Word: mcleane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...poured down as much alcohol as normal people consume in a lifetime and plenty of drugs--mostly pot--as well. I was, by any reasonable measure, an active alcoholic. Fortunately, with a lot of help, I was able to stop. And now I was on my way to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., to have my brain scanned in a functional magnetic-resonance imager (fMRI). The idea was to see what the inside of my head looked like after more than a quarter-century on the wagon...
...that conditioned reflex--identical to the one that caused Ivan Pavlov's famed dog to salivate at the ringing of a bell after it learned to associate the sound with food--that unleashes a craving. And it's that phenomenon that was the purpose of my brain scans at McLean, one of the world's premier centers for addiction research...
...heyday, I would often drink even when I knew it was a terrible idea--and the urge was hardest to resist when I was with my drinking buddies, hearing the clink of glasses and bottles, seeing others imbibe and smelling the aroma of wine or beer. The researchers at McLean have invented a machine that wafts such odors directly into the nostrils of a subject undergoing an fMRI scan in order to see how the brain reacts. The reward circuitry in the brain of a newly recovering alcoholic should light up like a Christmas tree when stimulated...
...probably a case in point. My brain barely lit up in response to the smell of beer inside the fMRI at McLean. "This is actually valuable information for you as an individual," said Scott Lukas, director of the hospital's behavioral psychopharmacology research laboratory and a professor at Harvard Medical School who ran the tests. "It means that your brain's sensitivity to beer cues has long passed...
...David L. Golding ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House. On the Fourth of July he witnessed the whole of McLean, Virginia and its surroundings, take shape and solidity, spring into being, town and gardens alike, from his bottle of Heineken...