Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent Wednesday night, Eleanor Phipp spent an hour watching commercial television. Nothing unusual about that - except that Phipp, 30, was in a dark room at a south London medical center, lying inside a loudly whirring Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) scanner that mapped her brain as video images flickered before her eyes. Brain scanners - which use radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to trace oxygenated blood to areas of neural activity - are mainly used to study or diagnose brain diseases. But Phipp's brain was being scrutinized for decidedly nonmedical reasons. Researchers were monitoring how it reacted...
...Neural blockade - control of the various "gateways" through which pain signals reach our brains, is next. There' s no doubt that pain is ultimately a mental phenomenon whose survival value involves some kind of negative re-enforcement; we learn not to hammer our thumbs by punishing experience. There are times when there' s more survival value in not feeling pain though, and at those times, even injured, we often don't have pain. Anyone who has seen an action movie knows we can take quite a beating yet be oblivious to pain. This is neural blockade at the highest level...
...ones who when asked "Don't you have any pain? say something like "not really but what does it matter, I still have to work to put the food on the table." I don't think it can be a central blockade because it's always there; mental or brain level suppression would be more variable...
...student under hypnosis in medical school. I told her it was a burning coal but that she couldn't move to take it off. We thought her grimacing seemed a little fake. But the very obvious inflammation of the skin touching the quarter was not. It showed that the brain's control of specific, tiny nerves - in this case the tiny blood vessels in the skin - is profound...
...pains suffered by certain peri-menopausal patients. Exercise, strangely enough, seems to have taken the place of the hormones we used to give - with nearly the same pain relief. This might be a covert form of hormonal therapy itself; the "pleasure hormones" or endorphins that are released in the brain by exercise (and eating and sex too) are potent natural pain killers...