Head injuries and suicide: It's not just for football anymore.

Now, playing baseball "with abandon" is connected (in the NYT) to suicide.

“There is no way to say [Ryan Freel's] neurodegenerative disease was the cause of his death or the tumultuous 10 years prior to his death,” said Dr. Bob Stern, a neurology and neurosurgery professor and a co-founder of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy....

The B.U. Center’s examination of athletes has focused on football, and research published earlier this year indicated that of 35 deceased players whose brain matter was inspected, all but one showed signs of C.T.E. Several were suicide victims. One of the most prominent players, Dave Duerson, had attained the third stage of C.T.E.

Stern said he was initially skeptical that a baseball player would develop the disease. Then he learned during the investigation not only about Freel’s history of collisions with outfield walls and other players but that his first of several concussions unrelated to sports may have occurred at age 2....

“I don’t think baseball is going to become a high-risk activity for C.T.E.,” he said. “I don’t think parents should immediately say: ‘That does it. My kid should not play Little League.’ ... [But] we need to pay better attention to our brains. Try to take the head out of these activities."

Will parents overreact and take their kids out of sports? That would be stupid. I assume sports also alleviate depression and some of those sedentary kids, plunging their brains into computers and televisions, descend into suicide. The message is only: Don't get your head knocked hard.

About that "affluenza."

Those who think the rich teenager — who, driving drunk, killed 4 persons — should have gotten a harsher punishment than 10 years probation are focusing on the expert testimony he presented in his favor. A psychologist named G. Dick Miller testified that having grown up in affluence, "He never learned that sometimes you don’t get your way... He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle."

Miller used the term "affluenza" — a portmanteau of "affluence" and "influenza" — to refer to the young man's psychological deficit.

Affluenza, Miller acknowledged to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, is “not a medical term.” The psychologist said that it means “You have too much and you don’t know how to distribute it.” At Cooper’s prompting, Miller acknowledged that the boy was “a spoiled brat.”

The affluenza claim rightfully strikes the most absurd note since Dan White’s infamous 1979 “Twinkie defense.” Psychologists have loosely used the term for years to describe the emotional pitfalls unique to children raised in affluent settings.

Of course, psychologists will have a lot to say about the afflictions of rich people, since rich people are more likely to have money to throw into long, luxurious sessions with psychologists. And rich people have the money to put on a strong defense in a criminal trial, replete with expert testimony framing their deficiencies in the most compellingly sympathetic form.

It's the judge's responsibility to give this testimony the weight it deserves. The problem here is not that rich people have money to dump into a strong defense in a criminal proceeding or that psychologists have coined a catchy/cutesy term for the woes of the rich. It is the judge — Texas State District Judge Jean Boyd — who is accountable for anything that went wrong in the case of Ethan Couch. And we don't know the weight she put on Miller's testimony or the notion of "affluenza."

I don't know how Boyd has treated other teenagers. Perhaps she's deeply informed about the deficiencies of the teenage brain and has shown mercy to a great many poor and working class teenagers and her sentencing of Couch is — within her record — a model of equal treatment of the rich and the poor. Maybe she knows the research that has led, for example, to articles like this — "Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different" — in the New York Times.

That's a 2009 interview with Laurence Steinberg, "a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia... one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology." He says:

I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Asked whether the criminal justice system is "beginning to take these differences into account during sentencing," Steinberg says:

It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

At the link you can see links to the U.S. Supreme Court cases and descriptions of the neuroscience research about the teenage brain.

Speaking of brains: Let's try to think clearly about this case and the larger context. Don't get too distracted by the word "affluenza" — which no one said was an actual disease. Don't impulsively slot this into a class warfare template. Remember that the criminal defendant has a right to present the evidence in his favor. And the responsibility for sentencing lies squarely with the judge, but don't succumb to impulsive emotion as you judge the judge.

"The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II..."

"... according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal."

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals....

“Realistically looking back, the diagnosis didn’t really matter—it was the behaviors,” says psychiatrist Max Fink, 90, who ran a ward in a Kentucky Army hospital in the mid-1940s. He says veterans who couldn’t be controlled through any other technique would sometimes be referred for a lobotomy. I didn’t think we knew enough to pick people for lobotomies or not.... It’s just that we didn’t have anything else to do for them.”

In a standard lobotomy, the surgeon opens the skull and severs the prefrontal part of the brain from the rest of the brain.

Much more at the link. It seems that the government was looking mostly at men with what today we would call PTSD and taking advantage of a way to control intractable people. I'd like to see more details on how this related to homosexuals. Presumably, as Fink said "it was the behaviors." This was back in the days before Thorazine, so it's hard for us today to picture what these doctors were seeing.

During eight years as a patient in the VA hospital in Tomah, Wis., [Roman] Tritz underwent 28 rounds of electroshock therapy, a common treatment that sometimes caused convulsions so jarring they broke patients’ bones. Medical records show that Mr. Tritz received another routine VA treatment: insulin-induced temporary comas, which were thought to relieve symptoms

To stimulate patients’ nerves, hospital staff also commonly sprayed veterans with powerful jets of alternating hot and cold water, the archives show. Mr. Tritz received 66 treatments of high-pressure water sprays called the Scotch Douche and Needle Shower, his medical records say....

“You couldn’t help but have the feeling that the medical community was impotent at that point,” says Elliot Valenstein, 89, a World War II veteran and psychiatrist who worked at the Topeka, Kan., VA hospital in the early 1950s. He recalls wards full of soldiers haunted by nightmares and flashbacks. The doctors, he says, “were prone to try anything.”

My mother, who is no longer alive, was a WAC who worked in wards like this in the 1940s, but I never heard her say anything about the treatments, only very general things about how the men suffered.

"As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains."

Writes Guardian science editor Robin McKie (who's a male, if that matters to you)"

For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes...

And there are no signs that this flow is drying up...

McKie, being male, slips in a menopause joke.

... with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains....

It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors...

Equally, when gender differences are uncovered by researchers they are frequently found to be trivial, a point made by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at London's Institute of Psychiatry, whose studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender....

Read the whole thing. And try to maintain some rationality this time. Especially you men. I know it's hard for you. Oh, no, Althouse, being female, could not have made a joke. I must with heavier, manly hands crack that joke in the comments, that joke that she could not have made.

Professor Nutt has a new drug, to get you drunk without drinking.

"Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and former drugs advisor to the U.K. government, said the drug would be consumed as a cocktail drink and targets neurotransmitters in the brain to mimic the pleasurable effects of drunkenness...."

"I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist [i.e., antidote]," Nutt told the BBC. “That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.... I think this would be a serious revolution in health ... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionize the smoking of tobacco... I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement."

Nutt is seeking funding, but I don't think he'll get it. For one thing, wouldn't the government need to approve this drug and wouldn't it say no? Another thing is, drinking has a whole culture to it, which gives it a social and political acceptability that you'd never get for a new drug that gets you high. Drugs aren't supposed to get you high. That might be an acceptable side effect, but it can't be the end itself. You need some tradition behind your recreational drugs. That's why eventually they'll allow us to use marijuana and not just for the medicinal use. A tradition has developed around it over the years.

Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains."

"We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain."

"Ronney Jenkins cannot be sure whether chronic traumatic encephalopathy is clawing through his brain tissue right now, but he suspects that it is."

So begins a CNN medical news report about football and brain damage.

"I'd be talking to a cousin of mine, disagree with him, and I'd just want to do something to him," Jenkins said. "I don't know why I had those thoughts, but I wanted to hurt him."

Jenkins cannot shake the feeling that these and other symptoms he has add up to CTE, but he will never be sure. The only way to diagnose CTE is after death -- by analyzing brain tissue and finding microscopic clumps of an abnormal protein called tau.

"Brains Of Dying Rats Yield Clues About Near-Death Experiences."

 "Just after the rats' hearts stopped, there was a burst of brain activity. Their brain suddenly seemed to go into overdrive, showing all the hallmarks not only of consciousness but a kind of hyperconsciousness."

"We found continued and heightened activity... Measurable conscious activity is much, much higher after the heart stops — within the first 30 seconds.... That really just, just really blew our mind. ... That really is consistent with what patients report"....

I thought this was already well known, but I guess euthanizing rats and getting this data is new. Still, were the scientists' minds actually blown? Isn't this what they expected? Wouldn't it have been more mind-blowing if there hadn't been a brain activity burst — because that's what would support the supernatural interpretation of the near-death experiences reported by human beings?

IN THE COMMENTS: Hagar asks: "Why is euthanizing used as a euphemism for killing?" Yeah, euthanasia is killing to spare the animal pain. These rats were killed just to watch them die, like Johnny Cash and that man in Reno, except Johnny Cash didn't have electrodes implanted in the man's brain, nor did he seriously collect and analyze data or shake our beliefs in the existence of heaven and hell.

"House painter gets $58M after vicious bar beating leaves him without half a skull."

"Antonio Lopez Chaj appeared at a news conference Monday... When he took off a baseball cap hiding his injuries, gasps could be heard from people present."

Click to see what they saw.

"In the literature, perfect pitch is talked about as a fixed ability, so it was quite surprising to find..."

"... that as little as 45 minutes of de-tuned music could temporarily shift note categories.... What this points to is the malleability of the human brain. Relatively brief exposure to flattened music is able to rearrange what was thought to be a very long-term and stable note category. This is a great example of how our immediate surroundings and perceptions can change the way in which we view the world."

What are the other things in the category that that is an example of?

"He wandered from room to room with his head in his hands wondering what had hit him."

An 80-pound tree branch had hit him in the forehead. He had recently emerged from a month-long coma.

He felt nauseated and slept most of the day.

When he told me he didn’t “feel love,” I tried to stay calm.

Boxing to blame for Boston bombing?

The battered brain of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

"It is remarkable that it is so common for cells from one individual to integrate into the tissues of another distinct person."

"We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as singular autonomous individuals, and these foreign cells seem to belie that notion, and suggest that most people carry remnants of other individuals. As remarkable as this may be, stunning results from a new study show that cells from other individuals are also found in the brain. In this study, male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades. What impact they may have had is now only a guess, but this study revealed that these cells were less common in the brains of women who had Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting they may be related to the health of the brain."

"Am I going to die today? Just give me a percentage."

Senator Mark Kirk tells about his stroke. (The percentage the doctor gave him — in the ambulance — was 98% in favor of not dying.)

I was in my hospital bed when the waves came and I began to lose control of my body and mind. Unbelievable, I thought. I’m only 52. I didn’t even know anyone who’d had a stroke.

More than a week later, I regained a confused consciousness in the intensive care unit. I knew I was lying in a bed. I thought someone was sharing the bed with me, but it was my own leg. I vaguely remember a party the ICU staff had for the Super Bowl and the smell of the food they brought.

Later:

I regarded my left leg as a lifeless appendage. Mike kept insisting that it would bear weight. The moment I realized that it would, and that I could swing it from my hip and propel myself forward, was the breakthrough revelation of my rehabilitation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Someone snarks: "Show me when this paper has done a similar story for a Republican. *crickets*" — only to be told that Kirk is a Republican. I blogged this item without remembering Kirk's party affiliation or caring enough to check. But when the subject came up in the comments, I did check, went to Kirk's website, and saw his statement, released yesterday, rejecting Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense:

During yesterday's confirmation hearing, Senator Hagel instinctively called the Iranian government both elected and legitimate.  He initially offered strong support for containment of Iran, rather than President Obama's stated policy of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout.  He could not clearly explain his past opposition to unilateral sanctions against Iran – opposition as recent as 2008.  And at no time did he state his position on whether the European Union should formally designate Iran's terror proxy, Hezbollah, as a terrorist organization – a critical step to cut off the flow of funds to a group responsible for the murders of some 280 American citizens.

The statement is illustrated with the chilling photograph of "Neda Agha-Soltan who was killed during 2009 Iranian election protests."



Am I going to die today? Just give me a percentage.

"Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength..."

"... if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information," writes Oliver Sacks in an essay about memory.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Gabby Giffords, ever smiling, struggles through an interview with Diane Sawyer.

Giffords can only get a few words out — "so slowly" — and Diane Sawyer has no compunction about supplying words all around Giffords's words, most notably at the end of the interview — you have to watch the video — when she turns Giffords into a puppet who voices the last word to a long sentence yammered out by Sawyer. Sawyer repeatedly assures us that Giffords understands everything and is able to think well, that her only intellectual deficit is in speaking. We're told how effective Giffords will be in pressuring Congress to enact gun control. She will be taken around to the members of Congress so they will be subjected to the ordeal — if they want to say "no" — of saying "no" to her face.

This is how it's done. At what point do you say "no"... enough?

ADDED: The most poignantly telling moment in the interview is when Giffords is invited to say what matters most to her. She says: "family."

"More intelligence and fewer offspring?"

"Perhaps Idiocracy was stating a more general rule...."

But another thing...

When it comes to humans, for example, though our brains are only 2% of our bodies, they take up a whopping 20% of our energy requirements. 

If that's really true, it could be the key to why one person can eat heartily and never gain weight while the next person, eating the same thing, gets fat. Maybe it's a big brain/small brain distinction. Also, is it possible that instead of going to the gym or getting on a bicycle when we hope to lose weight, what we really should be doing is studying calculus or reading philosophy?

ADDED: Idiocracy primer:

"Anesthesia awareness is an intrapersonal event..."

"No one else sees it. No one else knows it. You’re the only one."

"Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it..."

"Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain."