I spent much of the last two weekends working with my two sons-in-law constructing a tree-house for their children (Diane and my grandchildren). It’s a beauty. You enter tree-house paradise via a ladder (still under construction) that wraps around a large oak tree to deliver the kid to a notch that opens out onto a…
Being ambidextrous is pretty useful as a member of your Little League team, but it turns out to be not quite so positive if your brain is later faced with traumatic experiences. Rather surprisingly, a study of 2,490 individuals exposed to combat in Vietnam revealed that an ambidextrous individual is about twice as likely to…
An article in the New York Times published about two weeks ago mirrored by an article in the AARP Bulletin bumptiously extolled the wonderful energies in the pharmaceutical industry directed toward medical strategies for more effectively treating or ‘curing’ Alzheimers Disease. The NYT science writer focussed on Wyeth Laboratories, because they are putting down most…
There are too many answers to this question, and in a sense, THAT’S what’s wrong. I used this ‘headline’ as a cheap trick to get you to read my little story. I have a specific partial answer to this question in mind, which I would like to present to you by way of a little…
Race car driving was the last thing Marilyn Kays expected to be doing at the age of 63. Her late husband called her ‘grandma’ because of her pokey driving. After completing BrainHQ, where she made great individual progress, Marilyn felt more confident than ever before. She noticed that she remembered things like her bank account…
Dan has been making a lot of comments and asking a lot of questions, and I thought I’d take a crack at one of the latter. He specifically asks how a blind individual creates representations of the things of the world. What kind of internal ‘representation’ can the brain make, when it can never see…
There are several highly-ordered neurological representations of the surfaces of your body within a cortical region called “S1”, which occupies a narrow band that roughly bisects the cerebral cortex mantle from a location just above and in front of your ear, and extends from ear to ear. When you stimulate a specific location on the…
James B. Watson, the genetics pioneer, is the first individual in the history of the universe to have his DNA completely sequenced. In a statement that testifies to his infectious enthusiasm for nerd science (for which, if you’ve had a conversation with him, you know that Watson is obviously genetically endowed), Jim was “thrilled to…
Nancy Martin-Crisco wrote a heart-rending response to a blog I posted (“How to get PTSD. Twice. Worse.”) that you all should read. Her son Christopher was diagnosed with PTSD after service in Afghanistan. After a few months stateside, he was redeployed to Baghdad. It was NOT good for him. Addiction, divorce, separation from his child,…