This boy would set himself maths problems, which he had to solve before he could eat. His OCD had become so severe, and the maths problems he set himself so complex, that he couldn’t solve them any more, so he couldn’t eat.” At Butler hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, Lindquist and colleagues put the boy in an MRI-like machine and passed beams of gamma radiation through his brain. These beams converged on a pinpoint-accurate spot where they created a lesion that damaged a tiny area of tissue, blocking the pathway that caused the OCD symptoms.
