of broca's and wernicke's speech centres is changing 🧠

Nuances in ACM management 🧠

To Operate or Not to Operate: When is Surgery Necessary for Chiari Malformation Mark Proctor and Cormac Maher

'Natural' neural network model of episodic memory by Gazzaniga et al 🧠

Pterional craniotomy, step by step 🧠

Pterional Craniotomy: Details of Technique Troy Payner and Aaron Cohen-Gadol

Although the analogy looks scandalous, the role of anatomy in neurosurgery is overwhelmingly important 🧠

So we can excuse the legendary Ribas for this quote 😅

Consciousness is the true manifestation of "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

In the words of the great author Ribas himself "The interactions of all these functions gives rise to the experience of consciousness, to the notion of one's self and to the tailoring of our personality"

Perhaps this is more like the orchestra, the whole team working together generates more meaning than a single instrument.

Sherrington went a little further and called human brain an enchanted loom weaving a meaningful pattern of reality 🧠

This is the original article by Maguire et al published in 2006, decisively linking visuospatial memory acquisition and expansion of hippocampus by neuroplasticity to accommodate new content.

In the words of the authors "....humans have an amazing capacity to acquire and use for navigation a highly complex spatial representation of a large city. Our findings suggest that this is accompanied by greater grey matter volume in the posterior hippocampus"

Maguire EA, Woollett K, Spiers HJ. London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus. 2006;16(12):1091-101. doi: 10.1002/hipo.20233. PMID: 17024677.