Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...part of the brain that takes over when we are frightened is called the amygdala. It's an ancient, almond-shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the brain's temporal lobes. The amygdala is designed to be wildly sensitive to certain things - for instance, anything uncontrollable and unfair (like a terrorist attack involving an airplane) - and remarkably forgiving toward other, far deadlier menaces that seem to be small in scale (car crashes) or involve less suffering (heart attacks...
Most of all, the amygdala loathes unpredictability of the kind we are currently enduring. Lab experiments with rats and humans show that both species prefer predictable electric shocks over unpredictable shocks. That's because, on a normal day, the brain works by following shortcuts. We recognize patterns in order to make split-second judgments about what we are seeing. Shortcuts are ruthlessly efficient, which is important for an organ that only uses about 40 watts of power per operation. But the more uncertainty we face, the more shortcuts our brains use. And the shortcuts lead to a slew of predictable...
...researchers are now looking to test the therapy in brain tumors of dogs, which would prove beneficial for veterinarians, who currently can do little more than diagnose the tumor...
...plans to cover mental illnesses the same way as physical ones (no more higher co-pays, deductibles and limits on hospital stays). For more than a decade, Senator Peter Domenici pioneered the fight for such legislation. Last year, the 76-year-old Republican announced he suffers from a degenerative brain disease and would not seek another term. One of his final votes led to the bill's long-awaited passing. TIME spoke with Senator Domenici about the legislation's history, the state of mental health care in the U.S. and his hopes for the future. Why do you think there...
...take care of people with heart trouble, we operate on them, we have great learning centers where we study all there is to know about the heart. And insurance companies have paid for all those surgeries. And yet, if you have schizophrenia, which is an illness of the brain instead of the heart, because we started off early on saying it wasn't an illness, we kept it and they wouldn't let us change it. How did you feel when you found out the bill had finally passed? You know, I'm going to be dead-honest with...