Word: frontal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...indeterminate future, you stand in a crowd in the Great Glass Elevator. Like all elevators, this one comes wired for sound—soulless, slick, electronic muzak. Yet something is not quite right—rather than being the irritatingly-pacifying background-stuff, it keeps sneaking into your frontal lobes with growls of distortion, electronic shrieks and incendiary little licks. As the elevator gathers pace, your colleagues strip off their suit-jackets and ties, and the elevator becomes a sky-rocketing disco?...
...military retaliation, but all except Britain are showing signs of uneasiness over being drawn into an ill-defined or open-ended war - indeed, they refuse to call it a "war" at all. The Bush administration, of course, is likely to steer clear of the sort of frontal invasion of Afghanistan that became a nightmare for the Soviets, and instead concentrate on special forces operations along with British commandos. But even that would draw fierce resistance from the Taliban, and the U.S. has, of course, promised to punish those who shelter Bin Laden. A major confrontation between...
...more basic level to remember the thread of an argument while we are trying to make a point. A brain without working memory is like a computer without its RAM; its computational abilities are crippled, as they often are in people with diseases that affect the frontal lobe, such as cerebral palsy, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and schizophrenia...
Peanut and raisin rewards have become the coins of Goldman-Rakic's realm. In a series of elegant experiments that combine memory tests with electrical recordings from brain tissue, she has learned, for example, that each part of the brain has its own short-term "scratch pad" in the frontal lobe. Within each of these areas, individual neurons are responsible for holding and processing highly specific pieces of information, like the memory of a particular face or voice...
Despite Goldman-Rakic's best efforts, there is still probably as much we don't know about the frontal lobe as we do. But she has helped open the door wider for other scientists to explore, and given hope and new ideas to researchers studying various conditions--from drug abuse to Parkinson's--that affect memory. Psychologists in particular respect Goldman-Rakic for the way she is constantly trying to bring psychology and biology closer together--thinking about the mind as a whole even while she is looking through a microscope...