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Today's Google Doodle celebrates the 127th birthday of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who developed a groundbreaking epilepsy treatment called the Montreal Procedure.
In the 1930s, while working as a neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, Penfield had a patient who reported smelling burned toast just before her seizures. He realized that he could use that hallucinatory scent to pinpoint the part of the brain that was seizing - and put a stop to it.
With the patient wide awake, but under local anesthetic, he used electrodes to stimulate parts of her exposed brain, asking her what she felt, saw, heard, or smelled each time. When she declared, "I smell burned toast!" Penfield determined that he must have found the center of her epilepsy. It worked; he removed a small piece of brain tissue from the spot, and the woman never had a seizure again. Penfield and his colleagues published a paper on the method in 1951, and since then it has helped bring relief to many epilepsy patients.
Of course, there are many different kinds of epilepsy, and the Montreal Procedure doesn't work on all of them, but it made a significant difference for a large number of people. And Penfield performed the procedure more times than any other neurosurgeon working at the time. In the process, he assembled a detailed map of where sensory and motor functions happen in the brain, and which areas of the brain receive input from, or send output to, which parts of the body. He also discovered that using an electrode to stimulate the temporal lobes, in particular, can produce very vivid sensory memories - such as the smell of burned toast.
Penfield died in 1976, after a lifetime spent doing what he described as "the best way to make the world a better place."
Penfield, W., Erickson, T.C., Thomas, C.C. (1941). Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization: A Study of the Mechanism, Treatment and Prevention of Epileptic Seizures.
Liputan6.com, Jakarta - Google merayakan hari lahir Wilder Penfield yang ke-127 tahun dengan menampilkan Google Doodle di laman mesin pencariannya, Jumat (26/1/2018).
Wilder Penfield dikenal sebagai seorang ahli bedah dan peneliti otak yang memiliki prestasi luar biasa hingga membuat dirinya dijuluki sebagai "Orang Kanada paling hebat".
Wilder Penfield dikenal sebagai sosok brilian yang mengembangkan sebuah perawatan bernama Montreal Procedure (Prosedur Montreal) bersama dengan rekannya, Herbert Jasper pada 1950.
Adapun Montreal Procedure adalah perawatan bagi pasien yang memiliki kondisi kejang otak, dengan cara menghancurkan sel saraf bermasah dengan menariknya menggunakan alat beraliran listrik dengan kondisi pasien masih tersadar.
Meski dianggap sebagai orang Kanada, Wilder Penfield sebenarnya lahir di Spokane, Washington, Amerika Serikat. Ia tumbuh besar di Hudson, Wisconsin, sebelum akhirnya mengenyam pendidikan di Princeton dan mendapatkan beasiswa kuliah di Merton College, Oxford, pada 1915 untuk belajar neuropatologi.
Ia juga meraih Rhodes Scholarship dan menghabiskan bertahun-tahun belajar di Oxford, Spanyol, Jerman, dan New York, sebelum menjadi ahli bedah saraf pertama di Montreal.
Impian besar Wilder Penfield adalah ingin mendirikan institut neurologis, di mana ahli bedah, peneliti laboratorium, ahli physiologi, dan semua ilmuwan di bidang neurologi dapat bekerja dan berbagi pengetahuan mereka.
To a generation of Canadians, “I smell burnt toast!” means something very specific, and ominous. It means they’re having a seizure. Today’s Google doodle celebrates the 127th birthday of Wilder Penfield, the man behind that strange cultural reference and, more importantly, a groundbreaking neurosurgeon who pioneered new treatments for epilepsy.
Though today a Canadian icon, Penfield was actually born and raised in the United States and moved to Montreal in 1928, at age 37. There, he invented the Montreal procedure for patients with severe epilepsy. The patient remains awake under local anesthesia, while the doctor stimulates various parts of their brain tissue. The patient can then give real-time feedback about what they’re feeling, which helps the doctors destroy the nerve cells that are causing the seizures.
So what’s with the burnt toast? The first patient to undergo the Montreal procedure reported smelling burnt toast when no such thing was happening. Later, this was dramatized in a short and widely played clip explaining Penfield’s work. It’s really something. See for yourself:
Penfield’s experiments with stimulating different parts of the brains helped us learn to map its different sensory areas and he also was immortalized in the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which features a Penfield mood organ — you just press a button and feel exactly what you want.
