DeLong’s discovery led Alim-Louis Benabid, a neurosurgeon at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, to start thinking about using deep-brain stimulation to treat people with Parkinson’s. Deep-brain stimulation, as we have seen, involves implanting electrodes in the brain and a battery-operated device elsewhere in the body. The device sends high-frequency electrical impulses into a neural circuit, in this case the subthalamic nucleus. The impulses essentially inactivate the circuit, much as the damage to the monkey’s subthalamic nucleus did, thus preventing the abnormal activity
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