Slashdot Mirror
Brain Surgery Patient Trapped in a Mental Time Warp
diverge_s writes "BrainConnection has an interesting article about a man who lives life straight out of the movie Memento. FTA: "When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made "H.M." the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.""
It means he never has to put up with re-runs on television and got to escape the entire disco era unscathed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"BrainConnection has an interesting article about a man who lives life straight out of the movie Memento. FTA: "When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the ..."
This case reminded me of another case I learned about in a psychology class several years ago. There is a British man named Clive Wearing who has a similar condition caused by disease. A video of Wearing showed him greeting his wife as if for the first time in months or years, even if she had only just stepped out of the room for a minute, writing in his journal every couple minutes etc. They did say that he had some vague recollection of major events like the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, but not much beyond that. He was also shown playing the piano very fluently, although he went into a seizure as soon as he stopped playing, supposedly because of the "shock" from the music stopping.
Okay, I started typing this based only on the title of the /. article when it was still in the mysterious future. It looks like I'm talking about the same guy that the article is. Anyway, this guy is
truly fascinating. It's good to hear that he's still alive and kicking! Here's what I typed before reading the article:
I was doing video conversions (VHS->VCD) for a Pyschology professor a while back and he had this most amazing video of a man through some sort of illness had lost the ability to make new memories (a
la, Memento, although this was before the release of that movie). He was happy as a clam, although kind of dazed and confused. What was interesting though, was that as he got older (the video followed
him over something like twenty years), he started to adapt. I say adapt, because he wasn't making new memories, but was learning patterns. Let me explain: the nurses always came into his room hoping
that he would recognize them, but of course he wouldn't, because he met them after the brain injury, but he started to pick up on that anticipation and started to fake knowing them, as best he could.
...is better known as Cowboy Neal.
(Caption on the screen: 'IT'S THE MIND -- A WEEKLY MAGAZINE OF THINGS PSYCHIATRIC' Cut to montage of photographs again with captions and music. Cut to a man sitting at usual desk. He is Mr Boniface.)
... (looks puzzled fir a moment) Anyway, tonight on 'It's the Mind' we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange...
... that ... we've lived through something...
Boniface: Good evening. Tonight on 'It's the Mind', we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu. That strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened. Tonight on 'It's the Mind' we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get that we've
(Cut to opening title sequence with montage of psychiatric photos and the two captions and music over. Cut back to Mr Boniface at desk, shaken. Caption on screen: 'IT'S THE MIND')
Boniface: Good evening. Tonight on 'It's the Mind' we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we someti... mes get
(Cut to opening titles again. Back then to Boniface, now very shaken. Caption on screen: 'IT'S THE MIND')
"entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery"
If the most recent development was in 1953, is it still news?
The funniest and cruelest thing you can do to him is show him his own reflection. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and had tons of wrinkles on your face where none were before.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
WWASD?
What would Adam Sandler do?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I have epilepsy, specifically partial complex seizures of the temporal lobe. No neurosurgeon ever suggested surgery as a solution, but based on cases like this, I think I would have declined the offer had it been made. I can't imagine actually having part of my brain removed, and because everyone is different, results like this man's can never be 100% avoided.
The brain has a fantastic ability to route around damage, but 53 years after this man's surgery, we still don't know enough about the way it works to reliably fix problems that the brain itself cannot handle.
(Then again, my seizure episodes aren't nearly as frequent as described in the article.)
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Wait, isn't he the editor /. hired a bit back?
DYWYPI?
he could meet this girl http://imdb.com/title/tt0343660/
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
does he use tattoos as well?
I think hitting over the head with a chair would be pretty cruel, because man, that would have to hurt.
Apparently what happened in practice is that doctors would use coat hangers or any other bits of wire they could find, and slash at the brain until the symptoms stopped.
