Word: mirror
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...patients with Huntington's disease, it's the part of the brain called the basal ganglia that's destroyed. While these victims have perfectly intact explicit memory systems, they can't learn new motor skills. An Alzheimer's patient can learn to draw in a mirror but can't remember doing it; a Huntington's patient can't do it but can remember trying to learn. Yet another region of the brain, an almond-size knot of neural tissue known as the amygdala, seems to be crucial in forming and triggering the recall of a special subclass of memories that...
...visitor leaves and returns, H.M. has no memory whatsoever of having met the person. In fact, H.M. has no permanent memory of anything that happened after his surgery. As far as he's concerned, it's still 1953, and that old man looking back at him from the mirror bears only a passing resemblance to the young man he knows himself...
...remarkable experiment performed in 1962 by Canadian psychologist Brenda Milner proved that H.M. can form new memories of a very specific sort. For many days running, she asked him to trace a design while looking in a mirror. As far as H.M. knew, the task was a brand-new one each time he confronted it. Yet as the days wore on, his performance improved. Some part of his brain was retaining a memory of an earlier practice session, a so-called implicit--rather than explicit, or consciously remembered--memory. People who suffer from Alzheimer's disease exhibit the same sort...
...slowing down, which means that even dramatic changes in the natural world won't necessarily have evolutionary consequences. Argues Wolpoff: "We're not going to [adapt to] the next ice age by changing our physical form. We'll set off an atom bomb or set up a space mirror or whatever [to control climate]." Manipulation of the human genome, meanwhile, will eventually let us change the basic characteristics of our species to order. Evolution by natural selection could be replaced, perhaps chillingly, with evolution by human intervention...
...this is industry self-love, though, it's tough love. While TV has turned the camera on itself from The Dick Van Dyke Show to The Larry Sanders Show, the current mirror gazing is not just more insider-oriented but harsher. Rob Petrie's foibles were along the lines of tripping over the ottoman, not buying a $250,000 screenplay from "the wrong Jew" in a case of mistaken identity, as Jay Mohr's smarmily obnoxious producer, Peter Dragon, does in Action's pilot. Beggars, a sharp satire set at the fictional bottom-tier network LGT, updates Network for broadcast...