Send A Brain Card On Valentine’s Day

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

If someone has told you recently that “I love you with all my heart,” don’t believe it. The heart is really just a lift station or waste pump, making sure we get rid of the bad stuff while circulating oxygen and the good stuff around the body.  As that eminent philosopher W.C. Fields said: “Don’t worry about your heart, it will last you as long as you live.” I guess we should blame Aristotle for this technical mistake of making the heart the center of our intellectual being.

Over 2300 years ago he thought the brain’s moist coils served only one purpose: to cool the passions of the heart. The heart was the center of our emotional and intellectual being. But now we should be saying: “I love you with all my brain.” That’s the way it is. There should be a well-coiled brain on a Valentine instead of a heart. Instead of a heart in “I (heart) New York,” there should be “I (brain) New York.” Not as pretty, but it is certainly more meaningful—medically speaking. One early dissector described the brain as an ugly mass of tightly packed cold spaghetti.

It was not nice or legal to dissect human bodies even after Renaissance men such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo decided to study human anatomy. They often sent their interns, apprentices, and vandals out at night to steal corpses for their studies. Throughout history there were many moonless nights for roaming body snatchers.

With 100 Trillion Synapses, It Is The body’s Most Mysterious Organ
I have kept a file on the brain for many years because I thought it was the key to how we educate our society. I particularly felt that attempts to come up with processes and techniques to fill our brains with enough information to form sound judgments would be successful if we knew more about that three pounds of cold spaghetti. We certainly don’t know enough yet—and such programs as Leave No Child Behind put us back decades and prepare students for 20th century assembly-line work.

The 21st century demands creativity and out-of-box thinking as well as scientific theories and math formulas. You don’t encourage creativity by emphasizing learning that can be judged only by standardized, mind-numbing, multiple-choice tests—and then rewarding that kind of learning by turning students into minimum-wage robots. Creativity demands a life of science and math balanced with art, music, dance, drama, debate, and literature. A flight of fantasy may be more productive than any scientific theorem. Even my favorite cynic Voltaire believed in brain power: “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”

I suppose this is an estimate, but it’s the best we’ve got so far. We have one million neurons for every neuron a fly has, so we have over 100 billion neurons to play with. We don’t use many yet. If we examine a neuron from a fruit fly cell and one from a human cell we discover they almost look the same. They have the same electrical properties, the same protein channels for ions (messages) to flow on, and many genes in common. In 3.5 billion years we have progressed from being simple swamp microbes to nanotechnology and Lady Gaga. We now have so many neurons we presently think we have a “quality” brain. If we can keep from blowing up the planet maybe we will learn to use that quality in some future millenium.

John Keats: “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be Before My Pen Has Gleaned My Teeming Brain”

Our “teeming” brain has four major lobes: (1) Frontal, the center of judgment and emotional response; (2) Temporal, the center of hearing, intellect, and long-term memory; (3) Parietal, the center of visual perception and object manipulation; and (4)Occipital, the center of visual perception such as recognition of colors and movement. Thus, the brain regulates all aspects of our behavior. If parts of the brain are damaged, we may lose some functions, but sometimes other parts of the brain may take over if restoration of the damaged part fails. We average about 1.7 million brain traumas a year in the U.S., mostly from car crashes (without seatbelts!), strokes, and accidents. And let’s not forget wars and IEDs. The Veterans Administration now estimates that at least 710,000 soldiers and Marines from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have suffered brain trauma.

If in good shape, the brain processes trillions of bits of info in seconds, micromanages our heartbeat, intellect, balance, personality and the language we use, and enables us to drive a car. If damaged, the brain can birth a new “person” in our frame.
Being a complicated organ, if the brain is damaged, repair is extremely expensive. A federal study reveals the average daily cost of treating brain trauma runs $8,034. Initial brain care in the hospital runs $162,194 and inpatient rehab costs $59,862. No wonder government agencies plead with bikers to wear helmets and auto drivers and passengers to use seatbelts. Nursing homes for brain outpatients run from $600 to $1,000 a day.

A young, quality brain will permit a neuron to make an average of 1,000 connections with other neurons. When this is disturbed we have brain backfires and electrical burnouts. So far brain experts have determined that 1,461 genes control the signals of protein-based machines that transmit signals. (Hey! Studying this stuff ain’t easy! If any of these genes screw-up a protein, it may lead to one of 269 different human diseases. And we know little about the brain. On a scale of 100 we may be at a two or three level.)
The Locked-In Syndrome

We sometimes hear of “vegetables” after major brain trauma waking up after decades of lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Rom Houben of Germany was paralyzed and in a coma for 23 years. After he was tested for eye, verbal, and motor responses he was declared “extinct.” Not a good word. The problem was he was screaming for attention inside while he had lost any control of his body on the outside. After 23 years of screaming he was alive he “woke up.” He probably will never leave the hospital but now he can read a book through computers and devices while lying down.

There may be other “extinct” people like Rom. Each year 100,000 Germans suffer traumatic brain injuries. Over 20,000 are in a coma for more than three weeks. But between 3,000 and 5,000 end up like Rom to a certain degree–in some kind of purgatory or limbo of life and death.

Perhaps the most publicized case of locked-in syndrome involves the French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a massive stroke that left him almost totally paralyzed except for small movements of the head and one eye. He did not seem to lose any intellectual power. Although only able to blink his left eyelid, he was able to dictate an entire book describing his experiences and situation. By using the French alphabet and blinking to select letters, he blinked 200,000 times over a period of ten months and four hours a day to describe his everyday problems and events. Each word would take about two minutes. He died three days after his book “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” was published. It was a bestseller across Europe and was made into a movie in 2007. It is a testimony to the uniqueness, pluck, and the “Impossible Dream” potential of man.

What Killed 116 Healthy Hmong Men? Only The Brain Knows So Far

After the Vietnam War in the 1970’s we allowed many of the Hmong tribe to come to the United States because they had assisted us in the futile effort to “win” a stalemate. The Viet Cong murdered many who had sided with us in that civil war. In the early 1980’s, and only after they had been in this country for a period of months, 116 out of 117 Hmong men with the median age of 33 died mysteriously.  Only one was in poor health. It took about 25 years of intensive work at the University of California to determine that the victims had sincere beliefs in a spirit world. Death was actually caused by cardiac arrhythmia, which is a genetic fault found among Southeast Asia men. Researchers determined the men suffered from “nocturnal pressing spirit attacks” during sleep paralysis sessions caused by the existence of “evil.”  Such “evil” attacks are relatively common in Indonesia, China, Hungary, and Newfoundland. The evil is a night-“mare,” generally a female supernatural being, who lays on the chests of victims and suffocates them.

The brain can accomplish amazing things. Chinese men who have a combination of bad health that is related to a bad or evil Chinese astrological sign often die five years younger than a man who has good health related to good astrological signs. If a Chinese man has poor health that coincides with a good astrological sign, he most likely will have an average life span. Go figure. There seems to be real meaning in the phrase “scared to death.”

Even With 100 Trillion Synapses, Can A Human Drive A Car Safely While Chewing, Texting, Talking, Eating, And Applying Make-Up?

There is negative meaning in the phrase “He’s a pea-brain.” Not only is a pea small, it has no brain. But we still don’t know enough to be conclusive about brain-power. Research has shown a bee’s brain has some unusual capabilities, even if it is the size of a tiny grass seed.

Bumblebees have to visit many flowers in different locations in order to survive. Bees not only have the intelligence to find flowers with pollen, they soon learn the shortest overall route to flowers in their area! Like a city transportation manager, they set up a convenient route which keeps flying to a minimum. Both buses and flying take a lot of energy.

There is a real problem with the use of cellphones while driving. The National Transportation Board has recommended to the states that they prohibit their use in cars. Remember when cellphone service was interrupted for three days in Abu Dhabi and auto accidents went down 40 percent? That’s fairly conclusive evidence.

The National Safety Council claims the human brain cannot multitask efficiently. It may be able to juggle tasks quickly. Witness a mother feeding baby, talking on the phone, and folding diapers at the same time. But we can perform well only one specific task at a time. The NSC says there are three basic types of distractions: visual, manual, and cognitive. Texting, as an example, requires all three. Research by Virginia Tech concentrating on long-distance truck drivers indicates accidents go up 23 percent while texting. If a driver texts for six seconds his eyes are only on the road for 1.4 seconds.  At 55 miles per hour that is a blind spot longer than a football field! With a population of 313 million we presently have 280 million cellphone subscribers. If we don’t control use, we will continue to kill off users.
The North Dakota Legislature Has Done A Lot Recently To Keep Teenagers Alive

I’m still in shock that the Republican-dominated North Dakota Legislature actually used science to make changes in teenage driving rules and regulations instead of depending upon the Biblical musings of Matthew, Luke, and John. We kill 4,000 and injure 400,000 teens with cars every year in this country. We have to remember that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the brain site of decision-making and understanding of future consequences in our brains, does not fully develop until the early 20’s. That’s why 16-year-old drivers have crash rates three times higher than 17-year-olds—and five times higher than 18-year-olds.

Teenagers aren’t stupid, although they might appear that way even if their brains weigh about three pounds. It’s just that those necessary connections among the 100 trillion synapses are not hooked up yet. Then again, perhaps Mark Twain had a good idea about raising teenagers: “When a child turns 12, he should be kept in a barrel and fed through the bung hole until he reaches 16….at which time you plug the bung hole.”

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