Word: braining
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Neuroscientists have long been convinced that the first few years of life are a crucial period for brain development--a time when connections between neurons are being forged at a prodigious rate as a baby learns to make sense of the external world. Interfere with that process, and you can cause permanent, irrevocable damage. If a child is born blind, for example, it's pretty much over by age 6. You can fix the eyes, and they might be able to perceive light and dark. Without the right visual circuitry in place, though, there's no way to form images...
Evidently, though, nobody told the surgeons who operated on S.R.D. And as Sinha and his colleagues discovered, it's a good thing. Even though S.R.D.'s visual acuity topped out at 20/200--considered legally blind in the U.S.--her brain had, in defiance of theory, learned to interpret visual information. One year after surgery, she could recognize her family's faces and identify objects. And that's a very big deal. Dr. Suma Ganesh, a pediatric ophthalmologist at the Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital in Old Delhi, India, used to believe that operating on blind children past the critical period...
...came away from Pinker's article doubting whether we have souls. If consciousness is a by-product of electrochemical reactions inside our brains, where are our souls? Are our souls a separate entity from this collection of tissue and neurons that keeps our body running? Or when our brain dies, are we snuffed out like a candle, and that is the end of our experience? The more science discovers about the brain, the more I'm convinced that after our brain dies, we die with it. Bill Simon Lansing, Illinois...
...posting the article "How the Brain Rewires Itself" on my office wall. It's further encouragement that you can stop your brain from rewiring itself into depression, anxiety and addiction. As a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist, I've had great success training people to emerge from depression using simple mind exercises to switch their neural activity from the feeling part of the brain to the thinking part. Biology is not destiny. Will is destiny. Arline B. Curtiss Escondido, California...
...Mapping the brain and tracing how its different parts interact can offer real hope for people with injuries and disabilities. But I have one misgiving: I'm not sure I'll ever have the same degree of self-respect now that I know I'm just an illusion created by 100 billion jabbering neurons. Gregory Dobbins Columbia, South Carolina...