Word: brained
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...persona (Craig Smith), lives in a shack on the dunes, writing his first major play and trying to entangle Kip, a dancer and Nijinsky look-alike (Elton Cormier), in his grimy bedsheets. But both Kip and Clare (Dominique Cieri), who acts as his protector, are doomed, he by a brain tumor, she by diabetes. The entire work is shadowed by death, which is approaching as quickly as the fall. Both characters seem so tentative, however, that it is even hard to imagine that the end, when it occurs, will matter much to them or anyone else...
Still, the most dramatic impact of PET scanning so far has been in studies of the brain. The technique is painlessly providing detailed information about how a normal brain reacts biochemically to such stimuli as the eyes seeing light, the ears hearing a story and even the movement of an arm or a leg. For example, when a subject moves his right hand, the PET scan indicates increased glucose use by the region of the left side of the brain controlling the action. Physicians have begun to use PET scanning in determining therapy for people who have had strokes...
Preliminary evidence from PET scans suggests that in schizophrenics the frontal part of the brain consumes glucose at a very low rate. In manic-depressives, glucose seems to burn at a very high rate during the manic phase. (No pattern has been found for the depressive phase.) People with senile dementia show decreased glucose metabolism; the more advanced the case, the lower the activity. Researchers also plan to use PET for biochemical brain portraits of patients with multiple sclerosis, Huntington's chorea and possibly alcoholism...
Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head. Not that the brain actually leaves the head during the summer months; rather, something happens to it, or on it, like a moon caught in an eccentric orbit between the sun and, say, East Hampton or Bodega Bay. Astronomers know this event either as the "mental equinox" or "cranial eclipse." It is not serious, causes no permanent damage; the apparatus is simply altered while the body is on vacation. After Labor Day, when the body stands vertical again, the brain pops back into shape like...
...there they go-the summer memories faded almost completely now as the brain, restored, readies itself for the lions in winter. Goodbye, local peaches. Goodbye, Hun. Goodbye, Red. So the earth rolls reluctantly away from heaven, not to return for ten marvelous months. -By Roger Rosenblatt