What happened to Serene Branson?

Watch the clip. Did she suffer as stroke?

ADDED: If it's just a flub, it's hilarious — "Well, a very, very heavy burtation tonight" —but it's not funny at all until we know that. 

"Three years into his first term as president, though, I was feeling the first shivers of concern that something beyond mellowing was affecting my father..."

Ron Reagan speculates and expectorates a juicy lump. Please notice him. Please. He has a book.

"For me, I will often see a calendar in my head, and it's usually a month at a time."

"When I hear the date, it's like my brain immediately goes to a position on a calendar and once I locate it, I see what happened instantly."

"Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s..."

"... is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?"

"A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes..."

"... giggles in haunted houses and once, upon escaping the clutches of a knife-wielding man, didn’t run but calmly walked away. A rare kind of brain damage precludes her from experiencing fear of any sort...."

"It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised."

"It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact."

The neutron bomb — so sensible to its inventor — was so intensely reviled.

Samuel T. Cohen, dead of stomach cancer at age 89.

***

Dialogue from the movie "Repo Man":

I had a lobotomy in the end.

Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?

Not at all. A friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people, but leaves buildings standing. It fits in a suitcase. So small. No one knows it's there, until... blammo!

MORE:

"The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently" — "rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing."

Says Harvard Med School professor Michael Rich in this "most-emailed" NYT article about these kids today.

The article begins with an anecdote about a high-school student — Vishal Singh — who wasn't making much progress reading the book he was assigned to read over the summer. Hey! The book is Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," the book I was assigned to read in the summer of 1969. It's what the professors at the University of Michigan's experimental college — the Residential College (R.C.) — thought we ought to read to align our brains for whatever it was they planned to do to us.

Ha:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

Now, where are you more likely to find the other members of your karass? Sitting alone in your room reading "Cat's Cradle," or weaving your way through Facebook? The great irony is that if you were really into "Cat's Cradle," you'd love the web and the way kids today swim in it.

From the Wikipedia entry on Bokononism:

The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:

granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.

Another example might be the teenagers who attend Vishal Singh's high school.

Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is

... on the internet!

Hey, sorry. I got distracted. I was going to tell you all about that NYT article. I think something has happened to my brain. But I'm not a teenager. I'm practically a sexagenarian. Would it be wrong of me to be in your karass?

Neuromarketing.

Making advertising as insidious as possible through neuroscience:

Neuromarketing’s raison d’être derives from the fact that the brain expends only 2 percent of its energy on conscious activity, with the rest devoted largely to unconscious processing. Thus, neuromarketers believe, traditional market research methods — like consumer surveys and focus groups — are inherently inaccurate because the participants can never articulate the unconscious impressions that whet their appetites for certain products.

If pitches are to succeed, they need to reach the subconscious level of the brain, the place where consumers develop initial interest in products, inclinations to buy them and brand loyalty...

But should we worry that a technique that probes subconscious brain patterns might be used to unduly influence consumers, turning them into shopping robots without their knowledge and consent?

And, obviously, the same methods would work in political advertising, ending democracy as we know it. On the plus side: We won't know it. It already happened, right? I mean... #1: Look at who's President. And #2: We're seeing crazy-ass commercials like this:

"6 ways that artists hack your brain."

Neuroaesthetics.

We've found those "mice with fully functioning human brains" that Christine O'Donnell was worried about.

It's Pinky and the Brain, brain, brain, brain...



Good lord! She's right to be worried. Every night, they try to take over the world!

(Thanks to HKatz — katz and mice! — and, in the email, sonicfrog — frogz and mice.)

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."

Uh oh! That's Christine O'Donnell, my dear friends.

Via Memeorandum.

ADDED: And here she is with Eddie Izzard!

"Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are 'visual learners' and others are auditory; some are 'left-brain' students, others 'right-brain.'"

It's junk science.

But there is good science to support the notion that you should study in multiple locations:

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

More scientifically tested study tips at the link.

"He stands swaying, his actions only slightly interrupted by the amputation of half his head."

Writes Gordon Grice in "The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators."

Then, while she is still eating, he crawls onto her back. He seems in this semiheadless state to have found a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. There will be no more showy stunts. His pale penis emerges from the rear of his body, extruded between the plates of his exoskeleton. His abdomen snakes around beside hers and forms a painful-looking curve. They begin to copulate.

Mantis sex. That description! Whew! It goes on...

Turning her face almost 180 degrees, she regards him for a moment, as if his attentions were a distasteful surprise. Then, twisting with some difficulty, she brings her raptorial forelimbs into position and strikes again. This time she retrieves the remainder of his head and a scrap of his thorax, from which one foreleg dangles.

He doesn't seem to mind.

He doesn't seem to mind! Ha. Well, try minding something when you have no mind. Anyway, there's quite a bit more, and the main idea is that the male insect's sexual performance is improved by the absence of a head: "He performs with more gusto once he's decapitated." Apparently, the brain is a source of inhibition.

