Dr. Michael Kilgard

I can tell you a lot of experiments have been done.

When you're having a, oh, my God, something just happened, those neurons are having exposure to those neurotransmitters.

So then the question is why doesn't it work that the brain rewires for that particular tone?

And it does.

It's not that it doesn't work at all.

And as you said, some conditions are so bad that you can do very non-selective things.

And the classic example would be if you have major depressive disorder and you do electroconvulsive therapy, we're not pushing your brain toward any particular goal.

We're triggering a seizure in the brain.

It's going to change the brain, but we're not telling it which way to go.

And somehow people tend to

recover from that in a better state than they went into it because it was so bad to begin with.

So we don't know the answer to that because the randomized control trials were not done at that time.

My colleagues who are psychiatrists say it's the most effective thing we have for people who are treatment-resistant to all the other treatments.

So I don't have an answer for you.

Normally, we do a sham control test.

And these people are anesthetized when it happens, so they would never know which one happened.

The study is easy to do.

It's just you can't do it in rats because rats don't have depression.

And right now, no one is signing up.

If you sign up for actual therapy or a 50% chance of getting a therapy, people tend not to sign up.