The Anatomy of a Lobotomy

in today's video we're talking about the lobotomy now for me personally this is one of those horrible things I've ever come across and I say that because in order to perform this procedure you have to be willing to turn someone into a shell of themselves you destroy their personality and their ability to make rational decisions it's absolutely awful but in order to understand this we need to discuss the necessary anatomy of the region we're gonna look at the mechanics of the procedure and we'll even talk about what they would feel once the procedure was over so it's gonna be an interesting one let's do this so in order to best understand how this procedure works we first need to look at some of the essential anatomy of the cranium or the skull because that's obviously what they had to go through in order to get to the brain so in front of us I have a real human skull and as you look at it you're gonna see a ton of interesting character in the bone itself and it's also accumulated some damage you can see it's missing part of the hard palate or the maxilla bone and the ethmoid in here is essentially gone but what I want to focus on is going to be this frontal bone up here and most people would refer to this as their forehead but it's more than just the forehead because the frontal bone wraps around and forms the top part of your orbit or your eye socket and up there the bone is extremely thin and that's the entire idea behind this type of lobotomy the transorbital lobotomy so what they used to do is take an ice pick and slip it above the eye now I don't have an ice pick I just have a probe but if you can imagine it going above the eye and then hitting the top of this orbit at this really thin piece of bone and it's kind of interesting this cadaver actually has a hole already up there it's likely not from a transorbital lobotomy more than likely it's just because the bone is super thin and over years of handling it broke but it does provide a pretty good visual but as the probe or ice pick rather would go through this top part of the orbit it would then enter into the neurocranium or the cranial vault where it would meet the brain so let's go ahead and take a look at the brain to further explain this so what you're looking at here is the right hemisphere of a female brain and there is a lot to look at so I want to quickly orient you right here we have the cerebellum which is in kind of in charge of just refining motor movement we have the brainstem this aspect of it is called the medulla oblongata then we have the pons the midbrain and up here is in a very important structure called the thalamus now the thalamus you kind of think of it as a relay center it's a hub of sorts that this entire region called the cerebrum is going to connect to and then it's going to send the signal to the proper place now the the idea behind the transorbital lobotomy is to sever the connection between the thalamus and this area here called the prefrontal cortex prefrontal cortex is in charge of rational decision-making and your personality and in fact it doesn't even fully develop until you're 25 years old so what they would do is break through that orbital plate which I'm obviously not going to puncture the brain here but it would enters around this area and then as it was in there they would make a sharp 40 degree turn towards the midline again the idea is to cut this to sever the connection between this prefrontal cortex and the thalamus by doing that you render them inactive they are deactivated as a person so it's a horrible horrible procedure I can't believe by the way it was done as recently as the 1950s which is another thing that is absolutely mind-blowing to me now what they would experience afterwards is if they didn't die is everything from I guess you could say stupor confusion rage some of them would just like I mentioned earlier be a complete shell of themselves and just be vacant I mean it's it's super super depressing so there was a wide variety of symptoms but they did this to trying to prove to treat things as simple as depression psychosis that they they deemed people and this was used a lot but I believe it was the correct numbers around 20,000 times or so in the United States alone this procedure was performed absolutely ridiculous but I hope you enjoyed this video as strange as it was if you did please let us know in the comments below what you'd like to see in future videos always be sure to subscribe if you haven't and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Institute of Human Anatomy

Views: 2,792,177

Keywords: lobtomy, transorbital lobtomy, the lobotomy, institute of human anatomy, institute of human anatomy tik tok, institute of human anatomy on youtube, anatomy tik toks, ice pick lobotomy, ice pick lobotomy procedure, anatomy, anatomy and physiology, medical procedures, lobotomy (medical treatment), facts about lobotomies, mental health, mental health awareness, transorbital lobotomy definition, walter freeman, james watts, transorbital lobotomy procedure, anatomy of the brain, ioha

Id: L_5WrH80uUs

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020