The Meaning of Lobotomy

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The brain is a painless tissue, right? The master of pain is painless because it has no thing to send the signal to. In this particular case, the electrodes were implanted because we needed to do very long monitoring outside of the operating room. It's completely different and I think it took some time really to get away, you know, from this dark period, I think, in the history of medicine.

While operating on a 16-year-old girl who suffered from severe seizures, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried stumbled on the region of the brain that makes us laugh. To neuroscientist Patrick House, Fried's ability to produce laughter surgically raises deep and disconcerting questions about how the brain works. Join Fried, House, and EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a live broadcast from Jerusalem's Shalem College that is a sequel of sorts to House's earlier appearance on EconTalk. House and Fried discuss the mystery of consciousness and try to square the biological bases for emotions with the circle of our humanity.