by Kai Kupferschmidt The source of a deadly outbreak of Escherichia coli bacteria in Germany remains elusive as German officials today announced that the first tests of samples from a sprouts farm implicated in the outbreak were negative. The German farm had been shut down yesterday by authorities and the region's health minister had advised people not to eat the vegetables. The confusing turn of events comes less than a week after German officials suggested Spanish cucumbers were the source, only to later backtrack. Researchers are now analyzing the genome of the bacterium to understand its evolutionary history and possibly identify its source. Closer analysis of the genome might also offer some clues to how the Shiga toxin made by the bacterium is attacking the brain. This toxin normally targets the kidney, triggering the often fatal development of hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). Usually neurological symptoms are seen in only a few percent of HUS cases, but in the current outbreak "about half the patients with HUS are developing neurological symptoms," Christian Gerloff, head of the neurology department at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, told ScienceInsider today. Alarm bells started going off when some patients showed problems finding words or giving the date, Gerloff recalls. It quickly became clear that a lot of patients were developing problems reading or doing simple calculations. "Patients were mixing up words and were disoriented. Later they developed muscle twitching and then progressing to epileptic fits," Gerloff says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Epilepsy
Link ID: 15402 - Posted: 06.07.2011

We spend a third of our lives asleep. Every organism on Earth—from rats to dolphins to fruit flies to microorganisms—relies on sleep for its survival, yet science is still wrestling with a fundamental question: Why does sleep exist? During Shakespeare and Cervantes’ time, sleep was likened to death, with body and mind falling into a deep stillness before resurrecting each new day. In reality, sleep is a flurry of action. Trillions of neurons light up. The endocrine system kicks into overdrive. The bloodstream is flooded with a potent cocktail of critically vital hormones. Such vibrant activity begs the question: Where do we go when we go to sleep? Based on new sleep research, there are tantalizing signposts. Join us in exploring this slumbering journey. We’ll delve into the one-eyed, half-brained sleep of some animals; eavesdrop on dreams to understand their cognitive significance; and investigate extreme and bizarre sleeping behaviors like “sleep sex” and “sleep violence.” Join us in a discussion with leading researchers who delve into the one-eyed, half-brained sleep of some animals, eavesdrop on dreams to understand their cognitive significance, and investigate extreme and bizarre sleeping behaviors such as "sleep sex" and "sleep violence." Moderator: Carl Zimmer Participants: Carlos H. Schenck Marthew Wilson Niels Rattenborg © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15401 - Posted: 06.07.2011

Rowan Hooper, news editor IF YOU like to think of chimps as wise, rational tool-users, gorillas as gentle giants, or bonobos as sexed-up hippie apes, be prepared for a shock. Among African Apes, a collection of field diaries, is primatology given the Tarantino treatment. In the introduction, Martha Robbins of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, emphasises that extreme violence among primates is rare. The incidents described in the book stuck in the biologists' minds because they illustrate how aggression can influence ape society. They stuck in my mind too because, infrequent as they are, these are clearly not random episodes, but key moments in the lives of characters who behave in such familiar ways that we see ourselves in them. In the course of the book we learn about infanticide and violent infighting among silverback gorillas. We get to know Mlima, a gorilla the biologists have been observing almost daily for six years. Through diary entries we are there when they find her dying from wounds inflicted by a younger member of her own species. We also meet Volker, an ambitious young bonobo the researchers have followed for most of his life. Volker has close relations with Amy, a female whose baby the researchers believe he fathered, but the attention he pays her is finally punished: he is savagely beaten by his former friends. The biologists observe Volker's screaming face as he clings to a tree trunk, then never see him again. Josephine Head, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 15400 - Posted: 06.07.2011

