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.

• In 2007 a man wearing a baseball cap complained of headaches at the emergency room of St. George's Hospital in London. Doctors removed the baseball cap to find 11 nails penetrating the man's brain, one of which was a spike at least five inches long. It turns out that the man had a history of paranoid schozophrenia and had hammered one nail into his head each of the previous 11 weeks in order to rid himself of evil. He recovered with no lasting neurological deficits.

• In 2008 when Kansas man George Chandler fired a nail deep into his brain, a resourceful emergency room doctor removed the offending nail with a claw hammer.

• In 1993, a very drunk man was brought to his local emergency room. Even once he sobered up, he was seen to have weakness on the right side of his body (hemiparesis). The emergency room doctors ordered brain imaging. The images showed a two-inch nail, which had entered the patient's skull directly between his eyes and traveled through the brain to the very back of the skull. The man admitted to a suicide attempt nearly 12 years earlier.

My new book came out August 3rd. It's packed with sensationalist brain science, psychology of the weird, questionable conclusions, and just a touch of heresy. How can you resist buying a copy of Brain Candy?