Word: catatonia
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...opportunity for a grand gesture may be developing in the most unlikely of locales: the Middle East. Obama has sent a special envoy, George Mitchell, to launch negotiations, but the Mitchell process has moved slowly and seems to be slouching toward catatonia. The Israelis have refused to freeze their illegal West Bank settlement-building; the Arabs have refused to make any gestures toward recognizing Israel's sovereignty until such a freeze is imposed. Deadlock. At the same time, though, there is the rarest of Middle East commodities - some actual, tangible good news - beginning to bubble up on the West Bank...
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...
...clear. "The justices saw it as a form of what some people now call no-touch torture," says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of the book A Question of Torture. "It sends prisoners in one of two directions: catatonia or rage...
...well-intentioned husband, strong willed yet seen as lacking empathy, who had the task of explaining his wife's mental condition to physicians as she lapsed into silence and catatonia...
...desecrated bird (a la A Christmas Story). These are the kind of shenanigans that I have come to expect and even admire from our family dog during Thanksgiving. While normally Thanksgiving is the most languid of all the holidays, consisting of heroic acts of gluttony followed by digestion-induced catatonia, I could always trust Sadie to pull some sort of caper that would derail the otherwise smooth-running family affair...