Man plays guitar while undergoing brain surgery:
In a video you can see Anthony Kullkamp Dias of Brazil playing guitar while surgeons remove a tumor from his brain. That’s not as crazy as it sounds: For the kind of brain surgery Dias had, patients need to stay awake. And being conscious isn’t enough — they also have to talk to and interact with the surgical team so doctors can be sure they aren’t injuring vital areas of the brain.
Awake brain surgery is made possible by advanced brain mapping techniques and high-tech anesthetics. These days, doctors are working with a precise map of the brain they’re operating on, and they can use that to successfully extricate dangerous tumors that sit near important brain regions, like ones that control speech, motor function or memory. Meanwhile, the latest anesthetics make it possible to keep patients sedated but awake and talking.
Plus, after testing a patient with questions or fine-motor tasks while applying electrical stimulation to different parts of the brain to see where the vulnerable areas are located, doctors can put them right to sleep for the actual removal, confident that they’ve mapped out forbidden areas.
Most people choose to read aloud or simply answer questions from their doctors during the surgery. But Dias — a Brazilian banker who’s played guitar for 20 years — decided to put on a little concert. CNN reports that the surgery was successful, with 90 percent of the tumor removed. The location of his tumor had his doctors worried about damaging motor function and speech, so the task was actually pretty perfect as a mapping test. If Dias stumbled over forming a chord or suddenly forgot a classic Beatles lyric, they’d know they were mapping a danger zone. Though I suppose that probably put a lot of pressure on Dias not to mess up.