Arguably, though, severe brain damage (through cutting chunks out or prodding them wildly with steel rods) was probably a better fate than those in Victorian asylums, which combined all the home comforts of a Soviet-era Siberian prison camp with the theraputic properties of a medieval torture chamber. At least the victims of the medical experiments were often incapable of suffering much. (Some, just not as much.)
Modern therapies for brain disorders are often highly dangerous, extremely toxic to the rest of the body, notorious for side-effects, often addictive, and many are poorly studied with completely unknown long-term consequences. That is many thousands of times better again than those who underwent the surgery.
With the newer discoveries being produced through fMRI and other next-generation scanning equiptment, I fully expect the next thirty to fourty years to produce as many radical changes to neurological treatments as the past thirty to fourty have. It'll be interesting to see how things change.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The story description starts out "diverge_s writes...", but although most here will never actually follow the link and read the article, if they did they would see that the first paragraph is almost identical to diverge_s' description. So, he / she didn't really write the summary as the Slashdot blerb suggests
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Maybe I am the one trapped in a time warp? This article is odd. Could it be April 1st already?
I thought this story covered the term but apparently it doesn't. Anyway, the medical term for Henry's condition is called anterograde amnesia. And if it hasn't already been mentioned here, it's also the same ailment that the protagonist Leonard has in the movie Memento. And if you liked that movie I reccommend reading the short story it was based on. It's an excellent piece of prose.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
When my mother had a stroke when she was dying of cancer, a very odd thing happened.
I rushed to the hospital, she seemed ok, but weak. We talked for hours, everything seemed fine. I still don't know what prompted me to ask the question as our converstation was pretty much normal. I asked her "Do you know you who I am?"
She said "No, should I?". Pretty much the worst moment of my life. As it turned out, she though it was 1968 and she was in there to give birth to what would be my brother Kevin.
Thankfully, over the next few weeks, most of it came back, but it all came back in chronological order.
She was back to the 1980's within a few hours, but the next 12 years came back much slower. She thought I was still with my first girlfriend circa 1990, that we had our old pets. The last few years were the only thing that remained somewhat little fuzzy.
I always thought that was very telling about the mind. Not sure exactly what it says, but it definitely says something. Maybe memory is stored tree-like. The other thing that was odd, was the closer to the present it got, the slower it came back.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Never mind that... I've always wondered what someone from the fifties would think when seeing "special-effects" movies like LoTR ;)
Back then people seemed to be much more sensitive to these things than we are now...
And always off topic.
I've have one that's very specific, but only been a minor nuisance. I blow people's names. Especially in a work environment, where I'm constantly meeting new people. A new person will have to remind me of their name anywhere from six to twelve times before it sinks in. Some people I know for awhile, then start calling them by the wrong name for a while. Then I stop that and get back to calling them by their right name again. Most people are understanding (I have to explain myself), but some get quite offended.
Mind you, it's the only memory defect I have. I can remember a face after meeting a person once and not seeing them for years. In conversation with a co-worker on a day-to-day basis, I can tell them what we talked about yesterday, what they were wearing last week, everything they've told me about themselves down to the most minute detail. Just not their name! But in most cases, I finally get them straight after a few months.
I was just wondering, with all the psych buffs in here...(PS it works this way online, too. I'm more likely to remember posters by their sig, or even just by their writing style, or on other forums by their icons...I'll even place people by their ID-number before their names!)
I am the same way, and by way of ref, I was "diagnosed" ADD/ADHD in the late 80's/early 90's (you seriously expect ME to remember when, yeah right, read the first part of the sentence again). I have since spent a lot of time talking to some very knowledgeable (think genius and add some on top) Psychs (both varieties) and have come to the conclusion (which they sometimes acknowledge is a reasonable belief, since so little seems to be known about this "disease" (phhht)) that ADD/ADHD is not a impairment in the way that the mind makes connections with data, but in how much data the mind is anticipating. Kinda like revving your engine and dropping into second, sometimes you're where you need to be to make that happen, sometimes your not. ADD/ADHD people sometimes seem like everyday normal people, and sometimes we're all over the place, and sometimes we're about to fall apart on ya.
