Word: brained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three years ago, Dr Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium, examined a comatose 43-year-old Belgian patient, Rom Houben, who for the past 23 years had been assumed by medical professionals to be brain dead. Laureys, who runs a coma study group specializing in such cases, performed sensitive clinical and imaging tests on Houben and made a startling discovery: the former engineering student who suffered a brain injury in a car accident in 1983 was not in a vegetative state at all. (See the top 10 comas...
...Nearly all of his voluntary muscles were paralyzed - including those controlling eye movement - but his brain functioned almost completely normally. He suffered from "locked-in syndrome," in which patients are aware of their surroundings but unable to communicate to the outside world. In the past three years, Houben has learned to talk through a computer: a language therapist traces his finger over a keypad and when it hovers over the desired letter, he contracts a muscle in his finger. He now has plans to write a book. "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," Houben recently told a journalist...
...findings suggest that when dopamine is present during an imagined event - that is, even when you're not actually experiencing it in person - it still influences how much pleasure the brain will expect from it in the future. Researchers think the extra shot of dopamine may aid learning - that is, it boosts your brain's learned association between pleasure and whatever experience you're thinking about at the time. Or perhaps, the authors speculate, the extra dopamine makes us simply want something more while we're imagining it. In other words, it would be useful to have...
...possible, then, that the more dopamine that is active in your brain, the more likely you are to view the future as rosy, which raises at least two questions: how do I get more dopamine, and is there such a thing as too much...
...answer to the latter question is, yes. Although dopamine may be crucial to making decisions about future pleasure, too much of it might distort those decisions. A surplus of dopamine is at the root of addiction, for instance: Cocaine, for one, works in part by preventing brain cells from reabsorbing dopamine that the brain has released in connection with pleasurable sensations. And once the brain has learned to like cocaine, it causes all kinds of self-destructive behavior to satisfy its cravings...