Word: brained
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps not quite. Sting has a hip, slightly frosty presence and a vulpine sexuality to which he does not like attention to be drawn ("It's a pejorative, demeaning. I got a brain, you know"). Nevertheless, it is getting him good movie-acting work. He starred in Brimstone and Treacle and will appear as the head heavy in the upcoming Dino De Laurentiis/David Lynch film of Frank Herbert's sci-fi behemoth Dune. Stage presence and movie appearances tend to reinforce each other, producing a charisma that may be inadvertent but is certainly undeniable. Copeland puts it simply...
...most rudimentary level, the videotape machine enables a psychologist to record a baby's wriggling and demonstrate that it often moves in rhythm with its mother's voice. At the most complex levels, surgeons at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago can diagnose prenatal hydrocephalus (a brain-damaging excess of cerebrospinal fluid) in a fetus, then introduce a plastic tube into the mother's uterus and into the fetus' head to drain off the surplus fluid inside its brain. Guiding many of these technological innovations is the ubiquitous computer, which can synthesize a mother...
...practical value: some infants suffer from eye ailments, such as cataracts, severe astigmatism and strabismus, which benefit from treatment much earlier than would once have been possible. No less important, the new research has demonstrated that an impairment of infant vision can damage those parts of the rapidly growing brain that rely on visual information. That brain damage can be permanent unless the eye impairment is treated early...
These experiments demonstrated the infant's very early capacity for what psychologists call "intermodal perception"-that is, to combine the brain's perceptions of two different activities, in this case vision and muscular action, which is virtually the first form of thinking. Says Yale's Kessen: "The past 15 to 20 years have demonstrated that the child has a mind. The next several years will be used to find out how it works...
Most experts now think a baby is born with a number of reflexes that are gradually replaced by the "cortical behavior" dictated from the cortex of its rapidly developing brain. Brown's Lipsitt believes that a period of "disarray" during the course of this transition may be an important element in the "crib deaths" that can mysteriously strike during the first year. The struggle to escape from accidental smothering in bedclothes, known as the "respiratory occlusion reflex," is automatic at birth but then needs to be learned. Says Lipsitt: "The peak of 'disarray' is right...