Word: cortexes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...drug abuse can have a crucial impact on her child's eventual intellectual capability -- which could go far to explain the lower IQs of inner-city children. After birth the brain's higher intellectual centers show explosive growth. Around eight or nine connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex are pruned back. The rule that governs this elimination is simple: use the connection or lose it. Children without a rich early life exposure to reading or numbers may be at a disadvantage that can register later as diminished intellect...
...1970s scientists began to suspect that people with dyslexia have some fundamental problem with their vision or hearing, since children verbalize - words when learning to read. Studies have since suggested that victims have something amiss in the cerebral cortex, an all-important part of the brain responsible for thought and language. Last week researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented evidence that may pinpoint a spot in the cortex where dyslexia originates. It is an area of tissue called the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN), which affects hearing by acting as a relay station for auditory...
...blood flow and lower levels of electrical activity in the frontal lobes than normal adults and children. In 1990 Dr. Alan Zametkin at the National Institute of Mental Health found that in PET scans, adults with ADD showed slightly lower rates of metabolism in areas of the brain's cortex known to be involved in the control of attention, impulses and motor activity...
...comes the most startling discovery yet. According to a recent report in Science, researchers have found discrete locations in the brain of an intricate system that serves, among other things, as the human moral compass. Largely in the prefrontal cortex, it is where reason is applied to complex social situations, where our personal scales of justice do their weighing. It may come as a shock that this highest, most spiritual faculty is just as identifiable and in some ways as physically vulnerable as, say, a knee joint. But vulnerable it is. One's moral fiber can literally snap...
...moral faculty in the brain, it need not take an iron projectile to reshape one's ethics. How about a virus? A birth injury? A genetic defect? It is quite possible that some of history's greatest villains harbored an unseen wound much like Gage's in the prefrontal cortex. Such may be the condition of all psychopaths. This is not to say that experience has no relevance to character. Abuse during childhood, experience of all sorts is inscribed on the brain. But childhood traumas have never fully explained the psychopath, says Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of neuroscience at Johns...