Prisma enters the operating room with neurosurgeon Christian Brogna to explore one of the key techniques of modern neurosurgery.
«And when the brain surface appears to me in all its magnificence, I tell the patient to play, draw, describe images. While he expresses himself, I remove the lesion.” In the first episode of 2026, Prisma, the Evidence Network vodcast, enters the operating room together with Christian Brogna, internationally renowned neurosurgeon specializing in brain tumors, to explore the principles and applications of one of the key techniques of modern neurosurgery, Awake Surgery.
What does it mean to operate on a human brain while keeping the patient awake? What happens in the mind of a neurosurgeon preparing for such a complex operation? And what frontiers have we reached on the neurosurgery front?
Tap on the identity
«Christian, you will only operate on me if you don’t take away my music», this is the phrase that Giorgio, one of Dr. Brogna’s patients, pronounces before deciding to undergo Awake Surgery. In front of him was the only doctor who agreed to operate on his tumor, located in a very complex area of the brain, the very one on which his ability to play the sax and thus live off his passion depends.
Through the story of a patient, told in the book Awakepublished by Rizzoli and written by Christian Brogna and Claudia Zanella, a writer who followed the doctor in his surgical activity for an entire year, the neurosurgeon retraces the most salient parts of an operation of global resonance, showing how the Awake surgery is not just a technique, but a paradigm shift in modern neurosurgery: during the operation the professional musician was asked to play his sax.
While the patient remains conscious and plays his instrument, the dialogue with the neurosurgeon remains constant, with the sole objective of identifying the boundaries beyond which the removal of the tumor would put essential functions at risk.
It is in this very delicate space between science, responsibility and personal identity that awakening surgery becomes an extremely personalized medicine tool: “It’s about touching the patient’s identity first-hand, what he cannot afford to lose.”
