Brain Food

Yum Sugar brings us a fine recipe for brain cookies! The dough is "arranged in long tubes" and "shaped like a brain." Although the author advises that these special treats be reserved for Halloween, I believe that they are appropriate for pretty much any occasion. Keep in mind that you "will need an entire bottle of food coloring to make the deep red blood glaze."

For recipe details, and a picture of these fine confections, go to the source: Disgust Your Guests with Brain Cookies.

Death, and How to Diagnose It

In "Happy Effects", one of the stories in DOCTOR OLAF VAN SCHULER'S BRAIN, set in the 1700s, the protagonist waits beside the body of her slowly decaying son because she, like many people of her day confronted with bodies displaying similar symptoms, did not believe that he was truly dead. Rather than risk burying him alive, she waited several increasingly odor-filled days to ensure that he was truly deceased.

Fortunately, today, we know when someone is dead and safe to bury. Or do we?

The Fortean Times links to a recent story about a Wisconsin family of three who lived with the decaying body of a 90-year-old woman for several months because their "bishop" claimed that grandma would come to life, provided that her family prayed hard enough. The woman had apparently passed away while relieving herself on the home's one toilet, which led the family to use "makeshift" toilet facilities for the months that passed between the expiration and the arrival of the local Deputy. For more on the story, see the Fox website.

Bassett's Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy

Stanford's Bassett collection of human dissection is now online! Well, some of the images. More will follow by this summer. A selection of the striking, 3-D images of the human body can be viewed at here (well worth the click).

Bassett, a 1934 graduate of Stanford's School of Medicine, and a "genius for dissection" collaborated with William Gruber, inventor of the View-Master, to create the Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy. Over the 17 years the two worked together, they produced 221 View-Master reels with 1,554 color stereo views of dissections, accompanied by explanatory text and labeled drawings. More details about the collaboration can be found in the John Schwartz's New York Times story, The Body in Depth or on the Stanford site.

Dr. Olaf is bound

Greetings! We're all back from a trip to NYC, where I finally got to meet my editor, Antonia Fusco, in person. We've been working together for a couple years, but only over the phone, email, or manuscripts on paper. It was great to see her and the Algonquin offices. The advance review copies of Dr. Olaf were ready as well, so I got to hold the book and thumb through pages. That was a lot of fun. Now I'm trying to find people interested in reading it! The book looks very nice, with a cover image on front and blurbs on the back. It's small--5x7, which is nice as well. I asked Antonia if I could post the cover image--will do that as soon as it's okay to share it. That's the latest on Olaf. Hope you're doing well.

Does the brain have a will of its own?

The belief in free will--that personal choices are not simply determined by fate or forces of a physical or divine nature--is under attack!

John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Hu­man Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences in Leip­zig, Ger­ma­ny has looked into the matter, and published his findings, summarized recently in World Science:

Cer­tain pat­terns of brain ac­ti­vity pre­dict peo­ple's de­ci­sions up to 10 sec­onds be­fore the peo­ple are aware of them... Re­search­ers tracked brain ac­ti­vity while peo­ple viewed a stream of let­ters on screen, and then pressed a but­ton. Each par­ti­ci­pant was asked to de­cide freely which of two but­tons to press and when to press it.

Scan­ning the brains with a tech­nique called func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance im­ag­ing, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors used a sta­tis­ti­cal meth­od known as pat­tern rec­og­ni­tion to ex­am­ine brain ac­ti­vity as­so­ci­at­ed with each choice. Ac­ti­vity in two brain re­gions, called the pre­fron­tal and pa­ri­e­tal cor­tex, pre­dicted which but­ton the per­son would press, they found... This ac­ti­vity oc­curred up to 10 sec­onds be­fore sub­jects were con­sciously aware of hav­ing made a de­ci­sion, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers.

Is it true that our decisions are made before we are even aware of them? Has all the trouble I've taken to choose entrees from menus been wasted time? Have I already decided on the answer to that question? At least the brain appears to be efficient.

First page proofs of Dr. Olaf

Last week, I mailed back the first page proofs of Dr. Olaf. Seeing the book laid out really made it feel real, and I can't wait to see the bound review copies later this month. And yes, every time I read through the pages, I have changes--even though the manuscript has gone through several great edits and a thorough copy edit. I don't think the tweaking impulse will ever stop, even after the book is printed and bound and sitting on bookstore shelves (September 9!). That's the news of the moment, just a brief update to share where the book is at the moment.

Preserving the Brain

In 1898, former Civil War surgeon Burt Green Wilder, M.D., launched an impressive collection consisting of whole human brains (perhaps the first such collection in the US). According to Cornell University's Chronicle Online:

Wilder wanted to see if differences could be detected in size, shape, weight and amount of convolution between the brains of "educated and orderly persons" and women, murderers, racial minorities and the mentally ill. Eventually, it was concluded that such differences could not be detected, at least not by the naked eye or any 19th-century tools.

The collection, containing brains of the likes of Helen Hamilton Gardener, suffragist; E.B Titchener, "dean of experimental psychology in America;" and Edward Howard Rulloff, convicted murderer, grew to contain at least 600 specimens. Sadly, by 1978, most of the specimens were "dried up," and many were "purged."

Currently, eight brains and their biographies are on display in Cornell's Uris Hall. The remainder of the collection is "stored in a basement closet." The collection, maintained in Cornell's Dept. of Psychology, contains "14 brains of prominent people and 12 brains of less known or infamous people."