Guitarist Has Brain Surgery, and Strums All the Way Through | Hacker News Reader

Guitarist Has Brain Surgery, and Strums All the Way Through

nytimes.com

60 pointsbookofjoe20 comments

This reminds me of a video I saw of an opera singer performing whilst being operated on (brain surgery).

Right at the 2:45 mark his singing becomes garbled because (I presume) the surgeon 'touches' a part of the brain involved in singing. His singing recovers later on in the video.

Have a look for yourselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j70on4v3M4E&feature=youtu.be...

Amazing and disturbing. The recovery is welcome. The moment you highlight looks like a stroke but isn’t of course.

I think he is mentioned in the article itself.

Thanks a lot for linking that video though, that was a really odd thing to watch.

Most people have heard of this "method" of performing invasive brain surgery (so that the surgeon knows he/she's not messing with the patient's ability to play the guitar, which may be linked to other abilities etc.).

But I've literally never seen a story where they did this, and they found that the patient stopped playing the guitar/stumbled playing it/played better than ever before.

So what happens in any of those cases?

1) If they stop playing ? Does it mean they have 'damaged' a part of the brain ? Can you actually fix it ?

2) If they stumble/forget parts of the tune? Have you partially damaged the part of the brain that's responsible for that muscle memory?

3) If they suddenly become Hendrix? Have you found a way to turn mortals into gods with a metal stick ?

I'd think the distribution leans heavily towards 1) than 2) or 3).

But I've never seen any (1, 2 or 3), either they don't occur (i.e the surgery is just routine without any adverse effects) or I've not bothered to dig that deep into medical journals.

Any links would be appreciated.

I interpreted the text as saying that the doctors would probe with an electrode to stimulate the areas of the brain (or tumor) that they intended to remove, and use that response to judge whether or not to remove it. They don’t do any damage until they’re confident using that metric.

So as far as I understand, they can use an electrode to probe what part of the brain they're dealing with, then periodically probe again to see if they've weakened or damaged it. Even if they have, they can stop before they've done serious permanent damage, at which point the damage can heal on its own over time.

We could trust them not to be too harmful by design. From memories, probes move by fractions of mm and brain tissue is soft so it can bend without tear. I'd say they're more tuning part of a brain rather than operating.

My wife does these surgeries. I'm not going to ask her for journal citations on Christmas, but paraphrased answers:

1. You use electrodes to interfere with each piece they are are going to resect, and see if it interferes with the task they are having the patient perform. This is a mostly non-destructive way to test before doing something that damages the brain. It is not completely perfect for a bunch of complex reasons, but it works pretty well.

2. It's somewhat more complex than that (especially "the part of the brain that's responsible for that muscle memory"), but the goal is to identify the regions you want to avoid removing before you damage them.

3. "Becoming Hendrix" doesn't happen, but it's common for people to be able to perform the task in question better post-surgery than before. The reason for this is simple: you do these surgeries because the tumor is very close to the region whose function you want to preserve, and it tends to be interfering with the normal operation of that region already due to that proximity (if it wasn't interfering, you would try to delay surgery until it was). Removing the tumor removes that interference.

Not exactly the same but there are a few documented examples of people developing astonishing creative abilities as a side effect of degenerative brain disorders:

http://brainblogger.com/2012/09/23/what-is-creativity-art-as... https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-bolero https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188

Slightly related anecdote. I was in a coma for a month just over a year ago which left me with moderate nerve damage in my fretting hand. I'm still working on adapting my technique to better suit my condition. Initially, at least for a few months, I had trouble remembering any theory at all, but felt like I could improvise better after my coma, as weird as it sounds.

Funnily enough, even though my alternate-picking speed isn't the same, my legato playing has improved a ton. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps something to do with the nerve damage and how the muscles have "reset" since then.

Any other musicians here recovering from an injury? What have your experiences been like?

Had to relearn after breaking my fretting hand in a hairy motorcycle accident. Worse at chords, but better at blues and country style rolls now. I feel much of the change is just due to the reset in my playing due to a long break and some forgotten habits.

I seem to recall hearing that Frank Zappa would 'quit' guitar every few years to approach it fresh. Perhaps there is somehing to it.

My wife went through this about a year ago. They do this because brain cancers are so invasive that you basically want to remove as much brain matter around the tumor as possible with minimal functional deficiency afterwards. This is a tradeoff because it means they would want to take more, but cannot due to the functional impairment. They stimulate the brain with electric probes to find the coherent structures within the brain. This technique is actually quite old, pioneered in Canada over 50 years ago, and proliferated recently at UCSF. It is a miracle to those with benign cancers, but in most cases prolongs life by months not years unfortunately.

interesting you mention UCSF. I just met someone working in the lab that is doing this research, and was astonished to discover patients are awake during brain surgery for this exact reason; to discover and preserve the parts of the brain most critical to certain areas of life -- areas that differ person to person.

She also said each brain looks way different. Some a grey, some are pink.

A bassist and brain surgery - the setup of the joke is almost perfect.

Does anyone knows if they tinker in the wrong part how much damage will be done/recoverable from? The brain should in theory rebuild the missing links eventually...

The old technique last time I was reading about this was the stimulate areas with an electrode before doing any work there. The electricity would disrupt the function temporarily so the surgeons would know that that part was integral to whatever function they were attempting to preserve.

All metal bands making music videos need to step it up.

My phonetics and phonology professor used to be a clinical linguist at a big hospital.

He did similar stuff, consulting with surgeons before the operation, in order to minimize damage to speech areals.

Reminds me of surgery banjo player Eddie Adcock underwent to deal with a tremor that interfered with his playing. It was quite successful.

Next level: Make someone play Asturias by Isaac Albeniz

Not sure I agree at all, since most of that piece is muscle memory, something very different from improvising jazz.

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