The prefrontal lobotomy, or: “How I won the Nobel Prize without doing any solid research.” Moniz actually based his procedure on one chimpanzee. One. This ill-tempered chimp turned into a passive, docile ape after his prefrontal cortex was severed in the lab. Moniz went gung-ho on humans and got famous. Interestingly, one of the results of this operation is that it interrupts the feedback loop between the frontal cortex and the limbic regions - so, you have feelings/emotions, but you don’t fixate on them. A friend of mine who does neurosurgury says that they still do them on patients who have extreme cancer pain, and that if you do it right, the results diminish in about 6 months. The sufferers still feel pain, but it doesn’t bother them nearly as much. As a postscriptural ode to the goddess Irony, Moniz was shot by one of his lobotomized victims and paralyzed. Didn’t work so good on that one, Egar.