by Shaoni Bhattacharya SEEMINGLY random acts of violence by bottlenose dolphins on porpoises could be down to sexual frustration among young males. Cases of the cetaceans killing other creatures for no apparent reason have been reported in UK waters. Now bottlenose dolphins have been seen attacking harbour porpoises in the Pacific Ocean. Crucially, these observations show for the first time that the attackers are young males (Marine Mammal Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2011.00474.x). Mark Cotter at Okeanis, a non-profit conservation organisation in Moss Landing, California, and colleagues observed three acts of aggression by dolphins on lone porpoises. The dolphins chased the porpoises at high speed, rammed and then drowned them. In one particularly violent attack, three dolphins corralled their victim before seven others joined them to ram the porpoise to death. Cotter found most shocking the fact that two dolphins remained behind to play with the carcass before pushing it towards his boat. "It was almost like they said: 'We're done playing with it, here you go'." Competition for food does not seem to explain the attacks, as the dietary overlap between the two species is small, says Cotter. But the fact that 21 of the 23 attackers were males may be revealing. He believes that the attacks are "object oriented play" during the breeding season by young males who cannot get access to females because of competition from older males. "They are taking out their frustrations," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15399 - Posted: 06.04.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It's a summer's day and two flies are buzzing around your head. You may think that their trajectory is obvious but a new animation shows that your brain can be tricked by motion in the background (see video above). Created by Stuart Anstis from the University of California, San Diego, and Clara Casco from the University of Padua, Italy, the video starts with two flies moving in identical circular paths. Next, a rotating scene appears behind them and one of the flies seems to fly in a much larger circle than the other. When the moving background changes again, one fly looks like it's moving up and down while the other heads out to the side and back. Ready for the spoiler? The motion of the flies is actually exactly the same in each clip. So why do the flies' trajectories appear to be distorted when the background is changed? Are there certain aspects of the background movement that contribute to the effect? Let us know why you think our brain is tricked in the Comments section below. The first correct answer will receive some New Scientist goodies: a laptop bag containing a travel mug and a New Scientist book. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15398 - Posted: 06.04.2011

Liz Else, associate editor Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was struggling to find a solid philosophical basis for how we know about reality and truth. This is also turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly. So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it's beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny. That's the hope of Michael Corballis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization, is a fascinating and well-grounded exposition of the nature and power of recursion. In its ultra-reasonable way, this is quite a revolutionary book because it attacks key notions about language and thought. Most notably, it disputes the idea, argued especially by linguist Noam Chomsky, that thought is fundamentally linguistic - in other words, you need language before you can have thoughts. Chomsky's influential theory of universal grammar has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, but it is still supported by many linguists. Its key idea is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share some universal forms, constrained by the way we think. Corballis reckons instead that the thought processes that made language possible were non-linguistic, but had recursive properties to which language adapted: "Where Chomsky views thought through the lens of language, I prefer to view language though the lens of thought." From this, says Corballis, follows a better understanding of how humans actually think - and a very different perspective on language and its evolution. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15397 - Posted: 06.04.2011

By Laura Sanders Neuroscientists have confirmed what any kid knows: Third grade changes everything. Compared to kids just out of second grade, recent third-grade graduates use their brains in an entirely different way when solving math problems, a study in an upcoming NeuroImage finds. “I think this is really fascinating,” says cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. “Anybody who doesn’t believe that development is important needs to read this paper, because it really shows how dynamically the brain changes as we learn.” Cognitive neuroscientist Vinod Menon of the Stanford University School of Medicine and his colleagues recruited 90 children, aged 7 to 9, who had just completed either second or third grade. The youngsters calculated easy (3 + 1 = 4) or more complex (8 + 5 = 13) addition problems while Menon and his team scanned the children’s brains using functional MRI. Third-graders’ brains behaved very differently than second-graders’, the team found. “It’s not a minor change,” Menon says. “At this point, what’s clear is that the brain and brain function is undergoing major changes.” Overall, second-graders’ brains tackled the easy and hard problems about the same way. Third-graders’ brains responded very differently to the easy and the hard questions. This may reflect a cognitive strategy shift as third-graders grow more adept at handling the easy problems. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15396 - Posted: 06.04.2011

Analysis by Marianne English Karen Butler woke up from dental surgery with an accent from a faraway place. After the anesthesia wore off, the Indiana-native-turned-Oregon-resident was perplexed to hear her American English suddenly shift to a hodgepodge of British, Irish and European pronunciations, according to a National Public Radio piece. Considering her speech change temporary, Butler's doctor suggested it would go away after the swelling in her mouth reduced. But the accent stayed well after she recovered. Doctors hypothesize Butler experienced a small stroke while under anesthesia, resulting in her developing foreign accent syndrome (FAS), a neurological disorder that alters the intonation and pitch of a person's speech. To listeners, people with FAS sound like non-natives producing another culture's take on a given language. But evidence suggests the ears of others might make new pronunciations seem more foreign than they really are. In essence, a woman with FAS who seems to speak English in a Scottish accent is unlikely to sound so to linguists. It's also false to assume someone with FAS suddenly knows a foreign language, as the condition has nothing to do with acquiring new languages, but rather modifying existing ones. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 15395 - Posted: 06.04.2011