But back to you're post, yeah, you're not the only one. I CANNOT seem to get a person's name for anything, but I can do the face/item trick just as well. One of my prof's, double doctorate, retired from TWO psy institutions had a very simple trick for learning names, and he taught it to every one of his classes, psy or otherwise during the first few days of class. Use ONE (no more and no less) phrase everytime you meet someone, and you're brain starts to pick up on when you meet someone, you learn their name. Trust my words, he could pick up any name he could say like this. Most students in my classes could too! (I think my ADD/ADHD/Whatever kept me from being able to do this as quickly as most, but it works. He had us say something to the effect of (but use what works for you):
Hello, my name is ______, and your name is? (wait for answer) Nice to meet you _______.
Keep in mind, we were doing an in class exercise whereby we had to do this over and over with our classmates, but since, it has helped that part of my mind alot, and yes, it does sound really cliche. Please ignore that part, just trust that it REALLY does WORK.
my $.02, have questions, just ask
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This sounds more like "50 First Dates" then "Memento".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
... he'll never notice slashdot dupes.
I wonder to what degree this has affected his personality.
This is older than internet and I combined. Did someone just take Psychology 100 recently?
HJ
Did the operation cure the epilepsy?
For the weeks that I was like this, I was essentially dead. I was lucky enough that for me it was temporary, though I still have some problems, but even if I weren't already an atheist it would have been total confirmation that there is no afterlife, because with that small part of my brain not working I was literally no longer a person, I didn't exist as a mind - I was just some pile of animated meat.
The process of regaining the memory "stickiness" was strange - that time feels like my birth.
This space available.
But this research is OK because it is completely distinct from "bad" human experiments right? I mean, the end justifies the means here right? We're getting valuable data and all it cost was the long term memory of one solitary man.
Hooray for progress!
May the Maths Be with you!
WWASD is bound to be taken for something
This article talks about "In the 19th century a German anatomist Leopold Auerbach observed a complex network of nerve cells in the human digestive tract. And now scientists in the US and Germany are claiming to have rediscovered this so called 'second brain' which is made up of a knot of brain nerves in the digestive tract and is believed to involve around 100 billion nerve cells - more than those held in the spinal cord." and is really just a blurb but quite interesting food for thought. It comes from the Discovery Channel's website, since they do a lot of Health programming. (no puns intended, thanks, altho it is quite funny)
This article is a BB set of posts that is probably how most front page slashdotters would react to this topic, but it does have some insightful information, like this quote from halfway down the page Which leads me to my belief that the organs DO almost all the work of memory, but it is the brain that stitches all that information back together, as well as some information storage of it's own. Does the fact that all information travel via the nerve clusters as electronic impulses that originate and return to the brain have anything to do with the electrical firing that MRI's and the like pick up? More and more I think this is really the case (If you are a medico student and want a thesis, use this, please, if you have seen papers published on this topic, please let me know!!!)
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This is older than internet and I combined. Did someone just take Psychology 100 recently?
Hmm. I think someone needs to go get checked out for just this sort of brain injury - if it was 1953, then it was 53 years ago, not 43. The year is 2006, not 1996.
Speaking as a psychology geek, this is textbook. You hear about this case the first semester in class. But it's nice to see this on /. aswell, available to the general geek public.
In his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" Oliver Sacks describes a similar case, where a former soldier is bound to the same condition. He is living shortly after WWII. During one of their talks Sacks shows him pictures from the moon landing. The man is completely shocked, and Sacks was very sorry about what he did. But at least the man forgot about this shock shortly afterwards.
I just wanna say, you are a really smart buncha nerdy people. How you ended up on my TV isn't even relevant right now. I'm truly inspired by your fresh approach to scientific criticism and humour. kudos to you all and let the show go on!
I just wanna say, you are a really smart buncha nerdy people. How you ended up on my TV isn't even relevant right now. I'm truly inspired by your fresh approach to scientific criticism and humour. praise to you all and let the show go on!
