Brain

What puzzles Harry Gaines is that we typically plan our vacations with more care than we plan the rest of our lives, especially when it comes to health and fitness. Too often we neglect to make the investment in exercise that will pay rich dividends in well-being in our 70s, 80s, and beyond. Gaines, 74, a retired textbook-publishing executive who lives half the year in Newtown, Bucks County, and the other half in Florida, keeps a "bucket list" — goals and experiences he hopes to accomplish before he kicks the proverbial bucket.

In 2006, when John Whyte first started studying the remarkable effect that the sleep medicine Ambien can have on people with severe brain damage, he hoped the drug might be a miracle treatment. Six years later, Ambien's ability to rouse some people from oblivion remains tantalizingly mysterious. But Whyte, director of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Elkins Park, no longer sees the drug as a potentially dramatic improvement in care. Now he sees something far more complex.

I believe that Nicholas O. Berry's recent article ("The coddling of college students") was greatly unfair to many of us college students who truly care about our education. While it is true that many students do fit Mr. Berry's description, it is wrong to stereotype all those who attend college as "sponges" and "clones. " I particularly resent the statement that today's college students are "brain dead. " Perhaps, Mr. Berry, we're being taught by brain- dead instructors. Tom Granahan Philadelphia.

This message is for drug addicts to let you know that we do care, and even though we walk past you without showing feelings, concern is in our hearts. Let's take a closer look. The addict gets a craving for drugs. He gets the drug without really consulting with his brain. In Spanish, one would say, "I need la cura, mannn. " He thinks that by getting the drug (la cura means "the cure"), he is cured, but he is sadly mistaken because he is allowing the nervous system to get further addicted.

Thousands of psychiatrists and other experts on the brain and behavior will descend on Center City over the next two weeks for three professional meetings that illustrate the breadth of modern psychiatry. The groups will discuss everything from intensive talk therapy to the chemistry and structure of the brain to the interaction of biology and experience. Philadelphia will play host this week to the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry and, starting on the weekend, the American Psychiatric Association, holding the world's largest psychiatric meeting.

Athletes stretch. Musicians tune up. You don't just jump into a car and stomp on the gas. OK, maybe you do. But it's probably a better idea to warm up the engine first. Here are some exercises designed to do that for your brain, in preparation for the impending school year. Good luck. (The answers are printed upside down. We don't need to tell you that cheating is way uncool.) 1. Each of the symbols in this simple division problem stands for a number from zero to nine.

Dementia and its evil twin, Alzheimer's, may have moved ahead of cancer on the list of most feared diseases, especially among baby boomers, who have begun to believe it is their inescapable fate if they have the bad luck to live too long. So we grasp at any news about aging, hoping that medical science has indeed found a way to preserve that most essential part of who we are - our memories. Do we protect our minds by doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or by doing aerobics?

Connecticut freshman guard A.J. Price will miss the rest of the season undergoing treatment for a blood vessel abnormality in his brain, the school said yesterday. Price had an intracranial hemorrhage in October and spent several days in critical condition at Hartford Hospital. He was cleared to return to classes on Jan. 18, but his doctor said the abnormality will keep him out of practice and games for months. The condition is marked by masses of abnormal blood vessels that grow in the brain and malform into a mass capable of bleeding.

The star of Eliminators is something called a Mandroid, a human being who has had the right side of his brain removed. On the evidence, the two writers responsible for the film underwent the same surgery before embarking on their labors. Even by the humble standards established by previous vengeance sagas ending in -ators, Eliminators is as close to brain-dead as a movie can get. It rests on a question that has befuddled our best scholars: Is it possible to put a robot and a homicidal ninja in a pitched battle with a tribe of Neanderthals in contemporary Mexico without winding up with a very primitive movie?

More than five decades after the brain of Albert Einstein was preserved, partitioned, and distributed to the private collections of various hospitals and researchers, a set of the precious samples is now on public display. On Thursday, Lucy Rorke-Adams, a prominent neuropathologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, donated 46 slides containing Einstein's gray matter to the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. "They are a very important part of medical history," said Rorke-Adams, 82, who received the slides from a colleague in the mid-1970s.

Not feeling particularly bright today? Get a mental boost for the day, or for a lifetime, by firing up iTunes U or TED, a couple of applications for smartphones and tablets that put the world's best minds to work for your personal enrichment. Apple Inc.'s iTunes U app provides free access to what Apple estimates are 500,000 lectures, books, and other materials from university-level courses at such schools as Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. The introduction to computer science course from Harvard, for example, is a comprehensive 87-part package including the syllabus, video lectures, notes, problem sets, and computer code taught by senior lecturer, start-up founder, and computer forensics expert David J. Malan.

