Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Specialists in these related sciences have begun to seek a common language to describe the many varieties of pain, to chart its pathways from the burned finger or the stubbed toe to the brain, to assess its total impact, and to find better ways of relieving it. Mind doctors and body doctors are at last recognizing that in their evolving concern with pain they are really talking about the same thing in different terms. Increasingly, they realize that even the most obviously real and physical pain, as from a burn or a fracture, is processed in the mind...
...long ago as 1826, Johannes Peter Müller promulgated the "law of specific nerve energies." He suggested that stimulation of specific pain receptors in the skin, like those for heat or pressure, sends impulses along specific nerve fibers to equally specific parts of the spinal cord and brain. This concept has since been called the "direct telephone-line system." The latest research shows that the system is by no means so simple as direct dialing. It is full of crossovers and redundancies, creating the effects of multiple conference calls and party lines...
...microscopically thin and others that are relatively thick. The fine-fiber circuits can actuate the heavy-fiber circuits, which may reinforce or prolong the sensation of pain. So charting the pathways of pain-from the surface pinprick through the relays of the nervous system to parts of the brain where it is perceived and interpreted, perhaps with emotional overtones-is more complex than wiring a computer...
...when a man gets a shot of penicillin in the buttock, the stab sends an impulse along the nerve fibers to the fourth lumbar vertebra (see diagram). Then the impulse travels upward and soon crosses over to the opposite side of the spinal cord for its journey toward the brain. Along the way it triggers an automatic reflex that causes the man to flinch and tighten his gluteal muscle. After the impulse reaches the thalamus, a major (and evolutionally ancient) junction box at the base of the brain, where it is perceived as pain, it proceeds to the cortex. Only...
...months and years. If exposure can teach a baby rat, which to some scientists is not a very reliable creature for experimentation (TIME, Feb. 21), to discriminate between Mozart and Schoenberg, who can say what marvelous stuff can be dinned, just after birth, into the infinitely more malleable human brain...