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stimulation, to ascertain whether surgery would likely impinge upon any key processes (such as speech). Penfield’s team was surprised to find that focal stimulation of parts of the brain could evoke not just spontaneous sensations, such as hearing a specific sound or seeing something flash before your eyes, but vivid recollections of long-ago events, lost memories that transported the person back to another time entirely. “I was incredulous,” Penfield wrote. “On each subsequent occasion I marveled… . I was astonished
like CT rather than MRI is much less precise—you can see a large mass, but you don’t get the same detail you need for planning surgery. The scan image showed a mass the size of a cricket ball that was pushing against Luke’s frontal and temporal lobes and making the right side of his head swell. At one point his doctors even inserted a camera into an artery in his groin and made it travel all the way into his brain to have a look at the site of the tumor. Luke remembers the sound of it clicking away inside his skull as
swirls (known as “simple” hallucinations) or images of people, places, or things (“complex” hallucinations). Charles Bonnet was a naturalist who wrote about his grandfather’s hallucinatory experiences following cataract surgery. These included “astonishing images of men, women, carriages, and buildings. The figures appeared in movement: approaching, receding, becoming larger or smaller, disappearing then reappearing. Buildings would rise in front of his eyes, showing their exterior construction.” 16 CBS is also