Word: damasios
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pattern is reinforced-by repeated sightings of the person, by the effort to remember him or by connection with some other mental trigger ("This woman is attractive; she's worth getting to know better," or, "This man looks unpleasant; I need to avoid him")-the more likely, says Damasio, the pattern, or image, will not go into short-term memory, lasting weeks or months, but into permanent, long-term memory. And from there, barring brain injury, disease or old age, it can be re-created by inducing the neurons to send up electric impulses in the old, by now familiar...
...memories: if our distant ancestors hadn't had an instant and violent reaction to danger, they would not have lived very long. But other parts of the brain are apparently also involved in feeling emotions. What's most surprising is the assertion by the University of Iowa's Damasio that emotion is central to the process of rational thought...
...evidence comes from nearly two dozen patients treated by Damasio, including Elliot, the businessman who started behaving irrationally after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Elliot cannot behave rationally, even though his intelligence was not affected by his tumor. The part of the brain destroyed by invading tissue was in a region of the prefrontal cortex (see diagram) essential to decision making. But what Elliot lost, psychological testing revealed, was the ability to experience emotion. While the amygdala does process fear, his doctors argue from the example of Elliot and the other patients that other parts of the brain...
Until recently, scientists assumed that the brain processed language in two neatly defined boxes: Broca's area (for speech production) and Wernicke's area (for speech comprehension). The picture now emerging is far more complex. The University of Iowa's Damasio, along with his wife Hanna, also a neurologist, has recently constructed a model for how the brain processes language based on some 200 unusual case histories, most prominent among them a patient code-named Boswell. Boswell has no function in large areas of his brain, owing to an infection. One consequence is that he has no memory of recent...
Using an MRI scanner, Hanna Damasio has examined the living brains of hundreds of patients, and she and her husband have identified regions they think may serve as convergence zones in the brain's left hemisphere. An area in the temporal lobe pulls together information about the names of objects, animals and people, for instance, while another area in the frontal cortex appears to act as the nexus for verbs. Yet a third oversees the task of assembling nouns and verbs into sentences...