Brain

In hindsight, Susan Wendel thinks her daughter was sick months before she wound up in a coma. Charlotte's second-grade teacher that fall complained that she was disruptive. That was a big change from first grade, but her mother wrote it off as growing pains. Other behavior was a little odd, too. "She did things like wear her sweater backwards and pull her pockets inside out," Wendel said. Still, Charlotte was 7. Eccentricity isn't unusual at that age. But, as 2009 ended, Charlotte crashed.

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.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Famed Puerto Rican boxer Hector "Macho" Camacho is clinically brain dead, doctors said Thursday. They said family members were disagreeing on whether to take him off life support. Dr. Ernesto Torres said doctors have finished performing all medical tests on Camacho, who was shot in the face Tuesday night. "We have done everything we could," said Torres, who is the director of the Centro Medico trauma center. "We have to tell the people of Puerto Rico and the entire world that Macho Camacho has died, he is brain dead.

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.

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?

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.

By K.C. Cole August is a great month for celebrating human stupidity. On Aug. 6, 1945, we all but disappeared Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb, and then did it again, three days later, at Nagasaki. And now we barely seem to care. The sad truth is that we are incapable of understanding exactly what these seemingly ancient events mean - right now, for all of us, today. The August anniversaries are a stark reminder that the brains we inherited from our ancestors simply may not be up to dealing with much of the modern world we (they)

CHIP KELLY, meet Sam Hinkie. Sam, Chip. The Eagles' new coach and the Sixers' new president of basketball operations share neither a sport nor a background - but they are united in a way they probably don't even realize. They are united in their ability to make people uneasy. Kelly insists that he is a football man to the core, but his philosophies about how to play the game - and, even, how to practice the game - have left some people with a permanent eye-roll. Hinkie, by all accounts, is a video fanatic who spends a large percentage of his time scouting the game in a traditional way - but his embrace of advanced basketball statistics leads some to marginalize him as a nerd.

The contestants sat clustered in teams, viewing the game board projected on the classroom wall and waiting to pounce on a buzzer if they knew the answer. This was clearly no match for amateurs. "What is the average volume of the adult cranial vault, plus or minus 200 ml?" asked Bernie Lopez, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital's own Alex Trebek. The Pen Is Mightier - an all-male team of first-year emergency medicine residents, who took their name from a Saturday Night Live skit - was the first to buzz in. It had 10 seconds to answer.

WILMINGTON - The autopsy of a Texas man who killed his former daughter-in-law and another woman at a Delaware courthouse shows he had a brain tumor. The autopsy report of Thomas Matusiewicz, 68, says a large tumor known as a meningioma was found. Authorities say Matusiewicz killed himself after the courthouse shooting Feb. 11. His widow, Lenore, had sought an independent autopsy, saying she believed an untreated brain tumor was to blame for her husband's violent actions. Matusiewicz was cremated shortly after the state released his body.

WILMINGTON - The autopsy report for a Texas man who killed his former daughter-in-law and another woman at a Delaware courthouse shows he had a brain tumor. The report notes a large tumor known as a meningioma was found during the autopsy. Authorities say Thomas Matusiewicz, 68, killed himself after the courthouse shooting Feb. 11. The gunman's widow, Lenore Matusiewicz, had sought an independent autopsy saying she believed an untreated brain tumor was to blame for her husband's violent actions.

JEFFREY DEITCH majored in psychology, but eventually became more fascinated by what goes on inside the brain than its emotional reactions. He was intrigued by the "miracle of this extraordinarily well-oiled machine - our brains," said his son, Caleb Deitch. This fascination led him to the main thrust of his scientific work, the study of the crippling disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and the search for a cause and cure. "He found his life's professional path and passion," his son said.

Justin Jannetti didn't think it was a big deal. He grabbed his glove, pulled down his cap, and trotted onto the baseball field for the start of another inning. He's done the same thing hundreds of times in his life. But a lot of other people at Hank Greenberg Field in Audubon on Sunday knew this was different. His mother and father fought back tears. Folks in the stands yelled and clapped when the public-address announcer noted that Jannetti was playing second base for Audubon High School.

WASHINGTON - President Obama on Tuesday proposed an effort to map the brain's activity in unprecedented detail, as a step toward finding better ways to treat such conditions as Alzheimer's, autism, stroke, and traumatic brain injuries. He asked Congress to spend $100 million next year to start a project to explore details of the brain, which contains 100 billion cells and trillions of connections. That's a small investment for the federal government - less than a fifth of what NASA spends every year just to study the sun - but it's too early to see how Congress will react.

In hindsight, Susan Wendel thinks her daughter was sick months before she wound up in a coma. Charlotte's second-grade teacher that fall complained that she was disruptive. That was a big change from first grade, but her mother wrote it off as growing pains. Other behavior was a little odd, too. "She did things like wear her sweater backwards and pull her pockets inside out," Wendel said. Still, Charlotte was 7. Eccentricity isn't unusual at that age. But, as 2009 ended, Charlotte crashed.

A Shawnee girls' lacrosse varsity jersey is something to strive for, something players dream about wearing when they start, usually around third grade, in Shawnee's feeder system. But this season, game jerseys won't mean nearly as much as the team's neon shoelaces or its white warm-up shirts - the T-shirts with the gray No. 22 on the back and, on the front, a cry of support for the team's "hero," Katie. Shawnee senior defender and team captain Katie Kernan has brain cancer, and she has been fighting the disease since receiving the diagnosis in late January.

JUST AS the caveman comedy "The Croods" hits theaters, there is breaking Neanderthal news. This just in: Scientists at the Natural History Museum now believe that our cousin the Neanderthal, whose brain was as big as ours, died out because too much of his brain was dedicated to vision and physical ability, and not enough to socialization and thinking. Thus, he was unable to "cope with environmental change and competition. " This is, rather shockingly, the precise story line of the new 3-D animated comedy "The Croods," though with an upbeat spin.