Creative and logical parts of the brain

A BOY who had a large chunk of his brain removed to treat his epilepsy - has escaped with very few side effects. The boy, who was seven at the time, had a third of the right hemisphere - the side responsible for creativity, imagination and visual abilities - removed, to try and control his seizures. He had been through multiple treatments to treat his medically intractable epilepsy, which started when he was four, but nothing proved successful. The "lobectomy" surgery removed his entire optical lobe and most of his temporal lobe, both of which play a role in visual processing. The boy, known only as UD, lost some of his vision but eventually the left side of the brain eventually began to compensate for the part missing in the right, including recognising faces and objects. Scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in the US followed UD's progress to find out how the brain would cope after losing one of it's visual centres - we usually have two, one in each side of the brain. … [Read more...] about Boy, 7, has large chunk of his brain REMOVED to treat epilepsy – and it still works just fine

My wife knows the tremendous burden I must bear.The burden of constantly being right.About everything.All. The. Time.**sigh**It has happened again.Recently, in the Texas Lawyer, I wrote about how unforced time for incubation was essential to creativity. Allowing the brain to do seemingly nothing is the ingredient without which insight or inspiration will not happen.But law practice actually discourages down time and "incubation." So, I tried to come up with ways we can preserve the brain space we need to be effective, like:Setting aside time to sit and be quietExercising or taking a walk in the middle of the day to re-bootWeaning yourself from your computer screensLearning to say no, so that each project gets the incubation time it requires.Little did I realize the power of the Appellate Record echo chamber. In rapid succession, several pieces appeared in the New York Times or on the BBC confirming just how right we were. Check out:Brain, Interrupted in the Times … [Read more...] about Creatively Correct Re: Incubation at the Workplace

Apr 01, 7:33 AM EDT Newsletter Signup BusinessTechnologyWorldNationalMedia & CultureOpinionSportsLuxury National By Suman Varandani @suman09 03/20/19 AT 2:57 AM According to a disturbing new watchdog report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is turning lab kittens into cannibals by feeding them parts of dogs and cats. The research was being carried out at the Agricultural Research Service’s Animal Parasitic Disease Laboratory (APDL) in Beltsville, Maryland, the White Coat Waste Project’s report said.As part of the twisted experiments, kittens were also fed with the hearts, brains and tongues of dogs. The animals that were euthanized to be used as lab food included over 400 dogs from Colombia, Brazil and Vietnam and over 100 cats from China and Ethiopia.“It’s crazy,” Jim Keen, a former USDA scientist who co-authored the report, told NBC News. “Cannibal cats, cats eating dogs — I don’t see the logic.”The … [Read more...] about Lab Kittens Turned Cannibals, Fed Cat, Dog Parts For ‘Sick’ USDA Experiments

Aug 03, 7:31 AM EDT Newsletter Signup BusinessTechnologyWorldNationalMedia & CultureOpinionSportsLuxury World By Vaishnavi Vaidyanathan 08/03/18 AT 7:00 AM A 12-year-old boy has retained his capacity to recognize faces and is “perfectly normal” even though one-sixth of his brain was removed when he was 6 years old.In an astounding feat of adaptation, the other side of the boy’s brain has managed to balance the added burden of facial recognition on top of its normal functions and his intellect, visual perception and object recognition skills are also age-appropriate.Marlene Behrmann, a professor with Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, published his case in the scientific journal Cell Reports Tuesday. "In a child's brain, there is the potential for this kind of reorganization and recovery," he said. "A child's brain is still undergoing dynamic change. It can find these novel solutions.”Tanner Collins was just four … [Read more...] about Boy Has Over 15% Of Brain Removed But Develops Normally

BusinessTechnologyWorldNationalMedia & CultureOpinionSportsLuxury Newsletter Signup World By Daniela Cobos 07/19/17 AT 1:42 PM A scientist who has dedicated his life to researching how to bring the brain dead back to life may get the opportunity to conduct experimental treatments on “living cadavers” in Latin America.Dr. Sergei Paylian, 66, has over 30 years of research experience in biomedical sciences including molecular biology, genetics, virology and stem cell biology. When Paylian was 14, one of his young neighbors died. Her coffin was carried through the street in Tbilisi, Georgia, as per Soviet custom. Since then, he has focused on fighting aging and death. Read: When You Die, How Long Until You're Actually Brain Dead?His lifetime of work led to a purified extract called bioquantines. Baylian developed them as “combinatorial biologics” of other species such as frogs. He said that when injected into humans, bioquantines can restore … [Read more...] about Brain Dead Back To Life? Doctor Wants To ‘Reanimate Living Cadavers’