Autism blurs the molecular differences that normally distinguish different brain regions, a new study suggests. Among more than 500 genes that are normally expressed at significantly different levels in the front versus the lower middle part of the brain’s outer mantle, or cortex, only 8 showed such differences in brains of people with autism, say researchers funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. "Such blurring of normally differentiated brain tissue suggests strikingly less specialization across these brain areas in people with autism," explained Daniel Geschwind, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, a grantee of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. "It likely reflects a defect in the pattern of early brain development." Graph displaying genetic differences of autism A module of co-expressed genes that code for neurons and their connections tend to be under-expressed in many individuals with autism (red), compared to controls (gray). He and his colleagues published their study online May 26, 2011 in the journal Nature. The research was based on postmortem comparisons of brains of people with the disorder and healthy controls. In fetal development, different mixes of genes turn on in different parts of the brain to create distinct tissues that perform specialized functions. The new study suggests that the pattern regulating this gene expression goes awry in the cortex in autism, impairing key brain functions.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15394 - Posted: 06.04.2011

By ABBY ELLIN WHEN the 10-year-old son of Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman at the Whitney Museum, was having difficulty in school, there was only one person who was able to give him a proper diagnosis: Dr. Harold Koplewicz. When Debra G. Perelman, a daughter of the Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman, wanted to address her young daughter’s social anxiety, there was just one man she called: Dr. Harold Koplewicz. And when the financier Marc Bell, was concerned about his twins’ mental health, he called (you guessed it) Dr. Harold Koplewicz. “He basically saved my kids,” Mr. Bell said. Just who is this man, whom people from as far away as Dubai entrust with their children’s psyches; whose hourly rate can be as high as $1,000 (three to four times that of the average Manhattan therapist); and whose friends include the former New Jersey governor Jon S. Corzine and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton? “I know that some people see him as a self-promoter, but I don’t see him that way,” said Dr. Alan Ravitz, a colleague. “Harold really wants to do something meaningful for children, which is kind of an amazing thing.” Though Dr. Koplewicz admitted a knack for schmoozing (“I’m very good at fund-raising,” he said), his main mission in life, he contended, is to remove any stigma from mental illness among children and teenagers, make it merely something to be managed and overcome as it was with dyslexia or attention deficit disorder before it. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Emotions
Link ID: 15393 - Posted: 06.04.2011

By Maia Szalavitz While love doesn't always conquer all, it can be a potent antidote to addiction, according to a growing body of research. The latest study on the matter examined male prairie vole behavior, finding that those that had bonded to a female partner were less interested in taking amphetamine than bachelor voles. "These results indicate that the pair-bonding experience decreased the rewarding properties of amphetamine," says Kimberly Young, an author of the study and a postdoctoral student at Florida State University. Unlike rats or mice, prairie voles form lifelong bonds with their mates, more closely approximating human social behavior, which is why scientists like to study them. For the current research, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers looked closely at how pair-bonding and amphetamine affected voles' brains. The first experiment involved 30 male voles, 17 of which had been allowed to mate and form pair bonds; the rest were virgins. The voles were allowed to explore a set of two cages, connected by a tube, to see which cage they preferred. Then, the animals were given either amphetamine or a saline injection in the place that they did not like. The idea was to determine whether the voles would begin to prefer the cage in which they'd received the pleasurable drug. Only the virgin voles given amphetamine did. In a second experiment, researchers studied brain activity in single and pair-bonded voles. They found that singletons derived more pleasure from amphetamine than the mated animals. In the bachelor voles, amphetamine increased the availability of dopamine D1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens, a pleasure-related region of the brain. In bonded voles, however, the availability of these receptors decreased. © 2011 Time Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15392 - Posted: 06.04.2011

