“Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.”---Sydney Harris
When we were kids, education was prized by a society which lamented having had too little of it. The goal of most families was a college education for their children, the majority of whom would be the first in their clans to matriculate. The kids, themselves, were well aware of these aspirations and knew what was expected of them. They valued intelligence, intended to be smart, sought to tread the appointed path. Still and all, nobody wanted to be “a Brain.”
“A Brain” was a social misfit who valued knowledge and the demonstration of it to the exclusion of all else. Physical education was a nuisance, sports a blight on the Earth and extracurricular events to be avoided at all costs, with the possible exceptions of Astronomy Club and Band. Brains led a fairly solitary existence. On the rare occasion two or more arrived in tandem, onlookers announced a “Brain Alert.” Better to be cast into the firepits of Hell than be labelled a Brain. Many potential Brains became aware of this and resorted to camoflauge. John Barry and Dave Kiernan, the smartest kids in our elementary school class, played a little ball, were popular with girls and displayed a reasonable sense of humor. The Brains were smart, they adapted. Well, most of them. We had a Lithuanian import named Vytenis Vasliunas in high school who spoke in parables and covered the walls with mathematical graffiti. Everybody pretty much left Vytenis alone, fearful of contracting some mysterious disease which would leave them terminally geeky. I occasionally wonder what happend to Vasliunas. He had the capacity to be the proprietor of a cabbage farm or the president of Poland.
Nonetheless, for all our inadequacies, we respected high intelligence. We demanded it in our teachers, preferred it in our friends and expected it in our leaders. When Adlai E. Stevenson, a true Brain, was beaten out in two presidential elections, at least it was by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a very bright man of the Barry-Kiernan persuasion. It wasn’t until the Nixon-Kennedy result in 1960 that some of us began to worry that the U.S. electorate was fraying at the corners. I asked my wife at the time, Marilyn Todd, how a neurotic, uncharismatic mess like Richard Nixon could almost win the election. “Half the country is patently ignorant,” she advised, “and they’re breeding faster than the other half.” Truer words were never spoken. We have finally devolved into a nation where ignorance is prized, science is demeaned, the free press is maligned and bigotry is in flower. Few places on Earth have sunken so far so fast. We are verging on Brain-dead.
If there is any consolation, it is that the pendulum inevitably swings the other way. When the hippies were ascendant and things moving ever leftward, it appeared the tide was unturnable. Less than forty years later, Jabba the Hutt is president and the government is building prisons for New York Times editors and stacking the Supreme Court with female-molesting sots. Meanwhile, the Brains are scurrying, looking for shelter, a castle keep to repair to until the storm blows over, the skies clear and the Resistance rides out over the moat on crystalline horses. Round and round it goes in The Circle Game.
The Brain---When Less Is More
Jon Sarkin, a 35-year-old chiropractor, was playing golf one day when something weird happened inside his head. One of his blood vessels started moving and eventually pressed against his auditory nerve, causing a deafening case of tinnitus. Hoping to cure the incessant buzzing, Sarkin underwent a strange type of surgery. His doctor separated the nerve and capillary with a piece of Teflon, but unfortunately the treatment caused a massive stroke. When Sarkin woke up weeks later, he was missing a piece of his brain.
Due to the stroke, doctors had cut a chunk from the left side of Sarkin’s brain, causing a complete personality change. Suddenly, Jon had a burning desire to draw, an urge that totally consumed his life. When he returned to his chiropractic practice, he sketched random pictures between patients, doodling strange shapes, odd faces, weird plants. He would constantly stop what he was doing to jot down ideas that were racing through his brain. What Sarkin was experiencing was eventually deemed “sudden artistic output,” a phenomenon so rare that doctors have only recorded three cases caused by brain injury.
