“I became extremely interested in why people behave the way they do,” he says. Pilcher developed a fascination for human behavior as a sociology and anthropology major at Colgate. This summer, Pilcher became the first neurosurgeon to use brain mapping for the part of the brain that controls music - cutting a tumor off patient Dan Fabbio’s brain while he sang in the operating room. During surgery to remove a brain tumor, for example, Pilcher asks his patients to perform tasks involving language or motor skills, then watches the parts that light up on the fMRI screen, so he knows where to avoid cutting with his scalpel. “Unless they can contribute, we can’t do the surgery.”īrain mapping is at the cutting edge of neurosurgery, wedding research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with clinical practice. “We tell them at the outset that they have a very important role to perform,” Pilcher says. As a practitioner of awake brain surgery, Pilcher needs his patients to be conscious while he works so they can help him in an extraordinary task: mapping their own brains. Then, he asks his patient how he or she is doing. When Webster Pilcher ’72 performs brain surgery, he first drills holes in the patient’s skull, removing a portion of the bone, like taking the top off of a Halloween pumpkin.
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