"you cannot teach him facts about a bicycle that he doesn't know, but he could learn to ride a bycicle, if he doesn't know how"
So you could teach him to ride a bike but he'd be unable to to remember that he can ride a bike? Now that would be a weird experience.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Damn she was hot in that movie...
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
He is not really aware that he is being peeked and poked for the last fifty years, which is good.
But, OTOH, did the surgery ended the Freaking seizures?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
And as I'm also a nitpicking conjugating masochistic bastard, I'll just hit my fingertips with a stainless-steel ruler over and over again for typing "showed" instead of "shown".
Sadistic AND Masochistic (AND off-topic): endless fun
Anything you do can get you slashdotted, including nothing.
In the weeks afterward, Andy had some fairly classic stroke symptoms, including paralysis on his right side. He couldn't talk, even to say his own name. But he could sing songs with people, because that skill is located on the right side of the brain, rather than on the left side with our language centers. And when his nasogastric feeding tube was pulled out, he spat out a very intelligible "fuck". Evidently swearing becomes a reflex.
While he was still recovering the ability to stand and to walk, he had to be watched all the time, because he'd keep trying to get up out of his wheelchair... unsuccessfully. But the fact that he kept trying to use his right arm and leg - not remembering that they didn't work - probably helped their recovery.
Every time I talked to Andy, I'd tell him about my new apartment; he'd usually - but not always - react with surprise. During one phone conversation (which wasn't going very well because he was distracted by the TV in front of him), I asked if I could talk to his father (with whom he was staying). Andy put down the cordless phone, saw that Dad was busy, looked up at the TV... and forgot I was there. I had to yell from the sofa cushion to get his attention, so he'd pick up the phone again. Conversations were always difficult because "what did you do today?" would elicit either shrugs or he'd just make something up, his mind grasping at any random memory that might serve as an answer. I frequently fell back on retelling him the same stories about my life lately, just to fill time and stay connected to him, and hoping that maybe they'd sink in.
He did gradually form some new memories. His therapists accomplished some of this by chronic repetition. Living in an environment with lots of calendars and repeated quizzes about the month and year, he got fairly good at remembering that. By asking him over and over during our drive home from a restaurant what the name of it was (no, he didn't find it annoying; each time I asked he barely remembered that previous time), he was able to remember it an hour later. Once, in response to me commenting about my shitty finances, he commented about "the new apartment". After several months of telling him about the fact that I'd gone back to college for another degree, he seemed surprised when I mentioned it again, but on a hunch I asked him what the name of it was, and he remembered. But for the most part, he learned to compensate for short-term memory with habits and with a lot of clever guessing.
I wish I could tell you about Andy's condition in the long-term, but his family won't let me see or talk to him anymore. (They say he'd get overstimulated and unmanageable after I visited or called on the phone... and I never got along that well with them to begin with.) I fought this at first, but since they're better able to care for him (they have money and a support network; I'm just me and underemployed), and since he's painlessly unaware that I'm not in his life anymore (for all he knows, he might have just seen me yesterday), I finally had to let go. More of the personal sob-story details can be found here.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Looking back on it, of *course* he's stuck in a time-warp. We could infer from H.M.'s experience that the temporal lobes are responsible for our progression forward through time.
It seems obvious in hindsight that temporal lobes would be responsible for temporal mechanics.
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
I have much the same problem, but I find that if I write the name down I can visualize the written name and match it to the person. Weird, I know, but it works for me.
In case this sparks someone's interest, a good book on HM is "Memory's ghost", by Philip Hilts. It's a fascinating read that does of good job of explaining the backgound of why this was done at the time, and what HM's day to day experience may be like.
