[eriknstr]

> Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art, but because she believed it would have a life-changing effect on her. She hoped that a hole in her head would increase what she terms "cranial compliance," that alleviating the pressure in her skull would allow the heart to pump more blood to her brain, thereby giving her a new feeling of buoyancy. "If you don’t have that expansibility," she says of the prison of inflexible bone that most of us have for skulls, "then the heartbeat pushes against the brain cells, which isn’t very good."

She wasn't doing it to get rid of evil spirits.

> Archaeologists have speculated that the operation was performed as a religious rite, an initiation into the priestly caste, or as a treatment for demonic possession—symptoms we might now diagnose as epilepsy, psychosis, or migraine. A hole in the head served as a mouthpiece to the gods, it was thought, or as a window that would allow bad spirits to escape.

People might have done it for that reason previously but she wasn't.

[Baeocystin]

Her reasoning as quoted is no more based in reality than theirs. Frankly, I would say it's worse, as the people who did this hundreds of years ago did not have the benefit of modern medicine to model why it is a bad idea in the first place.

[cmdrfred]

Blood letting should have a similar effect no?

[darkerside]

What makes you so sure your model of reality is more predictive than hers?

[Baeocystin]

What testable predictions has she made?

[prbuckley]

This would have sounded crazy to me 6 months ago. However I had a friend who had a traumatic brain injury where the doctors had to remove a portion of their skull temporarily (a couple months) to releive pressure on the brain. The doctors told my friend that his brain function and parts of his personality may be different while parts of his skull was off, and sure enough it was. When they put his skull back together a couple months later his personality shifted. The stated reason the doctor gave had to do with differentials in blood pressure in the brain with and with out the skull entact. This was at a top hospital in San Francisco.

[Baeocystin]

A traumatic brain injury that is severe enough to require removal of a portion of the skull to relieve pressure from swelling is a critical medical event that has nothing to do with an otherwise healthy individual drilling a hole through their skull. Blood does not 'press on the brain' in a negative way in normal function. Far from it- being supported from all sides by a bath of CSF is critical to proper function. Remove that support from an unexpected area, and problems are likely, as you saw with your friend. The only reason they do such a radical procedure is to prevent a swelling brain from squeezing itself out through the hole that connects the brain to the spinal cord, as that progresses rapidly to death.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

//

I hope your friend is recovering well, and I wish them the best of luck in recovery. Brain injuries are frightening and frustrating, but the brain is amazing in its plasticity, too.

//

[edit] for some reason, I can't reply to the comment below, so I'm posting my answer here, so you don't think I am ignoring your point. Personality change after TBIs is not a good thing. For a representative example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pr...

[eriknstr]

>Personality change after TBIs is not a good thing.

Reminds me of a documentary I saw recently about snowboarder Kevin Pearce called The Crash Reel (2013) [1]. Kevin Pearce was changed by his TBI also but the one I came to think of when you said this was another person that was affected even worse from a TBI they got from a snowboarding accident.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2499076/

[Baeocystin]

That looks like an interesting documentary. Thanks for the link.

[elif]

You injected the word "problems" because it suited your argument... but OP used the words "different [..] personality"

[prbuckley]

This would have sounded crazy to me 6 months ago. However I had a friend who had a traumatic brain injury where the doctors had to remove a portion of their skull temporarily (a couple months) to releive pressure on the brain. The doctors told my friend that his brain function and parts of his personality may be different while parts of his skull was off, and sure enough it was. When they put his skull back together a couple months later his personality shifted. The stated reason the doctor gave had to do with differentials in blood pressure in the brain with and with out the skull entact. This was at a top hospital in San Francisco.