Pictures of the Mindby Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald
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How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us?
Neuroscientists once believed your brain was essentially "locked down" by adulthood. No new cells. No major changes. If you grew up depressed, angry, sad, aggressive, or nasty, you'd be that way for life. And, as you grew older, there'd be nowhere to go but down, as disease, age, or injury wiped out precious, irreplaceable brain cells. But over the past five, ten, twenty years, all that's changed. Using fMRI and PET scanning technology, neuroscientists can now look deep inside the human brain and they've discovered that it's amazingly flexible, resilient, and plastic. This book shows you what they've discovered and what it means to all of us. Through masterfully written narrative and stunning imagery, you'll watch human brains healing, growing, and adapting to challenges. Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald even shows how these discoveries are transforming our very understanding of the "self", from an essentially static entity to one that can learn and change throughout life and even master the art of happiness.
Pictures of the Mind (Chapter 1): Life, Death, and The Middle Ground.
In July 2005, a 23-year-old English woman was critically injured in a car accident. For a full five months she failed clinical tests of consciousness and her doctors declared her vegetative. Not until half a year after her accident—when researchers in Cambridge, England selected her to take part in a study of brain activity in vegetative patients using state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—was her surprising brain activity discovered.
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Shrimp (Chapter 1): Going Shrimping.
At age 18, I (Jack) had managed to get a job collecting marine specimens for a biologist at a local university. The scientist needed live batfish, a little brown leathery-skinned fish that can barely swim but walks on the bottom like a frog, and I had gone to the waterfront hoping to catch a ride on a shrimp boat to try and collect some.
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Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100 (Chapter 1): Living Well Beyond 100.
In recent years, however, mankind has extended life for those who reached middle age, ushering in the age of centenarians. Today more than 30,000 people in the United Stated have passed the magic century milestone. Demographers expect that, in 2020, 300,000 people older than 100 will be living in the United States, with similar tenfold increased projected for centenarians in other developed nations.
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Waves at the Oasis by Andrew Koob, author of The Root of Thought
The cell-based notion of thought and everything that has sprung from it might be an illusion – a mirage in the field of ‘neuro’ science. But in the past 20 years, it has come to the attention of ‘neuro’ scientists that the neuron might not be exclusively responsible for higher thought. Read More >>
Lies, Damned Lies and Science (Chapter 1): Potions, Plot, Personalities: Understand How Science Progresses and Why Scientists Sometimes Disagree
Disagreements between scientists are a normal part of the process of science, but the media often exaggerates, misrepresents, or oversimplifies these disputes to sensationalize the latest science news. This is especially common in headlines or brief sound bites. For example, there is new and still disputed evidence that moderate amounts of sun exposure may reduce a person’s chances of getting certain internal cancers like breast, endometrial, colon, and prostate cancer. It is not hard to imagine the headlines and sound bites proclaiming, “scientists now say sun is good for you!” Read More >>
It Takes a Genome (Chapter 1): The Adolescent Gene
Of all the paradoxes in the world, surely one of the most absurd is that the very same genome that gives us life inevitably also takes it away. Even when they aren’t killing us, our genes are generally making existence more difficult than seems absolutely necessary. Very few people escape this world having avoided a bout with cancer or diabetes or asthma or depression, and those who do often end up too senile to remember much of the journey anyway. What good reason could there possibly be for so much suffering and disease? Read More >>