Word: braining
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...YOUR BRAIN WHEN IT MULTITASKS...
ALTHOUGH MANY ASPECTS OF THE networked life remain scientifically uncharted, there's substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn't. It may seem that a teenage girl is writing an instant message, burning a CD and telling her mother that she's doing homework--all at the same time--but what's really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing. "You're doing more than one thing, but you're ordering them and deciding which one to do at any one time," explains neuroscientist Grafman...
...switching of attention from one task to another, the toggling action, occurs in a region right behind the forehead called Brodmann's Area 10 in the brain's anterior prefrontal cortex, according to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by Grafman's team. Brodmann's Area 10 is part of the frontal lobes, which "are important for maintaining long-term goals and achieving them," Grafman explains. "The most anterior part allows you to leave something when it's incomplete and return to the same place and continue from there." This gives us a "form of multitasking," he says, though...
...discovery this week of a third case of mad cow disease in the U.S. is renewing worries that, contrary to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's claim last summer that mad cow "is on its way out," the fatal brain illness may actually be getting a foothold in America. The new case is also raising fresh concerns that should an outbreak occur, the Agriculture Department will be unable to contain it because it has no efficient way of tracking where sick cattle picked up the disease...
...examine its teeth to make a guess (about 10 years old, the FDA estimates). Investigators are also unsure where that cow, which was euthanized and buried after it fell sick, may have fed. This is crucial because the disease is believed to be spread in cattle feed carrying infected brain, bone or spinal tissue from other cows. Any cow that ate from the same troughs could be sick, too. According to research by New York biologist Michael Hansen, it takes less than a milligram of infected material to contract the disease. "This is a critical example of our failure...