There is a classic science fiction story by John Pierce (Invariant, 1944, Astounding) wherein a man figures out how to make himself immortal.. but loses the capability to form new memories. Hasn't been reprinted in a while, but a very good story. You can find it in the first Astounding Anthology, amongst other collections.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Memory deficits are a risk of epilepsy surgery. As yet there's no truly reliable way to predict post-surgical memory problems, but since surgery is generally a last resort, it's a risk the patients have to take. This kind of memory problem is also typical of Wernicke-Korsakoff's Syndrome, dramatized in the second chapter of Oliver Sacks's "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," which is often a consequence of long drinking binges (and an accompanying vitamin deficiency, I think). You don't always see the truly dense amnesia, but when you do it's striking.
He's happy, though, as he likes to keep busy working as a Slashdot editor.
He saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and said it reminds him of movies from his childhood.
-- Boycott Shell
So it goes.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It seems like I've heard this story somewhere before.
I have the very worst memory defect, for a married guy anyway - I always forget to put the toilet seat down. Hell hath no fury...
Fortunately, I've since discovered World of Warcraft which means 1) I don't have to worry about dating ever again, and 2) everybody I want to talk to has their name written in blue above their heads.
Thanks, pal.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
...they showed the patient how to do 'Scene Selections' during playback of the DVD 'Memento', and his head exploded.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Your computer (like your body) may run fine for a while, it may even go to sleep and wake back up and go on running normally. Eventually you may come across some quirky behaviour (mental disorder) that you can't fix with patches (surgery?) or subsystem resets (drugs?). When all else fails, you reboot your computer (ECT) and everything goes back to normal.
ECT induces a seizure, and your brain sort of shuts down and resets itself. The mechanisms aren't entirely understood, but it works well to treat severe depression.
Electro-Shock Therapy has been portrayed as horrible torture (which it was used for) and has been tried for the treatment of many mental conditions (like schizophrenia and personality disorders) where it does little to no good. It definitely has a shady past, but the modern reality is much more benign and therapeutic.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3488
So I'm offering a contest. I will personally mail $5 to the person who comes up with a piece of "News" on /. that's older and more tired than this one. Whoever finds the oldest piece ever wins.
The rules:
Yes. In fact, I do basic arithmetic by visualizing patterns of dots, and then counting them. For example, for 8 - 3 I'll visualize 8 as
* ** *
* *
* *
then remove 3 from one of the top corners to leave
** *
* *
which is 5. Basically, I have shapes like Tetris pieces for the common integers.
I'm almost completely a visual thinker. I can navigate wonderfully, read maps fine, but I'm hopeless at giving directions because I don't know any of the street names. If I have to walk from point A to point B a few blocks away I literally visualize the route as if looking from above, or in 3D from street level: walk along here, turn left 20 degrees near the large white building, down the hill, and so on.
Another thing that might amuse you: there used to be a joke Mac extension which removed all the text from the menus. I could still use my typical software with it installed, because I navigate based on the physical location of the labels in the menu.
Which as an aside, is one reason why Windows XP's dynamically hiding things from the menu is a complete UI disaster for people like me.
One advantage of visual route finding, though, is that it works even when there aren't any street labels, in a location you've never been before. Out on a cross-country run in the middle of a forest once with a friend, we decided it was time to head back. I turned left about 40 degrees and started walking. My friend said "Hang on, we came from that way." We argued a bit, but he wouldn't budge. I walked back in a straight line. He finally got back half an hour after me.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
but even if I weren't already an atheist it would have been total confirmation that there is no afterlife
Well this experience doesn't necesarily lead into atheism, for me it leads to the conclusion that the soul is not immortal.
Your experience does seem to discredit a lot of belief systems, but for example this one is not discreditet by it.
And yet, you seem to assert that if a smoker has to change their habits to accomdoate [sic] your lifestyle, their rights are not violated?
How does that work?
--
Sig arrêt
I had actually started doing that thread while i was at work last night, so I didn't even have the time I desired for following up myself, as I have school this morning.
/., even if it's not the front page crowd, no that should read, especially when it's not the front page crowd.
