Word: braine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...father was a bit of a tyrant," Bette recalls. "He would flush the girls' makeup down the toilet. He'd lock my sister Susan out of the house when she came home too late. He taught my younger brother Daniel, who is brain damaged, to read and write by hammering and screaming at him until he got it. Every afternoon. None of us wanted to be in the house. But Daniel did learn, and it's made a big difference in his life. It gave him freedom. My father always thought I was a little odd. He never chose...
...some 2 million people in the U.S., robs its victims of their dignity and renders them helpless. They become confused, lose track of time and are eventually unable to recognize spouses and other loved ones. Physiologically, Alzheimer's manifests itself in the form of abnormal protein deposits in the brain. But the reason these insidious tangles and plaques build up remains unknown...
...connection with Down's syndrome, a genetic defect that is the nation's leading cause of mental retardation. Most Down's victims have three copies of this chromosome rather than the normal two, and by age 40 their symptoms often include the now familiar protein deposits in the brain...
...grain fashion. They haven't gone into the heads of the kids." Psychologist Bernard Rimland, of the Institute for Child Behavior Research in San Diego, notes, "It isn't surprising that we don't understand much about these aberrations. We haven't even begun to understand how the normal brain functions...
Researchers, however, have been making some progress. Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist in Fond du Lac, Wis., who is a nationally recognized expert on savants, points out that sophisticated tools like computerized scans have improved methods for investigating the functions of the brain. Reading and language ability seem to be controlled by the left side of the brain; art, music and mathematics by the right. Says Treffert: "The skills of the savants are generally right-brain skills, and we know that in many cases of savants there is left-brain damage." He explains, "We think now that the right brain tends...