Word: braine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remarkable plasticity of the brain has put scientists in hot pursuit of novel ways to treat a host of ailments. "What we are is a product of learning progressions in the brain," says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of Scientific Learning. "A lot of people are thinking about how to use intensive training to remediate the impairments of mankind...
...rates of speech. The kids click their mouses on animated screen games to identify what they hear. The training is intense--students must sit before computers for 100 min. a day, five days a week for four to eight weeks--because it takes sharply focused attention to rewire a brain. Last fall, Scientific Learning rolled out Fast ForWord II for children who can use additional training. (Parental disclosure: this writer's 12-year-old son Billy made welcome strides in both programs...
Scientific Learning's harshest critics charge that it hasn't done its homework. For example, many speech experts contend that reading difficulties arise from a failure of the brain to translate sounds into language, not from an inability to detect clear sounds, as Scientific Learning maintains. The company's own studies have "never been done with proper controls" to test its theories, argues psychologist Michael Studdert-Kennedy, chairman of Haskins Laboratories, a leading center for the study of speech and language at Yale University. Replies Paula Tallal, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University's Newark, N.J., campus and a co-founder...
...writer. By the time he began working on this manuscript, he had received all the honors--a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954--and all the fame that any author could desire. But his body had been battered by injuries and his brain by alcohol, and the "one true sentence" that he said would get his writing humming became harder and harder to find. Still, he persisted on a project he must have known, at some point, had become hopeless...
...make of the scientific study that came out last week showing how women let their biological calendar choose their mate? Maybe this: no matter how highly evolved we think we are, at some level the female of the species, like the male, is still a slave to the brain's prehistoric hardwiring...