Before you say, “Yeah, but…” Sarkin sold eight of his pictures to The New Yorker, quit his business and opened an art studio. Since then, his work has appeared in The New York Times and The Boston Globe. His pieces start at $10,000 a canvas. Jon’s story was recently bought by Tom Cruise’s production company and he is the subject of a book written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. As side effects of strokes go, this one might top the charts.
When Shooting Yourself Is A Good Idea
A Canadian man who prefers to remain nameless for obvious reasons has a story the National Rifle Association will love. Anonymous George was a hopelessly obsessive-compulsive fellow. Back in the 1980s, George was a hardworking high-school student who suddenly developed an irrational fear of germs, washing his hands hundreds of times a day and constantly taking showers. Despite consultations with local doctors, it was impossible to get his disease under control. George was eventually forced to leave school and quit his part-time job.
Finally, in 1983, he decided to take matters into his very clean hands and shoot himself. George grabbed a pistol, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through his skull and slammed into his left front lobe, the section of his brain responsible for his OCD. When he awoke from surgery, he found his fear of microbes had disappeared along with a chunk of his brain. Labotomy by gunshot. Happy as he is with his current condition, George would advise all his fans out there not to try this at home.
Senescent cells….beautiful but deadly. Kinda like Angelina Jolie.
Out With The Old
When we were kids, our parents practiced the annual ritual of Spring Cleaning. The storm windows came off, the screens went on, the drainpipes were cleared and every room in the house was cleaned of offending residue and rehabilitated. The result was a spiffy new residence, a psychological boost, a welcome to the new season. Now doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota think we should try it on brains. Clean out the old senescent cells which can no longer divide and youthful vigor will return, they say. Sounds good to us.
The results of a new study performed by Mayo doctors and published in Nature are among the first to take a careful look at senescence and its possible connection to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Senior author Darren Baker, a molecular biologist, says the concept of clearing out detrimental cells from the brain is not yet ready to try on people. Baker got interested in senescence about 15 years ago after genetically engineering a mouse to make it more cancer-prone. Instead, the changes accidentally sped up its aging process and there was evidence senescent cells were involved.
Because mature cells won’t divide anyway, it hasn’t been clear how they are effected by senescence. The new study suggests it is the “helper” cells—the microglia and astrocystes surrounding the neurons—that are at the center of the effect. Anti-aging companies like Unity Biotech, Oisin Biotechnologies and Cleara Biotech are among the stampede looking to advance the technology. Hopefully, we’ll eventually have a raft of quick-stops like Jiffy Lube where a customer can pull in for a snappy adjustment.
Brain Science. Ain’t it wonderful?
Feelin’ Groovy
In the last several months, there has been increasing research on the ability of psychedelic drugs to treat conditions like depression, which are resistant to traditional treatments. Not long ago, researchers taking this line of investigation were laughed out of the room as LSD crazies, but increasing numbers of scientists are beginning to take another look. Psychedelics have already helped scientists probe why some psychiatric disorders cause a blurring between one’s sense of self and the environment. LSD, in particular, provides a way to track interactions between brain regions—across millions of connections—to understand the electro-chemical orchestra behind murky perceptions.
In the latest study, researchers asked participants to rate songs along a scale of meaningfulness (from “not at all” to “very”). The participants then took either LSD or a placebo and listened to the songs again, reevaluating their meaningfulness. While this was happening, researchers examined the participants’ brains using functional brain imaging.
Songs which were previously meaningless became meaningful to people taking LSD. The same effect was triggered and then erased for those taking LSD followed by ketanserin. Brain imaging allowed the researchers to track the effects to serotonin receptors known as 5-HT2ARs in brain areas thought crucial for enabling us to experience a sense of self.
Interpreting the findings will take time, but one early takeaway is that the process our brains undergo when something becomes meaningful to us is embedded in the same process that allows us to be an “I”….in other words, meaning-making is neurochemically hinged to identity.
Fine. Now when is somebody going to put a few people in a room, give them acid and turn on a Firesign Theater tape? We’d like to see the results of that one.
