Several years ago, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, decided on a seemingly bizarre approach to studying people with medication-resistant depression. He asked his subjects to wear goggles that restricted sight to either the right or left visual field. He wanted to alleviate their depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and he had a hunch that the goggles might signal which brain hemisphere to treat with this experimental therapy to ensure the greatest clinical benefits.
The goggle strategy germinated in discussions with Fredric Schiffer, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard and an associate attending psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. From earlier experiments and observations in his private practice, Schiffer had learned that ordinary, taped-up goggles elicit mood changes in many depressed patients.1 Pascual-Leone was initially skeptical but soon changed his tune. "I was surprised and sort of amazed," he recalls, ...
