Saturday, December 17, 2011

Is that true that electrical stimulation of temporal lobe regions, can give rise to hallucinatory experience?

Decades ago, a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield treated epilepsy by removing small brain area where the seizure started. He located the area by stimulating the cortex and asking patients if they felt an aura coming on (which signaled a seizure was going to start). BTW patients are awake for neurosurgery because the brain itself does not feel pain. He found that by stimulating different parts of the brain, patients experienced olfactory and auditory hallucinations. This opened up revolution in neurology and neuroscience that led to a great understanding of how memories were stored, the electrical nature of the brain and so much more. In the last decade, there have been many more sophisticated studies showing that brain stimulation can induce all types of memories, feelings, hallucinations, reward and more, depending which areas were stimulated.

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