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Football is definitely back this fall, but will the players show up after seeing this insightful video about what playing in the NFL does to your brain? Former player Dave Duerson donated his brain to the NFL Brain Bank so researchers can clearly see what happens when you knock your head around for a living, and the results aren’t very pretty. But did anyone really think being a professional football player would be good for your mental health? I think not.
The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into the Universe.
Cabinet-card portrait of Phineas Gage, shown holding the tamping iron
which injured him. From the Gage family of Texas collection.
Even if you're not a neurologist or a psychotherapist, you may
have heard of Phineas Gage. When a guy survives being impaled with a three-foot
iron rod in the skull, he tends to gain a certain notoriety. What makes
Gage's case interesting isn't the fact that he survived, it's
how he changed after his accident.
A
HOLE IN ONE
Phineas Gage considered himself a lucky man. At the age of 25, he had
a responsible, well-paid job as construction foreman for Rutland and Burlington
Railroad in Vermont. On September 13, 1848, as Gage was packing a load
of explosives into the ground, the charge exploded without warning. The
iron rod he was using to tamp the explosives into the earth flew into
the air with the force and speed of a rocket, hitting Phineas Gage directly
in the head. The 3'7" rod (109 cm), which weighed 13 pounds
(6 kg), entered his left cheek, careened straight through his skull and
brain, and emerged out of the top of his head like a yard-long bullet.
SURVIVOR
They loaded him into an ox cart and took him - still conscious - to
a hotel where some local doctors treated him. They never expected him
to live; he was bleeding horribly and blind in his left eye. Yet, Gage
was still able to walk, talk, even to work. He returned home just ten
weeks after his accident. However, Gage wasn't unscathed, not by
any means. The iron bar that had practically destroyed the front left
lobe of his brain had irrevocably changed his personality.
I FEEL LIKE A NEW MAN
A few months after the accident he was feeling well enough to return
to work, but his old boss wouldn't hire him back at the same position
because - even though Gage was almost back to normal physically, emotionally,
and mentally - he was a changed man. Before his accident he'd
been efficient, capable, kind, and polite; now he was foul-mouthed, rude,
and easily annoyed.
A FREAK, ALIVE OR DEAD
Gage never worked as foreman again. He drove coaches and cared for horses
in New Hampshire and in Chile. He exhibited himself (and the rod) as a
curiosity at P.T. Barnum's Museum in New York. All in all, he lived
13 years after his dreadful accident and died in 1860 after a series of
epileptic seizures.
Gage's skull (and the rod) are now on display at Harvard Medical
School, where they've been studied intensively over the years by
neuroscientists.
FIRST THE GOOD STUFF
Gage's abrupt personality changes clues neurologists in to the
fact that certain portions of the brain corresponded with personality
functions. And in fact, Gage's case made the very first brain tumor
removal operation possible in 1885. After studying what had happened to
Gage, the operating physician concluded that lesions or tumors located
in the frontal lobes of the brain didn't affect the brain's
ability to take in sense information. Nor did they have an impact on physical
movements or speech. However, such localized lesions or tumors did produce
highly characteristic and unusual personality changes like Gage's.
In 1894, that same surgeon removed a tumor from a patient's left
frontal lobe. The patient had complained his thinking was becoming increasingly
slow and dull. Seeing the similarities between this patient's mental
faculties and Gage's, the doctor successfully removed the tumor
that lay, just as he expected, in the left frontal lobes of the brain.
THE BIRTH OF THE LOBOTOMY
Gage's case put scientists on alert. Now they knew that certain
areas of the brain were responsible for certain functions. In 1890, after
a German scientist discovered that dogs were tamer and calmer after their
temporal lobe was removed, the attending doctor at a Swiss insane asylum
began to perform lobotomies on his patients - six in 1892. The patients
who had been hard to handle, restless, and even violent, seemed much calmer
after their surgeries. Lobotomies fell out of favor for a time, but were
revived in the 1930s. Suddenly, a sort of lobotomy frenzy overtook the
American psychiatric world.