Yes I understand the BA and PTA, however, they followed her name on the article, so I followed it as well, since I was aiming for quotes, and to save some people the trouble of just clicking through.
I didn't imagine the author's had a tremendous amount of scientific evidence to back them up, and honestly wasn't even that concerned with the authors so much as the noted anecdotal evidence that could begin to illustrate the idea that organs could carry memory. If they were quacks would totally throw off my argument, but these individuals can apparently think for themselves in some regards, as they have degrees (medical degree is not something to sneeze at, doesn't make you a genius, however). To say that she has NO credibility to me is discarding the fact that she has direct contact with some of these reported individuals. Do all individuals who have had an organ transplant exhibit these signs? I do not know.
Whether or not an individual has a soul (I believe so, very southern baptist) is not at question here, however. Who says the brain is the only place where the mind resides, or memories, this is my argument.
Obviously the ancients knew that the mind extended throughout the body, look at their attempts to treat diseases of the mind. Take that thought process forward and look at current medicines. By taking a pill, we are not ensuring that the medicines are going directly to the brain, but rather through the blood system, which takes it to all parts of the body.
This was the focus of my posting the links, but I am grateful to you for having done the checking to verify that my posts showed people who had their own very definite agendas, not scientific advancement. It shows how just looking for five minutes on the internet does not show everything a person needs to know. That is definitely one of the reasons why I enjoy the community here on
While I stand and applaud your research, let me take a moment and ask you what are your opinions now on the subject matter at hand, not the method of delivery? What are your thoughts on the ability of the bodies organs and various cells to store memories, and the thought that the mind is the central connecting agency, not the prime storage facility? Would this possibly in some way point to why we only use 10% of our cranial capacity? (These can be considered widely spread and disassociated thoughts)
Bear in mind that I agree with you that these individuals, who possess a spirit of only pushing their own agenda and refuse to use a scientific method to obtain repeatable results, cannot have their arguments put under the microscope here. Instead, I ask, I urge you to consider the physical consequences involved in what I am proposing/asking about.
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I've always imagined it went something like:
"We've given your brain a really big electric shock. Do you feel better, or do you want us to do it again?"
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
But there's a difference between skills and facts. Doesn't just have to do with motor skills, but all skills. In a way it makes sense, just giving you a set of facts about how something is done doesn't teach you how to do it, you have to practise it before you have the skill.
There's a lot of literature on it if you are interested, his condition has been studied pretty extensively, but what it comes down to is you can teach him new skills, motor or otherwise, but he doens't know he has those skills.
From an interview with him:
"Well, what I keep thinking is that possibly I had an operation. And somehow the memory is gone...And I'm trying to figure it out...I think of it all the time. I don't remember this, and why I don't remember that."
How does he know he keeps thinking that? How does he know he thinks of it all the time? Is he simply assuming that because he is thinking about it now he must think about it often in general?
I was wondering the same thing. It's a fascinating case and all, but I remember learning about HM in my Intro to Psych class (8 years ago), and have since taught about him to middle school psych students.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
My personal experience with psych meds:
Personal experience. Probably the best basis short of a medical degree that I could have. (Between close friends and close relatives, I know 3 people who do have medical degrees, one of whom has "specialized" in psychology and neurology.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Is he still looking for John G.?
Great that you compare it to "rebooting a computer" because we really have very little idea how ECT works. The brain doesn't do anything akin to rebooting, so this analogy is completely worthless. It does permanent changes to the brain and we really have little clue as to what kind of changes. If you want an analogy, maybe "scrambling the hard drive" would be a better one, but even then we really have no clue as to how it works. The fact that it's no longer violent because people are anesthetized when it's done is really beside the point.
AccountKiller
Every single generation before you shrugged off harsh environments. This generation whines if there's a perceptible difference they find displeasing. Rest assured, while you think you're strong and in control, and working for the benefit of others, you're not.
If you could travel back in time to find your tobacco-smoking great-great grandfather, and you told him to put that out because it bothers you, he would probably kick your ass, put that cigarette out in your face, and piss on you for good measure. Because you're a whiney oversensitive little bitch, and it is none of your business what he does. If he ever found out you were his offspring, he would probably cut off his own balls to prevent your birth. He'd probably use a spoon to do it, because people were tough as nails back then.
As you faded from existence you'd curse him for not sterilizing the spoon, getting a tetnus shot, not using anasthesia, or for not using antibiotics. Because, you know, his infection could cause a health epidemic. Or because it will raise insurance premiums for everyone! yeah!
I'm suprised you even managed to make it out of the birth canal...
wow you're a total fucking retard
need some chlorine stat! the chlorine level in the gene pool is getting a little low!
...whereas tofu-eating non-smokers are more likely to have a quick stroke and die rapidly after that.
I would assume most tofu-eating non-smokers actually die from rectal asphyxiation.
Maybe they die from coming in contact with fun.
It does change the brain, but not like "scrambling the hard drive" as you call it. Again, based on my understanding, I'd say a closer analogy may be reinstalling your OS, but it could be as simple as rolling back whatever changes have been put in place since your last known-good system, and then rebooting. It could even be seen as the ultimate wetware buffer-overflow, it overwrites your brain "code" with crap and you have to shut down and restart.
Actually, that's entirely my point, but to each their own.
If someone is unsure about the necessity or safety of their meds should discuss their concerns with a qualified person, NOT take the personal experiences of a single user of a single weblog. I earn enough that I can afford to get myself checked every so often - I've had three EEGs, two MRIs and a sleep study, and recent research would suggest I might benefit from an fMRI - but I recognize that I've been lucky from that perspective. I've also been broke for long stretches of time.
If someone is observing side-effects, record them and their severity, then forget about them for a while. If they persist, record them again. Go to your doctor with those records, so you can say "this is what happens, this is how often, these were the circumstances, what is your advice?"
If you've an OK or a good doctor, side-effects shouldn't be a problem. They'll occur, but when they do, the doctor will either correct the meds or tell the person how to correct their behaviour. (If you take lithium, for example, you will suffer side effects from not drinking enough liquid. Almost any doctor will verbally beat up on someone for that.)
If you've a bad doctor, quit and go find an OK or good doctor.
If you've a co-dependent doctor, give them the meeting list for CoDA and -then- quit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage. I would argue the above was news around 1850. Or, will you disallow my entry on the basis that it mentions the book that made the facts better known? In that case, the mention of the movie Momento, as well as other links, in the present article could be argued to make Henry M. a more current news item.
whilst I don't disagree with your individual arguments, I am concerned with the general thrust of your reasoning; the burden of proof in matters such as smoking in public, should lie absolutely with the parties in favour of deviating from the norm by smoking
it is not, in my opinion, for the cautious parties to prove smoking, growing genetically modified crops, dosing livestock with drugs (such as antibiotics), etc. is dangerous, but rather for the innovators' parties to prove they are safe
GrimRCI just thought of something... maybe I am not the "I" that I think I am... when I stop trying to control myself, I sure feel a lot more relaxed. I wonder how intelligent I am when I do not try to be intelligent. Hehehe. I also wonder if this makes any sense.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
While I've not had anything as bad as Andy's problems, I had a stroke in April of 2005 but I've been able to work through most of the issues and medication helps. I lost the abilty to read for the most part, to write, I can't drive, I lost about 60% of the strength on my left side and about 90% of my fine motor skills and a host of other problems.
Treasure your ability to read, write, drive, think, live, because they can be taken from you in an instant even if you live the healthiest of lives.
I regained the ability to read and write, but now I'm faced with a medicated haze or blinding pain and the chance of a siezure, many others like Andy won't regain some of thier abilities.
don't know if someone else commented about this. incidently NPR (national public radio) recently covered audio interview footage of two true and real cases that went through brain surgery (well after being screwed by multiple 420). it was too movie-like to listen to. you may be able to catch a snippet online... (couldn't find it offhand).
