Word: braining
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other foldees. Science fiction has never shot much of a ray into television, and this year's try-The Outer Limits (ABC)-is unlikely to start a new trend. Last week Donald Pleasence appeared as a professor who had a neurosurgical operation that harnessed the electricity in his brain, producing a ray-gun effect every time he looked at someone he didn't like. Plop, they fell dead of electrocution. During the show the screen danced and jumped with various antics of the cathode tube, intended to suggest "the mystery which reaches from the inner mind...
...decline of mental powers with age, the psychologists conclude, is more likely to result from the brain's getting too little rather than too much work. The brain simply does not get exhausted from overwork, though the individual may get worn out from emotional strain associated with his effort...
...studies were to show how well the nervous system was functioning at the physiological level. There were other tests that dealt with reactions to abstract patterns, and that graded the subjects on ability to understand and remember what they heard and read. Because of little-understood crossovers in the brain's circuitry, results of all the tests gave clues to each man's ability to absorb new ideas and deal with new words...
...tests were also designed to show actual mental impairment, which could be the result of arteriosclerosis or other damage to brain arteries. But among executives subject to regular medical checkups, such impairment was not likely to have gone undetected. What the psychologists were really looking for was any suggestion of changes in mental function resulting solely from age. Among the men in their 50s, they found no changes that were inevitable. Some of the men in their 60s and 70s showed a loss of memory, reasoning and decision-making power, but many did not. Most of the group...
Most of the book reviewing done in the past century was outright puffery. Fields was especially adept at planting puffs. He would write reviews himself and mail them to editors ("It may serve your tired brain some purpose. No one need know that I wrote it"), or he would ease a reviewer's critical burden by explaining that "the moral of the story lies at the bottom of page 168." Journals in which Fields advertised were expected to discover rare qualities in Fields's authors, but on one notable occasion the system of back-scratching broke down...