Andrew Huberman· PhD
thankfully to the brain is painless right no pain receptors in the brain
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thankfully to the brain is painless right no pain receptors in the brain
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And the way that in a nutshell it can be done is that the brain itself doesn't have any pain receptors. So the pain receptors are the ones that are in our nerves that are in the scalp that are throughout our body. These are actually the way that we perceive pain and touch. And um you know I think it's paradoxical to many people at first but the brain itself which is processing that information in the body actually doesn't have those receptors itself. So the way that we typically do this is to numb the the scalp. We use things like when you go to the dentist office like lidocaine we can inject around the site of the incision. Um, the bone by the way doesn't have any pain receptors itself either. um the membrane on top of the brain that we call the dura does have some pain receptors. So sometimes we have to be sensitive around that and do some uh local anesthesia around the dura and interestingly the brain tissue itself doesn't. There are some other areas like around the blood vessels that can be sensitive. The membrane the dura is sensitive. So um there are areas but they can be numbed. And so this is a really important fact that allows us to do these surgeries awake when it's necessary to do it.
And begin by you know making your incision. I mean drawing where you want to make your incision and then literally just doing this as though it's a local um you know like you're having a lipoma removed or something. You're literally just covering the lidocaine and epinephrine across the scalp. You're boing down to where you need to go. Y once you get to the bone, you can start to literally put a hole in and start to saw across your holes. Yeah. Yeah.