So does this mean that at least part of Knowledge is "knowing how" rather than "knowing that", and cannot be expressed in terms of "propositions held" or "mental content present in the brain" or something along these lines?
ECT seems to me a really extreme form of therapy. I certainly hope it has really extreme benefits to justify.
I have epilepsy, most probably of the juvenile myoclonic type, with generalised tonic-clonic seizures (fortunately suppressed by medication for more than a year now). After each seizure, I've felt headache, tiredness, severe disorientation, and a short-term memory loss, plus various physical injuries caused by the convulsions.
Immediately after waking up from a seizure, being questioned by an ambulance crew, I've been able to recall my name and social security # (correctly), as well as the name of the current president. However, I've had no idea about what day, month or year it is, or what time of day it could possibly be, or where I was located, or what I was doing. I either checked these things or recalled them later (within the next few hours). OTOH, I've permanently lost memory of a few minutes around each seizure.
My neurologist said the effect of a seizure to the brain is like getting knocked out in boxing. It says in the Wikipedia article that the ECT seizures are stronger than naturally occurring ones and last around 60 seconds, which is pretty long time with a strong seizure. I don't wonder if ECT produces even larger blackouts. Of course, if administered properly, the convulsion-related damage will be minimized, but I do remain suspicious about the side effects.
--js--
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
In 1953, Eisenhower was president. If the poor guy's surgery trapped him in a state of thinking, recurrently, that the president remained Truman, he suffered from more than lack of sense of current awareness. The surgery had made him affirmatively ignorant! I understand that he thought, similarly, that Windows was still the best operating system.
Would you believe I was forced to study this for six years? I hated it. I knew less in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The greek only made things worse. On the other hand, I picked up Spanish in two months. Mucho mas interesante.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Athlon FX-60 (He is a frickin genius with those mystery shows)
7 KB RAM
Hard Drives set to Read Only.
I rant about the silly flaw whereby the bottom half of Slashdot posts on page n are repeated at the top of page n+1. It makes reading the posts a waste of time. I keep going on about it hoping one of the Inner Circle boffins will take notice. It's my monomania.
Thank you for noticing and setting me strait.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
The original post about pollution, having to go to work, etc, is incredibly intelligent. If you cannot see that, then the simple conclusion is that you are not.
Not that I expect you to find ME a credible source of information. But... You are teh suck.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Go move to the country. You get more pollution from factories and mother nature than you get from cigarettes. One volcanic eruption can put more bad stuff in the air than everything mankind has done in its entire existence. You have no right to clean air if you are in my personal space, and the cigarette smoke is NOT DOING JACK FUCKING SHIT to you if you are out of my personal space (i.e. 50 feet away). Furthermore, the science has been disproven. Go do some reasearch you ignorant fascist. If you were in my house I'd tie you down and force you to smoke, and it would be grand entertainment.
People like you just want to take away more and more rights. What if it was found out that cotton caused cancer, even if you were 50 feet away from it? (Yes, it's an insane supposition.) People like me would say, "If you don't like cotton, you can leave." People like you would insist that I surrender my underwear before they infringe on your rights.
Fuck. Why am I even responding? Now people are getting fired for smoking in their own homes on their own time. You are just another increment on the ruler to fascism. You might not believe in the destination, but you are a fucking tool helping fascism happen whether you know it or believe it or not.
Fired for smoking here.
P.S. I would gladly murder you to preserve my right to give you cancer.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
and yet... I don't smoke. Or rather, I smoke if they are around, but I don't purchase cigarettes. Oh yea, I'm so addicted; I sold my body last night on the streetside for my next fix. (NOTE: This is a parody, I actually enjoy a $200,000 positive net worth COUNTING what I owe on my house.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
If you had posted this under the "Shock Therapy" section of the thread, you may have gotten away with it since the movie "Shock Treatment" was the sequel.