Word: dementia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some researchers are using PET scans to explore the brains of people suffering from schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness and senile dementia. Their hope is that by scanning hundreds, even thousands, of patients with such conditions, distinctive patterns of biochemical activity will emerge, making diagnosis easier and more precise. Says Chemist Alfred Wolf of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island: "A diagnosis with cognitive tests, for example memory quizzes, takes days. The whole PET procedure takes under 90 minutes...
...evidence from PET scans suggests that in schizophrenics the frontal part of the brain consumes glucose at a very low rate. In manic-depressives, glucose seems to burn at a very high rate during the manic phase. (No pattern has been found for the depressive phase.) People with senile dementia show decreased glucose metabolism; the more advanced the case, the lower the activity. Researchers also plan to use PET for biochemical brain portraits of patients with multiple sclerosis, Huntington's chorea and possibly alcoholism...
...device is also sometimes called the Hungarian Horror, since it can induce temporary dementia in otherwise balanced citizens. It has become, in the words of a senior buyer for FAO Schwarz, the Manhattan toy emporium, "the world's most asked-for plaything." It can also be an obsession, an infuriation and an invitation to insomnia, distracting workers from their jobs, students from their theses, even lovers from love. Scholars compare it to Sam Loyd's puzzle, an 1873 American invention that was said to have driven 1,500 people to insanity...
...bursts into view with her grisly trophy, Papas ignites the stage with Greek fire. She moves from dementia to horrified sanity to rending grief with 'hypnotic intensity. Let who will divide her best moments from her finest. Papas is priestess of another god-Euripides. -By T. E. Kalem
Capote makes this quotation his centerpiece and turns Jake Pepper into a tragic hero of sorts, a Sam Spade in dungarees and pointy boots. Clues refuse to fall into place for him. Pepper's eminent reason cannot fathom the dementia of Quinn's "nasty mind...