Word: neurologists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Without these emotional reflexes, rarely conscious but often terribly powerful, we would scarcely be able to function. "Most decisions we make have a vast number of possible outcomes, and any attempt to analyze all of them would never end," says University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. "I'd ask you to lunch tomorrow, and when the appointed time arrived, you'd still be thinking about whether you should come." What tips the balance, Damasio contends, is our unconscious assigning of emotional values to some of those choices. Whether we experience...
However, Descartes was profoundly wrong, it appears, in his assertion that mind and body are wholly independent. The mind, argues University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error, is created by the body-specifically by the brain. Utterly contrary to common sense, though, and to the evidence gathered from our own introspection, consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes -- much as a rainbow is the result of the interplay of light and raindrops. Input from the senses clearly plays a part; so do body chemicals whose...
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...
...began to droop and the pupil became fixed. The baby's grandfather, Isaac Manly, a Harvard- trained surgeon, was worried about the child's symptoms but didn't want to frighten her parents. He gently suggested a trip to the ophthalmologist, which led to the pediatrician, then the neurologist. The first time the parents got a hint of what might be wrong was when they took Elizabeth in for tests and glimpsed the diagnosis on the hospital admissions form: "brain tumor...
...such a test could create a dilemma of a different sort: do people really want to know that Alzheimer's lies in their future when medicine can offer no cure? "If there's no way of controlling what happens to you," observes University of Iowa neurologist Dr. Antonio Damasio, "then it's unclear that early diagnosis provides an advantage. What you're probably going to do is worry yourself sick...