Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category

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Shhhhhsh. The baby’s observing.

Saturday, April 20th, 2013

A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can’t tell us.

This is…interesting. (And the photo of the wired-up baby is a little creepy.) I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently around a baby (and a toddler), and I’m not 100% sure I agree with their police work there, Lou. What does “perceive objects in an adult-like way” mean, exactly? Because the baby I’ve been hanging with doesn’t seem to understand adult-like concepts like “you can’t go through a solid object”.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She is, after all, a baby. At least we haven’t had to have the conversation about how riding the dog like it’s a small horse is FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.)

Charles Nelson, director of developmental medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, cautioned that the French scientists may be over-interpreting data…
Brain wave data and brain activity measured by functional MRI scans alone cannot imply a behavioral state, Nelson warned.
“If that were true, I should be able to look at your [electroencephalogram and MRI] response and know what you’re thinking or feeling, and we know that is not the case,” he said.

Posted in Clippings, Neuroscience | No Comments »

…saves you from trial!

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

A while back, I wrote about the case of Robert Carroll Gillham, who set fire to a Gallery Furniture store, doing $20 million in damage, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor while awaiting trial.

The HouChron has an update on the case. Good news: Mr. Gillham’s brain tumor was removed.

Good or bad news, depending on how you look at it: Mr. Gillham probably will never stand trial on the charges.

“An expert has found him incompetent and unlikely to regain competence and neither side is disputing that,” said Brett Podolsky, his attorney. “Both sides are working on an agreed order for a lengthy civil commitment.”

Summarizing, the damage that the tumor did before it was removed, the side effects of the removal, and Mr. Gillham’s age have left him in a state where both sides agree he’s not competent to stand trial.

Noted:

Gallery Furniture and [Jim] McIngvale, its colorful pitchman, are well-known Houston icons. He said Wednesday he was disappointed by the development, but had no quarrel with the criminal justice system.
“We wanted to get this behind us, and get some closure on this,” McIngvale said. “But the court system is the court system and if they say he’s incompetent, we certainly respect whatever the court system rules.”

That’s actually a pretty classy statement for a man who had $20 million worth of stuff burned up.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Neuroscience | No Comments »

The steer, the stall, the shade, the duke man, and the dip.

Friday, January 4th, 2013

Picked this up from Insta, but I don’t care that he already linked it; this is one of those stories.

People who have been reading this blog regularly know that I’m fascinated by magic and the history of magic. You know that my admiration for Penn and Teller is like the universe itself; finite but unbounded.

Penn and Teller are only in this story as sort of peripheral figures, but I commend it to your attention: a New Yorker profile of Apollo Robins, the world’s greatest pickpocket.

…Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

Part of what makes this story so interesting to me, other than the magic angle, is that Robbins’ work, and the techniques he’s developed, reveal really interesting things about the mind and human perception.

The intersection of magic and neuroscience has become a topic of some interest in the scientific community, and Robbins is now a regular on the lecture circuit. Recently, at a forum in Baltimore, he shared a stage with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman—who won a Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics—and the two had a long discussion about so-called “inattentional blindness,” the phenomenon of focussing so intently on a single task that one fails to notice things in plain sight.

This is the best thing I’ve read so far in 2013. It may be the best magazine article of the year; I expect it to be in contention if we’re all still here in December.

Posted in 2013, Clippings, Law, Magic, Neuroscience, Reading list | 1 Comment »

Two quick items.

Monday, December 31st, 2012

This is an actual headline on the Dallas Morning News website, as of 9:48 AM today:

Dallas police officer on leave over rap video has car burglarized while visiting husband’s grave

And I said, “Whaaaaaaaaht?” (Short item, but worth clicking through to read. The headline, while odd, is an accurate summary.)

Today’s NYT has a follow-up story about Ryan Freel, whose death was previously noted here. Of interest:

  • His stepfather ups the concussion estimate to 15, “10 as a professional ballplayer”.
  • “His former wife witnessed a winter league game in Venezuela in which he smashed through an outfield wall and had to be hospitalized with a concussion.”
  • “Freel’s former wife said she found no fault with his teams or their medical staffs, concluding that they diagnosed his condition properly and insisted that he abide by the stipulated recovery period.”
  • It looks like he will be tested for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Neuroscience, Obits, Sports | Comments Off

Norts spews.