THE ICE PICK TRICK
Along
came enterprising physician and neurologist Walter Freeman, a.k.a. the
Lobotomy King, who performed over 3,000 lobotomies from the 1930s to the
1960s. Impatient with the slowness of other brain surgery methods, Freeman
even created the superquick ice pick lobotomy. Instead of surgically opening
a hole in the patient's head, he put his patients under local anesthesia
and plunged an ice pick through the skull and into the brain. Once in,
Freeman would swing the ice pick swiftly back and forth, severing the
prefrontal lobe. An ice pick lobotomy took only a few minutes. The lobotomy-happy
Freeman would set up production lines at mental hospitals, operating on
as many as ten patients in a single afternoon.
EVERBODY'S DOING IT
Lobotomies were the psychiatric cure-all of choice in the 1940s and 1950s.
They were used not just on uncontrollable patients, but homosexuals, political
radicals, “troublesome" personalities, and other so-called
undesirables who veered from established norms. Even amateur surgeons
got into the act; they performed hundreds of lobotomies without first
performing psychiatric evaluations. Joseph Kennedy ordered a lobotomy
on his “difficult" daughter Rosemary in 1941 without consulting
anyone else in the family. Playwright Tennessee Williams was devastated
to find in 1937 that his schizophrenic sister Rose Williams had been lobotomized,
altering her personality utterly and permanently. The movie, Frances,
is a true story of fiercely independent actress Frances Farmer (as played
by Jessica Lange), who, after her lobotomy is a tragic picture of blandness.
LOBOTOMY TODAY?
Lobotomies are now outlawed in most countries, although they're
still occasionally performed to control violent behavior in Japan, Australia,
Sweden, and India.
Even though Phineas Gage needed that 1848 accident like a, well, like
a hole in the head, his case revolutionized brain surgery - in good
ways and bad.
__________
The
article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Several months ago major news sites reported that a Belgian man, paralyzed for 23 years and supposedly in a vegetative state, was interacting with caregivers through the use of “facilitated communication.” James Randi and other skeptics raised questions about the validity of the technique.
Faculty from the Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital are now reporting that subsequent controlled studies have failed to confirm the initial findings.
Dr Steven Laureys, one of the doctors treating him, acknowledged that his patient could not make himself understood after all. Facilitated communication, the technique said to have made Houben’s apparent contact with the outside world possible, did not work, Laureys declared. “We did not have all the facts before,” he said. “To me, it’s enough to say that this method doesn’t work.”
In the recent studies a facilitator, who helped the patient type answers on a computer screen, was not present when the test objects and words were presented to Mr. Houben.
Links at NPR and The Guardian.
Previously on Neatorama: Is This Man Fully Alert and Communicating – or Not? (with video of facilitated communication). Photo credit AFP/Getty Images.
The story of Rom Houben was posted earlier today on Neatorama, and is being carried on every major online news site – a Belgian man paralyzed for 23 years and diagnosed as being in a vegetative state has been found through new technology to be alert but “locked in.” With an assistant helping him communicate by means of a keyboard, he is now reportedly describing what this experience has been like. The case adds fuel to the fiery controversy regarding end-of-life planning and the right to die.
Every site that I have encountered has taken the story at face value. The one exception has come from the James Randi, who has written an essay entitled “This Cruel Farce Has to Stop!“ He notes that the communications from the subject all occur via a “facilitator” who “supports” the patient’s hand as it traverses the keyboard…
The “facilitated communication” process consists of the “facilitator” actually holding the hand of the subject over the keyboard, moving the hand to the key, then drawing the hand back from the keyboard! This very intimate participatory action lends itself very easily to transferring the intended information to the computer screen. In the video you have just viewed, it is very evident that (a) the “facilitator” is looking directly at the keyboard and the screen, and (b) is moving the subject’s hand. The video editing is also biased, giving angles that line up the head of the subject with the screen, as if the subject were watching the screen.
At the essay, Randi states that he has previously investigated “facilitated communication” when it was used to communicate with severely autistic children; he found the technique to be faulty and subject to observer bias in the manner of the “clever Hans” effect.
This patient is clearly severely impaired but is clearly not brain dead. Brain imaging studies have shown evidence of consciousness and awareness, which is fully compatible with his impairment. The controversy is whether the communications are valid representations of his thoughts, or whether they are (consciously or subconsciously) creations of the facilitator.
The video embedded above is a brief excerpt from the MSNBC video. Several other videos are available at the BBC, Telegraph, and other news sites.
Addendum: Subsequent controlled trials failed to show any validity for “facilitated communication.”
