#363 ‒ A new frontier in neurosurgery: restoring brain function with brain-computer interfaces, advancing glioblastoma care, and new hope for devastating brain diseases | Edward Chang, M.D.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is doctor Edward Chang. Edward is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF and a leading innovator in functional neurosurgery and brain computer interface. Edward's work bridges the operating room, the research lab, and the engineering bench to restore speech and movement for patients who have lost these traits. In this episode, we discuss how modern neurosurgery evolved, dramatically reducing collateral damage and recovery time. What happens during awake brain surgery? Why the brain feels no pain? How real time mapping protects language and motor function? And the split second decisions surgeons make at the edge of the eloquent cortex? Breakthroughs in brain computer interfaces? Neural Engineering's next frontier fully implantable wireless brain computer interfaces and functional electrical stimulation systems that may bypass damaged nerves to restore breathing or limb control, how genomic profiling, immune based strategies, and more extensive resections are slowly turning glioblastoma, a once uniformly fatal tumor, into a slightly longer survivable disease, Edwards' vision for 2030 and beyond, slimmer, safer brain implants to restore speech for people with paralysis and other injuries, and how advances will help turn conditions like ALS, spinal cord injury, and even aggressive brain tumors into more chronic manageable illnesses. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with doctor Edward Chang. Eddie, thank you so much for taking a time out of your very busy schedule to come to Austin. Really excited to talk with you today. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks, Peter. So there's so much I wanna talk about with respect to what your career is about today and what the field of neurosurgery is in today and how the bounds are really being pushed. But as we were talking earlier, I think that neurosurgery remains a little bit of a black box, and it might help orient our listeners if we give a little bit of a history lesson. So can we orient ourselves back into the latter part of the nineteenth century? And what were the typical problems that would have presented to a …