like curing epilepsy.

Cortical Surface Reconstruction and Visualization

loss of cortical gray matter.

like we're doing with epilepsy.

It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization.

Epilepsy can best be treated by responsive electrical stimulation.

You can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass,

There are drugs that treat epilepsy, but these don't always work.

Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses.

Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive.

I had two grand mal seizures and I was diagnosed with epilepsy.

So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring.

If that's the source of the epilepsy, we can attack that as well.

Now actually we've looked in several different cortical areas in the monkey learning this task.

For example, I asked the epilepsy people what are they using for informed consent.

And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy.

There are 15 or 20 cortical areas that are changed specifically when you learn a simple skill like this.

Well, if we're going to do it for epilepsy, why the hell not try it for something else?

So for example we can look to the cortical area that represents input that's controlling the posture of the monkey.

That concludes my discussion of epilepsy, which is the third invention that I want to discuss here this afternoon.

Epilepsy is a disease in which a faulty part of the brain starts working spontaneously for no apparent reason.

Would you believe, 12 pages, single space, the patient has to read before they're in our trial to cure their epilepsy?

We look in cortical areas that control specific movements, and the sequences of movements that are required in the behavior, and so forth.

The diagnosis of M.E. is really in a place where something like epilepsy or multiple sclerosis was a hundred to even thirty years ago.

The first wish is to use the epilepsy responsive neurostimulator, called RNS, for Responsive NeuroStimulator that's a brilliant acronym for the treatment of other brain disorders.

But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs, and being able to target those specifically is a first step.

In other words there is still a single, simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of cortical areas of the surface of the skin of the body.

There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past.

That says to me, at least in rats and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture that play may be pretty important for our survival.

And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions.

And what was interesting was that in this one region, the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds, suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent the natural age related decline in cortical structure.

Form a company to develop a neuro pacemaker for epilepsy, as well as other diseases of the brain, because all diseases of the brain are a result of some electrical malfunction in it, that causes many, if not all, of brain disorders.

And if we take a slice of cortical tissue with one month of age and we simply look at those neurons, those are those black bodies that you see there, and the little processes that issue from them, they look like spiders, those are the dendrites that connect to other neurons.

And then with four screws, we put in a frame, then we snap in the device and we run with wires the one shown in green will go to the surface of the brain with electrodes, to the epileptic focus, the origin of the epilepsy, where we can sense the electrical signal and have computer analysis that tells us when to hit it with some electrical current to prevent the clinical manifestation of the seizure.

It can detect and terminate seizures before the clinical symptoms occur, provide stimulation only when needed, can be turned off if seizures disappear it has minimal side effects as a matter of fact, in all our clinical trials to date, we've seen no side effects in the 40 or so patients in whom it's been implanted and it's invisible, cosmetically hidden, so, if you have epilepsy and you have the device, no one will know it because you can't tell that it's there.