Word: cerebellums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parents owned a meat market. As a boy in Louisiana, he first learned about his future specialty by cutting up cows' brains for sweetbreads. "I found them the most interesting part of the cow's anatomy," he recalls. "They were visually pleasing--lots of folds, convolutions and patterns. The cerebellum was more interesting to look at than steak." The butchers' son became a neuroscientist, and it was he who discovered the short circuit in the brain that lets emotions drive action before the intellect gets a chance to intervene...
...brain. Other sorts of memory are handled by other areas. The amygdala, for example, an almond-size knot of nerve cells located close to the brain stem, specializes in memories of fear; the basal ganglia, clumps of gray matter within both cerebral hemispheres, handle habits and physical skills; the cerebellum, at the base of the brain, governs conditioned learning (as when Pavlov's dogs salivated at the ringing of the dinner bell) and some reflexes...
...very boring," he says of his brief time as a pre-med. "I decided pretty quickly that it was only worth doing something that boring if you wanted to be a doctor. I've still got a smattering of medical knowledge lodged somewhere at the bottom of my cerebellum...