Bozeman Magazine

“What if I told you that there’s a place in the brain where, if you could reach it in just the right way, someone with severe, treatment-resistant depression could experience relief from otherwise inescapable suffering?”

That question, posed by internationally recognized neuroscientist Dr. Helen Mayberg, will form the basis for the next Café Scientifique community event set for 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14. Mayberg will present “A Pacemaker for the Brain: How Transformative Technologies Using Surgically Implanted Devices are Creating New Hope for Sufferers of Severe Depression.”

The online event will be co-hosted by Montana INBRE, Montana State University’s Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery and the Office of Research, Economic Development and Graduate Education. The event is free and open to the public and does not require registration. Participants can connect to the online event from the Montana INBRE webpage at inbre.montana.edu.

During the event, Mayberg, whose work explores the intersection of brain mapping and psychiatric disorders, will lead a discussion centering on the tools, techniques and ethics of her efforts to treat severe depression using “deep brain stimulation” — a surgical procedure routinely used to treat severe Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

To understand how deep brain stimulation might treat severe depression, Mayberg said it’s helpful to think of the brain as a series of interconnected neighborhoods and treatment-resistant depression as a malfunction in the electrical grid. 

“Using neuroimaging tools, we’ve been able to map the wiring and connections of the relevant circuitry with enough precision to reliably target a precise location deep in the brain, implant an electrode there, and then, with controlled amounts of stimulation, effectively reset a deeply depressed patient’s mood,” she said.

The event will include video testimonials from several of Mayberg’s patients, who describe their experiences in the operating room and their recoveries with the treatment.  

“Beyond the scientific rationale and ongoing work to optimize the procedure, important new discoveries have emerged from a place of empathy to the patient’s ongoing experience,” Mayberg said. “Recovery takes more than a stimulator.”

Mayberg will conclude by leading a community discussion on the ethics of implanting devices in the brain and future applications of evolving brain-computer interface technologies.  

“People are, of course, curious about surgical interventions in the brain and want to know things like whether a device can be turned off, whether we can actually heal the brain, or sometimes people just want to express some version of, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be doing that,’” she said. “Actually, that skeptical sentiment is a good place to start because it allows me to ask, ‘If you were a doctor, and you knew this type of treatment might work when nothing else would, what would you say to a deeply suffering patient who was otherwise all out of options?’”

Mayberg is a professor of neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York where she also directs The Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics. She earned her medical doctorate from the University of Southern California, trained at the Neurological Institute of New York at Columbia University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Prior to joining Mount Sinai, Mayberg was a professor of psychiatry, neurology and radiology and held the inaugural Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric Neuroimaging and Therapeutics at the Emory University School of Medicine. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

Café Scientifique provides a relaxed setting for people to learn about current scientific topics. The concept started in England in 1998 and has spread to a handful of locations in the United States. Following a short presentation by a scientific expert, the majority of time is reserved for conversation, questions and dialogue.

Housed at MSU, Montana INBRE is an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Program from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences division of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103474.

Contact Bill Stadwiser with Montana INBRE at 406-994-3360 or william.stadwiser@montana.edu for more information about the Café Scientifique concept or check the web at inbre.montana.edu/cafe/index.html.