"The annals of science are stuffed full of stories about researchers who were trying to achieve one thing and ended up accomplishing something entirely different. Fortunately for both scientists and science writers, the serendipitous find is a cliché that manages to retain its fascination no matter how many repetitions it goes through. That fascination arises from a fundamental truth about science: the more we think we understand, the more there is to know. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of neuroscience. Over the past few decades, scientists have made great strides in teasing apart the workings of the brain’s structures on a micro level. We now know, to an astonishing degree of detail, how neuronal cell bodies direct basic functions such as breathing, walking, and other motor functions. We can diagram, model, and even predict how the long, thread-like axons projecting from each brain cell carry electrical impulses from one neuron to another. Yet our fundamental grasp of how the brain’s signals operate on a larger scale—how they interact with each other to create the web of ideas and feelings we call experience—is much less robust. Recently, for instance, two separate teams of researchers were testing a technique called deep brain stimulation to treat obesity on the one hand and Parkinson’s on the other. In the process, both teams made discoveries about the nature of memory and personality." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Despite its disquieting name, deep brain stimulation has proven to be a life-changing therapy for thousands of patients who suffer from otherwise intractable disorders. It’s also been an amazingly rich source of accidental discoveries about how the mind works. - Wildcat