Archive for the ‘Neuroscience’ Category
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 »
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 Closed
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 »
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 »
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 Closed
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 Closed
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 Closed
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?
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Posted in Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
Oh, look! TMQ got us a Christmas present. To quote John Gruber (who is actually quoting Norm MacDonald): “Happy birthday, Jesus. Hope you like crap.”
After the jump, what we’ve been dreading all year…
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Posted in Clippings, Music, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 5th, 2011
I’ve spent most of my life living in Texas.
The current outside temperature is 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is hard to develop an appreciation for hockey when the number of sustained below freezing days can be counted on the fingers of both hands. I never have (though I did attend a Houston Aeros game once, and it seems to me that I had a good time).
So I’m probably not the best person to comment on this, but I did want to highlight the NYT series on Derek Boogaard, former NHL enforcer. (Part 1. Part 2. Part 3 to come.)
I haven’t had a chance to fully digest this yet, so I really don’t have anything profound to say. But it does look like this is worth reading.
(Subject line hattip.)
Posted in Clippings, Neuroscience, Sports | Comments Closed
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
One of the suggestions TMQ has been making for reducing concussions in football is expanded use of “anti-concussion” helmets, as well as better fitting mouth guards.
With that in mind, we wanted to point out this article in today’s LAT:
“I wish there was such a product on the market,” Jeffrey Kutcher, chairman of the American Academy of Neurology’s sports section, said at a Senate hearing Wednesday. “The simple truth is that no current helmet, mouth guard, headband or other piece of equipment can significantly prevent concussions from occurring.”
It is fair to point out that TMQ has never suggested this equipment will totally prevent concussions. However, the article indicates that the alleged benefits may have been overstated: the Riddell Revolution helmet, which TMQ has endorsed, only reduces concussions by 2.6%, not the 31% Riddell claims.
Edited to add: Also worth noting: this NYT article about the death of Ridge Barden, mentioned in this week’s TMQ.
Posted in Clippings, Neuroscience, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
One of WCD’s favorite quotes is from the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:
The notion that authority is entitled to reverence per se is the most subvervise of all notions in a free society. “There is not worse heresy,” Lord Acton wrote, “than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Authority is entitled only to the respect it earns, and not a whit more.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ:
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Posted in Food, Guns, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Did TMQ spend the off season reading epic fantasy novels? (WCD wonders if Easterbrook is a big Game of Thrones
fan. But we digress.)
Seriously, “great heroes”? “Muscular men with square jaws”? “gleaming heroes”? Who is TMQ talking about? After the jump…
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Posted in Geek, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
We apologize for the delay in posting this week’s TMQ Watch. We’re taking a class on alternating Tuesday nights; last night was the first meeting, and it appears this class is going to eat up a significant chunk of time. Ah, well, onward and upward.
After the jump, haiku. Not our haiku, of course (we have already made our feelings on that subject known) but TMQ’s annual predictions haiku.
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Posted in Geek, Guns, Neuroscience, Sports, TMQ watch, Wagers | Comments Closed
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
I went to the fights last night, and a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy broke out.
Sirhan Sirhan has been turned down for parole for the 13th time. What’s interesting about this article is that it focuses almost as much on Sirhan’s lawyer, William F. Pepper, and Pepper’s previous efforts:
Pepper says [James Earl] Ray, who was convicted of killing King two months before Kennedy was slain, was framed by the federal government and that King was killed in a conspiracy involving the FBI, the CIA, the military, the Memphis police and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis.
This gives me an excuse to plug Hampton Sides’ excellent (and Edgar-nominated) book Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History
, about the killing of King and the manhunt for Ray. I picked it up about two weeks ago, and read the first 300 pages in one night. The only reason I stopped there was because I was dozing off. Sides’ book has an amazingly strong narrative drive for a true crime work; it reads very much like a good novel.
I’m not going to say it deserves the Edgar; I haven’t read any of the other nominated books (I did pick up The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science
last weekend, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) but I do commend Hellhound to your attention.
This is not a strategy I had considered for driving up page views, but good for the Austin Bulldog.
Edited to add: This is the closest thing I’ve found to a discussion of food items at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this year. No photos. I’d apologize, but I don’t want a photo of the “Pulled Pork Sundae”, which frankly sounds disgusting.
Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Law, Neuroscience, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »
