I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.
Today, trepanation, or drilling a hole in the head, is commonly used to release the pressure of swelling inside the skull.Throughout history, it's been used to treat epilepsy, migraines, mood disorders and pretty much any other head condition that seemed to surgeons of the time as if it could be improved by seeing the light of day. But even more interesting than holding someone down and punching a hole through his/her skull is doing it yourself.
As promised, here's part three of the nails-in-the-brain trilogy. Only, while nails may be the brain-poking standby, they're not the only foreign bodies to be shot, shoved or stabbed into the human brain. For example, after getting into a fistfight a man reported to his local emergency room with a headache, black eye and a cut on his cheek. Imaging found a 10.5-centimeter paintbrush embedded in the man's brain. Surgery removed the paintbrush and the man experienced no lasting effects. The paintbrush had entered bristles-first.
Yesterday I posted a couple splendid instances of people driving nails into their brains. And here, for those of you that think (as I do) that the only thing better than nails-in-the-brain stories is MORE nails-in-the-brain stories, are a couple more. Stay tuned tomorrow for things other than nails that've been surgically removed from brains of the unfortunate.
Here are a couple wonderful instances of people accidentally or intentionally driving nails deep into their gray matter. Can't get enough nails in the brain? Don't worry—I'll post another couple tomorrow.
Look at a waterfall for 30 seconds. Now look at something stationary. The stationary object will appear to drift upwards. The same phantom movement is true after stepping off an airport walkway: if you close your eyes and stand still, you should continue to feel yourself moving.
The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him. That's right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.
When you woke up this morning were you an expert water measurer? No? Well, you will be after reading this article. But that might not be a good thing: experts are sometimes worse off than regular Janes and Joes. To see why, first we need to wire your brain for expertise–read on.
In a classic experiment known as the Ultimatum Game, person A is given 10 coins to split between himself and person B. If person B accepts the distribution, they both keep the coins; if not, no one gets paid.According to Game Theory, the optimal solution is for person A to give himself nine coins and person B one coin——both will end the game richer than when they started. However, played in the wild, the most common distribution is 6-to-4, a ratio seen as fair by both parties.But why? What's the origin of the human idea of fairness?
The attention we give to (or withhold from) tragedies has little to dowith numbers: many hundreds can die in a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe or hundreds of thousands in an earthquake in China and it receives nowhere near the press and public outrage as nearly 200 killed in terrorist attacks in Mumbai. (This isn’t meant to diminish the tragedy of Mumbai, only to act as comparison.)
Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too. Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.
How To Win Any Argument (Part 1) and (Part 2)Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from
Go here for Part 1Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!"When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward.You can too.Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.
