Word: brained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks knows all this - and too much else besides, to attempt any glib definitions. On the first page of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he writes that music "has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world." His book is ostensibly just a survey of research and case histories of patients whose inner lives have been fundamentally changed by music. Yet in revealing the exquisite complexity of the ways in which our minds are attuned...
...into the crevices of the human mind in search of a cure and surfaces with enlightenment for us all. We are irritatedly familiar, for example, with the phenomenon of earworms - catchy tunes that loop in our heads, even when we detest them. This "defenseless engraving of music on the brain," Sacks suggests, is a result of the precision with which most of us can replay music internally; built to seek stimuli, the brain rewards itself for its fidelity with perfect repeats of songs. But for the patients in Sacks' book who suffer musical hallucinations - a related and not uncommon condition...
Sacks' neurological interest in music dates back to the 1960s, when he noted that the parkinsonian patients he was treating could often inexplicably be roused from their catatonia by music. The leaps in brain science since then, particularly in magnetic resonance imaging scans, mean that neurologists can now actually see what happens when we hear or even compose music. Scans show that, neurally, the experience of imagining music is much the same as listening to it. Also, that the corpus callosum, the mass of nerve fibers that wire the two hemispheres of the brain together, is enlarged in professional musicians...
...revealed a pattern of conduct by the league that denies retirees the money to which their injuries entitle them. The game rakes in $7 billion per year and causes more bodily harm than any other. And yet fewer than 3 percent of applicable veterans—men plagued by brain trauma, dementia, and paralysis—succeed in obtaining disability benefits. But surely the retirees can pay medical expenses with the money they made as players right? Unfortunately, no. The violent nature of football often renders athletes incapable of providing for their families. At career’s end their...
...there. The boys catch a ride in a phantom Fiat (because what could be more bizarre than a spectral European compact car?), and fly high above a landscape coated with strange dancing women atop bales of hay. No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not your brain on drugs, this is your brain on !!!. The decision as to which one is healthier is up to you. —Ryan J. Meehan