Word: braine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Geoffrey Jefferson of Manchester, one of the world's top brain surgeons, faced up to the fundamental question of what is sleep, and had to admit that nobody really knows. But it is definitely not the same as unconsciousness: for man it appears to be a conditioned reflex...
Neurosurgeon Jefferson disposed of some medical fallacies, e.g., falling asleep has nothing to do with changes in synapses*- in the nervous system, or a shortage of blood in the brain, or accumulation of lactic acid. Neither is there, as some used to think, a sleep center in the brain...
Instead. Jefferson agreed with research which suggests that there exists a waking center within some nerve cells in the brain stem and basal ganglia called "retic-ular formations." Sleep comes when this waking center is deactivated, probably by enzymes. But how this happens is unknown...
...mother who sleeps through the roar of an airplane overhead but leaps up at the first little whimper from her baby is not necessarily sleeping less soundly or restfully than her husband. Impulses from the higher brain centers are "fired back" to the waking center, and the mother has conditioned herself to respond only to certain ones...
...boss is an electronic brain called Novac (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer), but Novac is a security risk. Into the brain an agent of The Enemy has built a secret radio receiver through which Novae can be indoctrinated with treasonable ideas beamed in from a jet plane that keeps whizzing through the stratosphere overhead...