From the headline, I assumed that the article was about trepanation (alternately trephination or trepanning). People have been peeling back the scalp and drilling holes in their crania for thousands of years to relieve things like recurrent headaches, seizures and mental disorders. It's been basically dismissed as pseudoscience by the medical profession, but there are still some people out there taking matters in to their own hands (try an image search), and there's an international advocacy group to boot.

Was there a control group in the study that received just the hole in the head, or did everyone get larger and smaller doses of current from the electrode implants? Maybe, just maybe, the hole itself was enough.

I hope you read my comment, I am MikeSar and I read your comment after I wrote mine, we are in complete agreement, explicitly and otherwise. This procedure is a tragedy, by well meaning people. The simple fact is we have no clue on how the brain works. A Neurologist Doctor was give an award by a prestigious group and in her acceptace speech she refers to the brain as "a mystery". Her award was given by a research institute for her important contributions. Well deserved, no doubt.

i met a nobel laureate who told me that "the brain is not a computer; it's a jungle! it will take 200-300 yrs before neuroscience reaches the point that we can do this type of "drilling" meaningfully. right now, it's just going in there with a pick and shovel and hoping for the best.

Interesting. I will add your comment to my notes on the brain, which will always be incomplete. If the study in Canada, confirmed by soldiers in Iraq that lost part of their brain but were able to re-develop previous skill, using part of the brain that remained, show that the brain is able to do any function with any re-trrained neuron. This means that any part of the brain may be doing the same or a different function any day. Even how we walk or think. This means that knowing the location tells you nothing about its current function.

As simple and hard as it seems to be, all the locations of a pain source are defined by the brain. We may say "my knee hurts" but the truth is "my brain tells me that my knee hurts" is closer to the truth.

You're probably right that we may not fully understand the brain for 200-300 years. Please advise me what to do in the meantime while I suffer from suicidal depression. I wouldn't want to allow doctors to do anything that you feel is a "tragedy" or "pick and shovel" treatment just because other people have gotten significant improvement from it.

Keep me on your address book and inform me when our understanding of the brain has reached a sufficient level of thouroughness so that I may then seek treatment.