Word: by-product
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...Roof, with its layers of grandiloquent Southern mendacity, might serve as an emblem for the life of its creator. The playwright with the arresting name of Tennessee was born plain Thomas; Williams wreathed himself in beguiling inventions and evasions. Some of these were the by-product of a well-meaning gentility, as in his and his family's attempts to veil from the world the tragedy of his sister Rose, whose schizophrenia ended catastrophically in a lobotomy. Some were solitary acts of cool calculation, as when he lopped three years off his age to render himself eligible for a young...
...less than a decade, the withering scourge that had at one point struck nearly 60,000 children a year was all but eradicated from American shores. Almost forgotten in the decades since, however, has been the terrible price a small number of children pay as a by-product of the protection the rest of the population enjoys. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, six babies a year, on average, contract paralytic polio from the very vaccine that was supposed to prevent...
What isn't natural is going crazy--for sadness to linger on into debilitating depression, for anxiety to grow chronic and paralyzing. These are largely diseases of modernity. When researchers examined rural villagers in Samoa, they discovered what were by Western standards extraordinarily low levels of cortisol, a biochemical by-product of anxiety. And when a Western anthropologist tried to study depression among the Kaluli of New Guinea, he couldn't find...
...wholly independent. The mind, argues University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error, is created by the body-specifically by the brain. Utterly contrary to common sense, though, and to the evidence gathered from our own introspection, consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes -- much as a rainbow is the result of the interplay of light and raindrops. Input from the senses clearly plays a part; so do body chemicals whose ebb and flow we experience as feelings and emotions. Memory, too, is involved, along with language...
...there is no shortage of competing theories about how consciousness might arise. One, offered by the Salk Institute's Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Christof Koch, at the California Institute of Technology, is that consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high-frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, according to Crick and Koch, just as the tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex and seamless sound of a symphony orchestra. The concept is highly speculative, Crick acknowledges...