A Bullet To The Brain

Pretend, for a moment, you’re a physician who treats cancer using radiation. One of your patients has an inoperable tumor growing deep inside his brain. If untreated, it will kill him.

The good news: Using a CT scanner, and a frame around the patient’s head, you can precisely aim a narrow beam of radiation that will kill the tumor.

The bad news: Like a bullet, the radiation beam is equally dangerous to everything en route to the tumor. The dose of radiation required to kill the tumor will also kill the normal brain along the entire path of the beam.

Problem: How could you deliver a lethal dose of radiation to the tumor in one treatment, while sparing the surrounding normal brain?

Think for a moment before proceeding…

Answer: Split the total dose of radiation into hundreds of beams and focus each beam on the tumor from a different angle. In this way, an lethal dose of irradiation can be delivered to the tumor – at the point where all the beams intersect – while the surrounding brain tissue only receives a tiny fraction of the total amount.

This brilliant solution was conceived by a Swedish brain surgeon called Lars Leksell. He created a device – called a Gamma Knife – that consists of over two hundred converging beams of radiation which can be precisely focused on a tumor.

I first saw Leksell’s Gamma Knife while at medical school. It got me thinking about the idea of solving a problem – in this case, how to destroy a brain tumor – by approaching it from multiple perspectives. I wanted to share this metaphor with you, because it’s exactly how I visualize Perspective Power. A set of strategies that enables me to focus – like a laser beam – on my circumstances from multiple points of view in order to solve problems, spot opportunities, make better decisions, be more creative, dilute toxic emotions and take effective action.