Junior Seau's family is revisiting its decision to donate the former NFL linebacker's brain for research into football-related injuries. Chargers chaplain Shawn Mitchell said Sunday that the family, which is of Samoan descent, is consulting with a group of elders on a number of matters. He said it doesn't necessarily mean that the family won't donate Seau's brain for research. "They really want to do everything right," Mitchell said. The medical examiner's office said Friday it was awaiting a decision by the family on whether to turn over Seau's brain to unidentified outside researchers for study.

The family of former NFL star Junior Seau will donate his brain for research into repetitive head injuries, San Diego Chargers chaplain Shawn Mitchell said Friday. "Junior was philanthropic," Mitchell said. "And he got that from his mom and dad. Their hope is that it can serve athletes down the road. " Seau, 43, was found dead in his Oceanside, Calif., home Wednesday morning of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. He did not leave a note. Some have speculated that brain injuries from football may have played a role in his death, but there's been no medical confirmation of such damage.

MASTERPIECE MYSTERY!: SHERLOCK. 9 p.m. Sundays through May 20, WHYY.   He's traded in his BlackBerry for an Apple product, but his smartphone's still smarter than yours. He is Sherlock Holmes and as "Sherlock" returns to PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery!" on Sunday, the thoroughly modern "consulting detective" played by Benedict Cumberbatch ("War Horse") is dealing — grumpily — with his newfound fame (following, of course, the resolution of that nasty-looking cliff-hanger from Series 1)

Question : Do puzzles and memory exercises really help to stave off getting Alzheimer's disease? Answer : Using the brain by doing various "cognitive activities" like puzzles, reading newspapers and books, watching television or playing cards and board games does help stave off Alzheimer's. Research does indeed show that more frequent activity to stimulate memory and learning is associated with a slower rate of cognitive decline compared to older folks who spend little time stimulating their brain.

In the early morning hours before the start of the second day of the 2005 NFL draft, Joe Banner awoke to a crash . . . crash . . . crash. By the time Banner reached the hallway, the pounding had stopped. His 10-year-old son, Jason, was sprawled on the bathroom tile. "I found him in the bathroom, on the floor and totally incoherent," Banner said. Jason was having a seizure and had been stumbling into walls. His father thought it might be a stroke. The Banner family rushed to the emergency room at Children's Hospital.

FOR THE INQUIRER Bad Brains remain one of rock's greatest conundrums. After 34 years of (still relatively underacknowledged) musical peaks and momentum-derailing implosions — working in rarefied air, crackling with creative energy, if also charged with inherent instability — the Washington, D.C., rock/reggae quartet has both a checkered past (and present) and a positive legacy. But after sets by Maryland's reggae-rockin' openers Lionize, and the Wu-Tang Clan's magisterial GZA, Thursday's notably mixed-race full house at the Trocadero witnessed something else the influential Brains remain: fascinating.

Charles Darwin would surely have been mesmerized by a paper released last week showing that baboons can recognize written words and distinguish them from gibberish. This was more than a feat of memorization, since the baboons were able to do this even if they'd never seen the words or nonwords before. In a paper describing their findings, the scientists say perhaps the baboons are able to do some sort of unconscious statistical calculation involving the combinations of letters most likely to form words.

The front of Mike Patterson's T-shirt turned a darker, damper shade of gray as he pushed further into his workout. Standing on a soft mat, his feet sinking in as if in sand, the 300-pound Eagles defensive tackle sprinted in place, arms pumping and knees high, for a 15-second burst, then rested for 45 seconds, and sprinted again. His unruly hair - some teammates compare it to a grizzly bear's - mostly conceals the scar that begins at his right ear and runs up the side of his head, cutting a path that ends roughly a third of the way across the front of his skull.

JASON KELCE traveled to Indianapolis last month during the NFL Scouting Combine. The Eagles' center wasn't looking for a do-over, after performing there the previous year while ill with what turned out to be appendicitis. No, his draft ship sailed for good last spring, with Kelce stuck in steerage as an Eagles sixth-round selection, perhaps suffering the fallout from showing up at Indy as a sickly 280-pounder. As has happened a few times in Kelce's career, what looked like a serious setback actually worked out real well.