"it's hardly likely that physicians can recommend that human patients reduce their brain activity to keep their gliomas from growing,"
I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the tumor.
It would make a really fascinating experiment to hook someone up to such a device, then see whether the brain considers that enough of an aversive stimulus to move the targeted functionality to another part of the brain, as if that part of the brain was damaged. No way to get that past the ethics committees, I'm sure, but interesting.
There's probably an interesting sci-fi story in the crazy home DIY tinker diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer who just puts together such a rig anyways with no medical approval... if we don't already have the off-the-shelf tech to do that today we're pretty darned close. (But I've never really worked out how to move from "high concept" to "actual plot", despite a few attempts.)
> I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the tumor.
Hopefully the target portion of the brain isn't the part that responds to being zapped.
I imagine there are a lot of very entertaining failure cases, or, at least, entertaining failure cases as long as they aren't really happening to someone.
Heh, perhaps that's the proper angle for the story... macabre comedy. Think Doc Brown meeting Marty McFly in the past for the first time (http://eol_images/Entire_Site/2012220/DocBrown.jpg ) meets existential pratfalls. We laugh, we learn, we question the fundamental nature of the relationship between brain and mind.
"Just a heads-up: That coffee we gave you earlier had fluorescent calcium in it so we can track the neuronal activity in your brain. There's a slight chance the calcium could harden and vitrify your frontal lobe. Anyway, don't stress yourself thinking about it. I'm serious. Visualizing the scenario under stress actually triggers the reaction."
Kind of the stuff of science fiction but...I can imagine that if we could put someone in a medical induced coma for a long-period of time, sort of like suspended animation, we could perhaps find ways to treat the cancer while the brain is inactive or at least limit the tumor growth until a more viable treatment is available at a future date.
I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the tumor.
It would make a really fascinating experiment to hook someone up to such a device, then see whether the brain considers that enough of an aversive stimulus to move the targeted functionality to another part of the brain, as if that part of the brain was damaged. No way to get that past the ethics committees, I'm sure, but interesting.
There's probably an interesting sci-fi story in the crazy home DIY tinker diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer who just puts together such a rig anyways with no medical approval... if we don't already have the off-the-shelf tech to do that today we're pretty darned close. (But I've never really worked out how to move from "high concept" to "actual plot", despite a few attempts.)