The Quest to Treat Binge-Eating and Addiction—With Brain Zaps

The brain is constantly pulsing with electricity. That’s the idea behind deep brain stimulation, a technique that delivers tiny zaps of electricity to brain tissue via implanted electrodes. Those live in different brain areas,” says Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon at Baylor College of Medicine who studies DBS and coauthored a recent review paper on its use for obsessive-compulsive disorder. “The better we can understand these circuits, the better chance we will have using therapies like DBS to restore those circuits.” Deep brain stimulation requires surgeons to drill nickel-sized holes in each side of the skull to insert a needlelike electrode into each brain hemisphere. You wouldn't want to do this if you can fix the problem easier, quicker, and better with something else,” says Mark George, who pioneered a noninvasive form of brain stimulation called transcranial magnetic stimulation and is a professor of psychiatry, radiology, and neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina.