What Does The Heart Have To Do With It?

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

It’s a no-brainer to call last week the week of the brain. First, millions of students in Fargo, West Fargo, Moorhead and across the land were determined by federal fiat to have been left behind because of an obsolete, unimaginative education program called No Child Left Behind. At least many of their schools, administrators, and teachers were determined to be inadequate through testing and—whatever.

Just wait until 2014, when all students must perform at their grade level or above for an education program that is designed for the 20th century assembly line worker. Then all schools and students will fail to achieve the impossible goals. All schools will be listed as failures, contrary to that Minnesota-Lake Wobegon myth that all children are above average.

Second, we learned about a nine-year-old girl in Big Lake, Minnesota who has congenital insensitivity to pain. She cannot feel hot food, ice, scratches, broken bones, and other injuries to her body. Gabby Gingras gets straight As, loves to read, and exchanges ideas with 40 families around the world who have children who feel no pain. The brain has to be involved somehow in her condition. A circuit has been disconnected. Pediatric neurologists are aware of the disease -– or whatever it is -– but they have not come up with a treatment.

We do know how complicated the brain is. It’s three pounds of gray and white matter composed of trillions of cells and neurons we don’t quite understand yet. Sometimes electrical brain circuits connect, sometimes they don’t. That is, no one understands how this mushy mass functions except for those geniuses who wrote the provisions of No Child Left Behind. We don’t know how to connect electric circuits so the entire brain is “lit” up.

Waking Up With a Russian Accent

Third, three years ago Robin Jenks Vanderlip of Fairfax County, Virginia fell down a stairwell and hit her head on the bottom step, knocking herself out. She woke up the next morning speaking with a Russian accent. Before her accident she spoke with a Mid-Atlantic American Southern accent, very typical of the Mid-East states. The doctors have finally come up with a term that describes a rather serious brain injury. Only about 60 cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome have been reported worldwide. Robin’s accent gets very thick when she is tired.

The syndrome was discovered by a neurologist in World War II who examined a Norwegian woman hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. After being in a coma for hours, she woke up speaking with a German accent. This proved to be difficult and perplexing for her because Norway and Germany were at war. Whenever she spoke in public people thought she was German.

So far the neurologists have not discovered how to hook up the circuits to restore accents. At the present time we have people suffering from brain injuries who speak with different accents. A Louisiana woman now speaks with a Cajun accent. An English woman now speaks with a Jamaican accent. A native of Boston speaks with a Scottish burr. A Japanese stroke patient has a Korean accent and a Spaniard woke up from an auto accident with a very thick Hungarian accent. In one case a doctor had a patient who developed Foreign Accent Syndrome after a stroke and lived with it for years. After the patient had another stroke the accent disappeared and her original accent returned. Repair completed? Evidently, damage to the brain does “something” to speech formation. Neurologists have not discovered the “why” yet.

The Catcher Who Can’t Throw the Ball Back to the Pitcher

Fourth, the former starting catcher for the Texas Rangers, Jarrod Saltammachia, can throw base stealers out at second and third base with the best of the American League catchers. But he has a major problem. “Salty” can’t seem to be able to throw the baseball back to the pitcher with any kind of accuracy after the pitch. The ball ends up anywhere but at the pitcher’s mound. He has been sent back to the minors to try to solve his problem.

This is not the first time this has happened in baseball—or sports. We have had golfers with the “yips” (as this symtom is described) who couldn’t make a putt if their life depended upon it.

Remember Chuck Knoblauch of the Minnesota Twins, a Golden Glove second baseman who was a good leadoff man? He came up with a serious problem later in his career. He woke up one morning and discovered he could not accurately throw from his position at second base to first base to get anybody out. Sometimes his throw would end up in the stands. He could throw accurately to any spot on the baseball diamond except to first base. He was traded to the Yankees but still did not completely solve his throwing problems. He was finally moved to left field and finished his career in that position. He had the throwing “yips” until his retirement from baseball. The neurologists never did discover which of the trillions of circuits did not work in Knoblauch’s brain.

Living and Dying With Brain Injuries

Each year we have about 1.5 million people who suffer brain injuries. Only one percent of that group do not end up with permanent impairments of one kind or another. Most of the Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) are caused by car accidents, playground accidents (in the case of school children), falls by the elderly in their homes, and domestic violence involving guns and blunt weapons. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates we have 3.2 million Americans living with long-term disabilities due to TBI at any one time.

These numbers do not include the 320,000 veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars who have suffered brain injuries from the concussive effects of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), the main weapon of insurgents. The Pentagon estimates that 16 percent of our Iraq and Afghanistan vets will end up with TBI, thus costing us trillions over the 50-60 years the vets will live with that disability.

My signature point in discussing all of these rather different brain cases is that it seems only the politicians and some education experts have figured out how the brain functions. Therefore, at least our millions of K-12 students should succeed if they stringently follow all of the guidelines of Leave No Child Behind! Let’s see. We have no idea how to cure the “yips” of a golfer or baseball player, we can’t cure the Foreign Accent Syndrome, we have no clue how to solve the problems of people who feel no pain, but we can take half of the students who are below average and move them to the Lake Wobegon schools in a decade. Wow!

What Did You Have for Breakfast 5,000 Days Ago?

We have no idea why 25 percent of the suicides in this country occur on Wednesdays. How can we pretend to know how to teach calculus to students with a very low Intelligence Quotient? We have people who can remember what happened to them every day of every year for decades. Memory experts at the University of California are working with three persons who possess what the neurobiologists call super auto-biographical memory. At age 50 Rick Baron can recall what happened to him every day since the age of 11. A woman recalls everything that happened to her every day since the age of five. What is the “capacity” of the brain? It has billions of possible circuits. Do we want to waste them remembering what we had for breakfast 5,000 days ago? What a load to carry! And some people have the temerity to believe they know how children learn!

Those saddled with the chore of teaching teenagers may take some solace from the research going on at the State University of New York Downtown Medical Center. Researchers are beginning to believe that puberty may force changes in the brain which makes it very difficult to learn new things. Experiments with “teenage” mice suggest that unusual changes are taking place in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory and learning. Chemical and electrical receptors in the “teenage” mouse’s brain interfere with learning because they are growing so fast and have a habit of disconnecting. To make a long story short, adolescent mice fail learning tests that both infant and adult mice pass with flying colors. If the results of this research also apply to humans, no wonder middle school is confusing and tough on both kids and teachers.

Does Your Heart Call You?

We are just scratching the surface of our trillions of brain cells in our extremely limited knowledge of how that gray glob functions. Blood flow increases in certain areas during testing of specific tasks. If we test the ability to plan an attack on a math problem, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex lights up on an MRI. If we show images of brutality the amydala in the central part of the brain lights up. Brain researchers say this section can show sociability, empathy, and morality. But what happens if we show a rapist images of a woman in five-inch heels stepping on the head of a cat? I think we have to concede that we know very little about how our brains function.

Now we also have to contend with the role of the heart in thinking and performing. We have a number of “heart sanctuaries” that are reviving the idea that the heart is the center of our body universe, not the brain. In 400 B.C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the heart was the most important organ in the body. In 200 A.D. Galen, a follower of Aristotle’s thinking, wrote that “The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal (that’s us) is governed. The heart is a hard flesh, not easily injured. In hardness, tension, general strength, and resistance to injury, the fibers of the heart surpass all others.”

I have often wondered about certain expressions regarding the heart. After all, our heart is just a fluid pump, not a sump pump for the soul. I used to get a kick out of President George W. Bush’s evaluation of some world leaders: “Oh, he has a good heart!” Did that mean the leader’s ten-ounce pump run by body electricity was in fine shape—or that he was just a good “fella?” Al Gore said Tipper was someone “I’ve loved with my whole heart since the night of my senior high prom.” Would their lives have been different if Al had used his brain instead?

Even Leonardo DaVinci Thought the Heart Was at the Center

The Mayans and the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice in the 10th and 11th centuries. The priests slashed open the chests of beautiful young people and tore out the living hearts with their bare hands to appease the gods. They believed the heart was the center of their intelligence. It’s a good thing our current politicians didn’t get any ideas from the Mayans for No Child Left Behind. It wasn’t until the middle of the 17th century that doctors and scientists started to consider the brain as the source of intelligence.

People who believe the heart can “think” on its own say the heart is in constant communication with the brain and that it is the “intelligent force” behind thoughts and feelings we all experience. We also have a lot of people who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old.

I wonder if these songs about the heart have some special meaning: “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” by David Bowie, “Shot To The Heart” by Lil Wayne, “Bad Liver And A Broken Heart” by Tom Waites, and “Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Patsy Cline. Wouldn’t it be fun to change the word “Heart” to “Brain” in these songs? Example: The songs reveal the brain’s filthy lesson about being shot, resulting in a bad liver and a broken and cheating brain.

Recently three paintings by a chimp named Congo sold for $26,352. I wonder if the collector used his heart or brain-–or a combination thereof.

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