system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What does it mean to be lobotomized.

Saw something on the front page about this.

Thanks.
gpt
They stick a small pick up your eye socket, as your skull is thinnest there, the pick enters the prefrontal cortex of your your brain (it's that part of your brain responsible for memory, decision-making and logical thought) from the bottom, the surgeon swishes the pick around and destroys a bit of the brain lobe. Generally, the patient is made to count from ten backwards repeatedly, when the patient can no longer count coherently, the surgeon deems that enough damage has been done and withdraws the pick.

This is generally done to make "uncontrollable" mental patients more docile. The end result was a patient with severely retarded mental capacities and almost completely no sense of initiative.

The above method (Transorbital Lobotomy) was popularized by the American doctor Walter Freeman (who learned it from the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, who would go on to win a Nobel for this "invention"). Freeman drove around America in a mobile lab he called the "lobotomobile" shilling his "technique" like some demented Kirby salesman. He preformed 3500 operations in the late 40s and boasted that the lobotomy would be as common as pulling teeth by the time he's done with it (the US would eventually lobotomize about 50 000 people, including children as young as 4).

The procedure was banned in every country by the 1970s.