Dr Russell Swerdlow
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Dr Russell Swerdlow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This was a gentleman in his early 40s, worked as a police officer, worked as a school teacher.
He was married.
What he had gotten in trouble over was making inappropriate advances towards his stepdaughter.
He was making inappropriate comments to one of the female physicians who was on the consult team with me.
And he had urinated on himself and didn't seem particularly concerned about that at all.
And all those signs suggest something in the frontal lobes wasn't quite right.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I told the residents working with me that everyone's going to hate me for sabotaging this guy's discharge, but we need to get an MRI.
And I thought we were going to see something, but I was shocked when the next day I looked at the MRI films and he had a very large tumor called a hemangiopericytoma, which was compressing the right frontal lobe in an area, in a specific part called the orbitofrontal cortex area.
Yeah, that's a way to see it.
I don't believe that we stumbled onto, let's say, the pedophilia center of the brain.
Really, what this tumor was doing was disrupting his impulse control center.
Now, in the behavioral neurology business, we've recognized for over 100 years that injury to the orbitofrontal cortices of the frontal lobes will alter behavior and tend to make people very impulsive.
It has all these implications for people who may know the difference between right from wrong, but because of damage to this part of the brain, may not be able to act on that knowledge.
I would guess things are going to move in that direction.
The implication of what you're asking is how free really is free will.
More than maybe we'd like to admit, our behaviour is hardwired.
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