What Have they Done To the Brain?
It stands to reason that students of brain science might be interested in taking a peek at the engine of Albert Einstein, clearly one of the great geniuses of our time. Being a genius, Einstein figured this out and ordered his remains to be cremated lest his corpse become a holy relic for zealous examiners.
Pathologist Thomas Harvey didn’t give a fig about Einstein’s wishes, however, and plucked Albert’s brain from his head during the autopsy at Princeton Hospital. Harvey wasn’t a neuroscientist, alas, and didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with the brain. When hospital officials came a-calling looking for their missing body part, he locked the door and was summarily fired. Harvey jumped in his car and drove to Philadelphia, where he found a technician willing to slice up Einstein’s brain into over 200 pieces. There are people who will do just about anything in Philadelphia.
Over the next 40 years, the little brain squares visited the strangest places. Harvey kept some in jars in the basement next to Aunt Annie’s picalilli. A few pieces migrated with him when he moved to Kansas, stored in a box under a beer cooler. Author William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) came by to regularly admire them and take them out for recreation. As for scientific study, however, there was little of consequence. Harvey mailed out pieces of the brain to various researchers but few showed interest. The ones who did cranked out studies of minimal value. Disappointed, Harvey returned what was left of the brain to Princeton Hospital and died in 2007. As far as anyone knows, nobody tried to steal his brain.
And You Thought Sharks Were A Problem
So did Fabrizio Stabile, who avoided salt water like the plague. Instead, Fabrizio escaped to the security of the wave pool in Waco, Texas’ BRT Cable Park Surf Resort. One thing about sharks, though. You can often see them coming. Not so with the Naegleria fowleri amoeba, which will sneak into your nose, hitchhike north and….well….eat your brain.
Mr. Stabile, of course, had no idea all this was going on until he returned home to New Jersey days later. He began to get severe headaches and went on to develop symptoms, including brain swelling and fever, and was brain-dead five days later.
N. fowleri is an amoeba found in warm fresh water, according to the Centers for Disease Control. People can become infected if water contaminated with the amoeba goes up their nose, allowing the nasty little critter to travel to the brain. Brainland is like Paradise to N. fowleri, which jumps off the tram and begins munching, causing a severe inflammatory condition called Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis. The infection destroys brain tissue, leading to brain swelling and death. Not that it’s any help to Fabrizio, but N. fowleri infections are extremely rare. From 1962 to 2017, only 143 cases were reported in the United States. The infection is also extremely deadly, with a fatality rate exceeding 97%. Of the 143 cases reported, only four people survived.
Yet another of many, many reasons to avoid vacationing in Waco.
Disa & Data
Your brain will not allow you to tickle yourself. The cerebellum warns the rest of the brain shenanigans are on the way. Once it knows this, the brain ignores the resulting sensation.
People who ride on roller coasters have a higher chance of getting a blod clot in the brain. (See, Alice, I told you Ferris Wheels were safer.)
Your brain is 75% water.
Your brain is more active and thinks more at night.
Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Transmissions can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec. Traveling at 120 meters/sec is the same as going 268 miles per hour.
The weight of the average human brain is about 1300-1400g and similar to the size of the average cantaloupe. It is wrinkled like a walnut.
The brain feels like a ripe avocado and looks pink because of the blood flowing through it.
Studies show that 50-70% of all visits to the doctor for physical ailments can be traced to psychological reasons.
Your brain generates 25 watts of power while you’re awake, enough to illuminate a light bulb.
Overexposure to aluminum compounds in foil, cookware, deoderants, antacids and toothpaste can affect brain function.
A cooked potato can jump-start a foggy brain.
Eating foods rich in Vitamin E, beta-carotene and Vitamin C may help lower your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The world record for time without sleep is 264 hours or 11 days. Some people drink a lot of coffee.
The Last Word
“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”---Emo Phillips
That’s all, folks….