There can be few competitions with such a rich prize - a massive one billion euros. That's what a team of European scientists are aiming to win. In return they are promising to create a simulated computer version of the human brain. The Human Brain Project is one of six research proposals competing for EU funding under its Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. Universities and organisations from nine countries in Europe are part of the brain research group, among them the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and researchers in Manchester, Plymouth, London and Leicester. "Our aim is to use supercomputers to establish how the brain is designed and to build a biologically detailed simulation", according to Professor Henry Markram, director of the Human Brain Project. "There are thousands of research papers published each year on aspects of neuroscience. We need to integrate all that information so that we can assemble all knowledge of the brain." The human brain has taken millions of years to evolve so it is a tall order to build a synthetic model in just a decade. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15391 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Christian Torres, When you’re in constant pain, it can be hard to think of anything else. The pain clouds your thoughts like a fog, wearing away at your patience and your attention. New research, however, suggests that when relief does finally come, your brain can recover all the way down to a cellular level. A report in the May 18 Journal of Neuroscience finds that relieving chronic lower back pain correlates with a return to normal brain function. Fourteen patients performed a cognitive task before and after one of two treatments, either spinal surgery or an injection of anesthesia between spinal joints. The cognitive task, which tested patients’ ability to focus, involved picking out which of three numbers or letters didn’t belong in a group. Among those who felt pain relief after treatment, neural activity during the task improved to healthy levels in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with attention. More striking, the cortex had actually become thicker, attaining a thickness similar to that of healthy individuals. Previous research has suggested that chronic pain leads to a loss in volume of gray matter, and potentially function,in several brain regions. Laura Stone, lead author of the current study and a researcher at McGill University, said she expected a slowdown, not a reversal, of these kinds of losses. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a particularly interesting area because it’s also associated with decision-making, anxiety, depression and emotion. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15390 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Bruce Bower Way back in the day, females came from far away and males didn’t stray — not far, anyway. That’s the implication, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, of a new study of members of two ancient species in the human evolutionary family. Adult females in both hominid lineages often moved from the places where they were born to distant locations, presumably to find mates among unrelated males, say anthropologist Sandi Copeland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues. Most males in both hominid species spent their entire lives in a home region that covered no more than about 28 square kilometers, or about half the area of Manhattan, Copeland’s team proposes in the June 2 Nature. These ancient “home boys” might have occasionally gone further afield, exploiting resources along wooded areas atop bands of bedrock that extend about 30 kilometers in opposite directions from the South African cave sites where the fossils were found. It’s not clear how far females traveled to reach new groups, only that they did not grow up where they died. “We have the first direct glimpse of early hominids’ geographic movements,” Copeland says. “Ranging differences between males and females were surprising.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15389 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Nathan Seppa A simple DNA test of saliva from a newborn can reveal whether the baby has a viral infection that can cause deafness in some cases. The DNA test is simpler and faster than the assay currently available and catches more than 97 percent of such infections, researchers report in the June 2 New England Journal of Medicine. “This is really exciting,” says Elizabeth Stehel, a pediatrician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who wasn’t involved in the study. Such a test “would fill the need that many people feel we have — to screen babies to detect a virus that contributes to so much hearing loss.” Cytomegalovirus is in the herpes virus family. Although it is common in the population and typically innocuous, cytomegalovirus can be dangerous to babies born with the infection, causing hearing loss in 10 to 15 percent of infected newborns. It is among the leading causes of deafness in children. Hospitals can spot some cytomegalovirus infections, particularly those that cause severe disabilities. Doctors routinely test all newborns for genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease by sending dried blood samples to a state’s central laboratory. Yet few hospitals test for congenital cytomegalovirus in babies who appear healthy, even though it is present in about 0.5 to 1 percent of such newborns. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recently found that blood tests of newborns often can’t predict whether the child is infected with the virus. Cytomegalovirus apparently doesn’t always get into the bloodstream in newborns, says Suresh Boppana, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at the UAB School of Medicine. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15388 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By Andrew Newberg The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation. It is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression. A number of studies have evaluated the acute effects of religious practices, such as meditation and prayer, on the human brain. A smaller number of studies have evaluated the longer term effects of religion on the brain. Such studies, like the present one, have focused on differences in brain volume or brain function in those people heavily engaged in meditation or spiritual practices compared to those who are not. And an even fewer number of studies have explored the longitudinal effects of doing meditation or spiritual practices by evaluating subjects at two different time points. In this study, Owen et al. used MRI to measure the volume of the hippocampus, a central structure of the limbic system that is involved in emotion as well as in memory formation. They evaluated the MRIs of 268 men and women aged 58 and over, who were originally recruited for the NeuroCognitive Outcomes of Depression in the Elderly study, but who also answered several questions regarding their religious beliefs and affiliation. The study by Owen et al. is unique in that it focuses specifically on religious individuals compared to non-religious individuals. This study also broke down these individuals into those who are born again or who have had life-changing religious experiences. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15387 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By DENISE GRADY A new study may help explain why some military personnel exposed to blasts have symptoms of brain injury even though their CT and M.R.I. scans look normal. Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward. About 320,000 American troops have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them mild, according to a 2008 report by the RAND Corporation. The injuries are poorly understood, and sometimes produce lasting mental, physical and emotional problems. “This sort of mild traumatic brain injury has been quite controversial,” said Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the new study and an assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Is it due to structural abnormalities in the brain, chemical dysregulation, psychological factors or all three? We show that at least in some there are structural abnormalities.” The pattern of the damage differed from that found in head injuries not caused by blasts, and matched computer simulations predicting how explosions would affect the brain, Dr. Brody said. If the new findings hold up, he added, they may eventually influence the design of helmets to provide more protection against blasts. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15386 - Posted: 06.02.2011