I have exclamation points in the margin in this passage of the book, which I read a dozen years ago (when I went through a period of intense fascination with the essay form). I just got the book down from the shelf to answer a question over on Ask MetaFilter: "Can you please recommend good books (fiction or nonfiction) or websites about insects and/or spiders..? Not so much identification books, but ones about how they live, interact, etc." It was fun reading that again. I should leaf through other old books of mine and pluck out passages with exclamatory marginalia.

The human being got smart by eating meat.

A theory:

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers....

Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle...

Interesting insight into evolution, but it doesn't say anything about what we should eat today. In evolutionary times, gathering plant material and chewing and swallowing enough of it to survive took a lot of energy. Today, we get more than enough. We have "big guts" in a different sense and for a different reason. So burning extra calories digesting low-calorie plants is probably a good idea.

By the way, if the brain uses 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle, why can't we lose weight by thinking hard?

"Maybe Michelangelo was hiding secret drawings of brains inside the Sistine Chapel's ceiling frescoes."

"Makes total sense, right? Because... well, wait, it doesn't make any sense at all."

"The Writer Who Couldn't Read."

"[Howard] Engel couldn't see words with his eyes. His visual cortex was broken. But he could 'see' when he used the motor part of his brain, first by tracing letters on a page, then by 'writing' those same letters in the air, and then, strangely, when he shifted to copying letters with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Tongue-copying was the fastest."

Why a brain damaged person who can't speak...

... can sing words clearly.

"What I started noticing around 2007 was that I seemed to be losing my ability to concentrate."

"Not just when I was sitting at a computer. Even when the computer was off and I tried to read a book, to sustain a single train of thought, I found it difficult."

If you don't click through and read the whole interview, you'll be proving him right. But he wants you to read his whole book. If you need to read it, you won't be able to. You won't want to. La la. Stay here with meeeee.......

Botox interferes not only with the ability to display emotions, but also with the ability to understand emotion.

Fascinating!

"We know that language moves us emotionally," said the lead author, David Havas, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "What this study shows is that that's partly because it moves us physically."...


The researchers asked 40 women waiting to receive first-time Botox injections to read a series of 60 sentences on a computer, pressing a key when they understood each sentence. To make sure participants were reading the sentences, the researchers periodically checked their reading comprehension. Participants repeated the test, using a fresh set of questions, two weeks later when the Botox treatment's paralyzing effect was at its height.

After treatment, participants were slower to understand sentences conveying sadness or anger than they had been before treatment. There was no such change for happy sentences. Mood analyses ruled out the possibility that the women were simply happier after receiving Botox, making them quicker to comprehend happier material.

The results indicate that our own facial expressions help the brain make sense of the social world, Havas says.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

When the face's ability to provide feedback is disabled, as in Botox treatment, our understanding is hindered.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

This has deep implications, far beyond the obvious reason to avoid taking Botox.

"Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward..."

From an essay by Roger Ebert about how the internet rewires our brains. A lot of the essay is about the importance of stepping away from the computer and reading our way through actual books — long books that you read straight through in a linear fashion (which ends up being long novels, which just happen to be something he loves doing anyway). But I was struck by the Facebook/Twitter point. We spend a lot of time on the internet, but we do different things here, so it's not just a matter of what The Internet does to our brains.

In fact, Reading Books isn't just one distinctive activity. Ebert writes about books as if book = Victorian novel. But some of us like reading nonfiction, including books that don't require linear reading at all. You can dip back and forth in a book and read snippets in very much the same style as web-surfing. When I'm reading books, I like a stack of books of different kinds. I might read a few pages in one, then switch to another, maybe rotate through the whole pile, very similar to the way I'd open up a set of tabs in my browser and cycle through them. And I like reference books and essay collections — e.g., a collection of movie reviews — that are best read by jumping around.

By the same token, on the internet, there are different ways to read. As Ebert's Facebook/Twitter point shows, reading is deeply interwoven with writing and with the feeling of interacting with other people. Sitting by yourself with a long book is quite unnatural by comparison. I think it could be said that the internet takes our urge to read and reintegrates us with society. It's more like the natural world that we evolved to live in: there should be the constant potential for interruptions and distractions; we should be giving and receiving communication to and from other people who are alive now and able to respond to us. In that light, long books distort our brains, and the internet brings us back to human society.

And being on the internet isn't just one distinctive activity. Some people like Facebook and some like Twitter. Me, I love blogging. I've done the other 2, but blogging suits me best — in part because I have so many commenters who come here and make this feel like the lively coffeehouse or salon I always hoped I could find in real life. Ebert says Facebook looks inward, and he prefers Twitter, but isn't it funny that if Facebook is really inward, it's more like the long novels that Ebert uses as an antidote to the internet experience? Ebert twits like mad — his Twitter feed is excellent — but maybe he's using it, in part, as a change of pace from those Victorian novels.

We can, each of us, design our own mix of experiences — in nature, in face-to-face human encounters, with books, with pen and paper, and using computers to read and write. We balance and offset. We seek pleasure and satisfaction and power and wisdom. We begin where we begin. One individual begins with too few real-life friends and a love of thick novels, another begins with a chattering schoolgirl clique and a Facebook page. Add something to that and then to that. Inward, outward/outward, inward. Make life better, in your own way.