Tuesday, December 25th, 2012

Today’s NYT has a nice retrospective article tied to the playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs 41 years ago today.

The Dolphins won, 27-24. In double overtime. To this day, that game remains the longest game in NFL history.

“Do you want to talk about my mother’s funeral, too?” [kicker Jan] Stenerud said recently when asked about the defeat. He hung up the phone, ending a brief interview.

Continuing with the “Merry freakin’ Christmas” theme, Ryan Freel has passed away.

Freel, who played second base, third base and all three outfield positions, spent six of his eight big-league seasons with the Cincinnati Reds and finished his career in 2009 with a .268 average and 143 stolen bases.

Freel was apparently a “b—s to the wall” player:

Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players while trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight shows, and he was praised by those he played both with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform.

And over the course of his career, he suffered an estimated 10 concussions. He missed 30 games in 2007 because of a concussion after he collided with a teammate.

Freel was 36. According to the NYT obit, law enforcement believes he killed himself. I wanted to mention this as a reminder: people have talked a lot about concussions in football, and to a lesser extent in hockey (they’d probably be talking more about hockey if we actually had a hockey season). I think it is worth keeping in mind that those aren’t the only sports worth worrying about.

Posted in Clippings, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

TMQ watch: October 23, 2012.

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Before we start in on this week’s TMQ, we want to note a story from today’s New York Times that bothers us. We think it is appropriate to talk about here, as it deals with things TMQ has been hammering on as well. After the jump, we’ll get started…

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Posted in Clippings, Firings, Food, Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Safety, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | 1 Comment »

TMQ watch: September 25, 2012.

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Let’s cut to the chase.

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Posted in Clippings, Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

TMQ watch: September 11, 2012.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

First TMQ of the new season. What can we say: we’ve got high hopes.

After the jump, oops, there goes another rubber tree plant…

(more…)

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TMQ Watch: August 21, 2012.

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Joe Ely’s classic song “Fighting For My Life” contains the lyric:

I don’t mean to crash the cymbals, I don’t mean to beat the drum

I don’t want to waste your time, I’d rather save you some.

TMQ’s favorite Batman film is “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm“. You can now skip the first 335 words of this week’s column. And if that’s all you were looking for, you can skip everything after the jump, too.

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Posted in Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Off

Obvious headline is obvious.

Friday, August 17th, 2012

So instead, I’ll link to this:

and this:

and let my readers fill in the blank.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Neuroscience | Comments Off

A blade to the brain.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

This story is too amazing not to blog.

Officer Eder Loor of the NYPD was called out on Tuesday to escort an emotionally disturbed individual to the hospital. During the process of escorting the gentleman, he became upset and attacked Officer Loor with a 3″ knife which

...sliced through the officer’s temple and into the temporal lobe and a major vein.
It passed less than half an inch from structures that control vision and speech, touched the nerves that give sensation to the face and nicked the surface of, but did not penetrate, a major artery.

Officer Loor pulled the knife out of his head and was taken to the hospital, where doctors found he was bleeding into his brain.

They found that the knife, which entered just behind the officer’s eye, went “deep into the temporal lobe and all the way down to the skull base.”
“The temporal lobe in this area does not have major function,” Dr. Bederson said. “About half an inch away, it controls speech. About a half an inch above all his motor function.”
The knife also cut through the Sylvian fissure, the deepest and most prominent of the cortical fissures of the brain, containing major blood vessels. “It cut the major vein of the Sylvian fissure,” he said, “and almost like a paper cut, it just nicked the surface of the artery but did not cut it.” The artery supplies blood for the entire left hemisphere of the brain, Dr. Bederson said.

Doctors stopped the bleeding. Officer Loor has some residual numbness in his face, which is probably due to the fact that the tip of the knife ended up pressing against his trigeminal nerve. Doctors expect the numbness to go away, and expect Officer Loor to recover fully.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Neuroscience | Comments Off

TMQ watch: January 31, 2012.

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Before we get into this week’s TMQ…well, we were going to snark on Women’s Professional Soccer, but that’s kind of kicking a person when they’re down. (“…average attendance 2,714 before the World Cup final”, “…season’s final average was 3,518, slightly below the 2010 average of 3,601″)

Other than that…well, this is the slowest week in sports. Why don’t we just jump in now and avoid the Super Bowl rush?

(more…)

Posted in Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Off

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