By JANE E. BRODY In my younger years, I regarded sleep as a necessary evil, nature’s way of thwarting my desire to cram as many activities into a 24-hour day as possible. I frequently flew the red-eye from California, for instance, sailing (or so I thought) through the next day on less than four hours of uncomfortable sleep. But my neglect was costing me in ways that I did not fully appreciate. My husband called our nights at the ballet and theater “Jane’s most expensive naps.” Eventually we relinquished our subscriptions. Driving, too, was dicey: twice I fell asleep at the wheel, narrowly avoiding disaster. I realize now that I was living in a state of chronic sleep deprivation. I don’t want to nod off during cultural events, and I no longer have my husband to spell me at the wheel. I also don’t want to compromise my ability to think and react. As research cited recently in this newspaper’s magazine found, “The sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.” Studies have shown that people function best after seven to eight hours of sleep, so I now aim for a solid seven hours, the amount associated with the lowest mortality rate. Yet on most nights something seems to interfere, keeping me up later than my intended lights-out at 10 p.m. — an essential household task, an e-mail requiring an urgent and thoughtful response, a condolence letter I never found time to write during the day, a long article that I must read. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15385 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By KIM LUTE “First off,” the counselor began, her lips pursed in disdain, “it’s important you understand that I don’t have a nickel in the dime” — an addiction therapist’s way of saying this was my fight, not hers. It was my first day at the Peachford rehab clinic for addiction to the prescription painkiller tramadol. I wound up spending 72 hours detoxing in a sparse room where everything but a Bible was bolted to the floor. The blinds were drawn tight against the sun — which, along with just about everything else, inexplicably offended me to the point of tears. Every nerve ending in my body felt electrified. When I broke the clinic rules by trying to shave my legs on a Monday instead of a Tuesday, I was treated like a criminal, so irresponsible I couldn’t be trusted alone with shoestrings or sharp objects. In truth, I had been acting foolishly. Seven years after successfully undergoing two liver transplants and bowel surgery for ulcerative colitis, I found myself furtively buying more than 400 pills a month online. Soon, I was pilfering my dog’s pain medicine. None of my friends and family knew of my addiction. The shame and guilt, coupled with the fear of having to withstand the pain of withdrawal, sapped what little resolve I had left to reach out for help. It took two years before I realized I was out of step with real time, in debt and in danger of damaging the organs that had been graciously given to me. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15384 - Posted: 05.31.2011

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. On a fall afternoon in 1988, Jon Sarkin, a 35-year-old Massachusetts chiropractor, was happily playing the eighth hole on a local golf course when he felt something “twist” in his brain. Three days later he began to hear a high-pitched screech, a siren that only grew louder with the passing weeks. Doctors shrugged; a brain scan suggested a vague abnormality near a nerve at the base of the brain that controls hearing and balance. Eight months later, driven to distraction by the unceasing noise, Dr. Sarkin underwent a controversial operation to “decompress” the small vessels surrounding the nerve. The day after surgery — having woken up long enough to report that the noise had indeed stopped — he was rushed back to the operating room with a major stroke. He didn’t survive, not really, but he did live and slowly came to thrive, and on that tangled paradox Amy Ellis Nutt builds a tale. Ms. Nutt, a staff writer for The Star-Ledger in Newark, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her detailed account of a shipwreck off the Jersey Shore. Now she has turned to a medical shipwreck in the person of Dr. Sarkin, whose story is both Hollywood-simple (Tom Cruise has, in fact, expressed interest) and dauntingly complex. The Jon Sarkin who emerged from the hospital months after his stroke bore little resemblance to his prior self. He was physically delicate and walked with a cane, but that was the least of it. His personality had morphed into a difficult teenager’s: self-centered, unreliable, obsessive. Bored, he began to doodle one day shortly after he returned home. Two decades later he is still doodling, but now as a full-fledged artist of some renown, having sold small drawings to publications like The New York Times Magazine and large pieces to private collectors for thousands of dollars. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Emotions
Link ID: 15383 - Posted: 05.31.2011