Q&A: The Surprising Upside of Getting Old

Americans have tremendous fear of aging — and a great deal of prejudice against the elderly. But, as the joke has it, being old is better than the alternative. And, despite our fears, new research suggests that being old is also a lot better than it looks.22

I spoke with Dr. Marc Agronin, whose new book, How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old, explores these issues through the rich stories of his patients’ lives. Agronin is the psychiatrist for the Miami Jewish Health Systems, a nonprofit that is the largest provider of health care for seniors in the Southeast.

What led you to want to work with older people?
When I went to medical school, I knew I wanted to go into psychiatry, that was a given. In my second year, by a chance encounter I began working with a geriatric psychiatrist and I loved the work. I took an immediate interest in working with older patients. They reminded me not only of my grandparents but also of my wonderful aunts and uncles. I felt that there was so much I could learn from these elders that I was just drawn to it and never looked back.

Many people would think that would be a very depressing field of medicine.
I see that all the time and experienced it even when I was doing my training. The older patients were often the ones that the students didn’t want to be around.
[But] the difference wasn’t just in attitude for me: whenever I had experience with older individuals I quickly had deep appreciation for not only their life experience, but also the gratitude they had when someone younger would spend time with them. It was always a positive experience. I never regarded it as something frightening or unpleasant.
I love the stories they tell and hearing about history. So, for me, writing this book was natural — it would be full of stories.

Research now suggests that as we age, our moods improve and we actually grow happier.
There’s great potential. It didn’t occur to me right away how much people learn and grow as they age. That message really transformed my view of aging. I wasn’t trained to look for strengths, but found over time that those strengths are the things that get people through difficult times, whether psychological or spiritual or emotional. They also allow people not only to overcome challenges but even to thrive. The more I saw, the more impressed I was.
Aging, in spite of the inevitable [challenges], is a long process and has its rewards. Amid all the challenges, often the rewards not only balance things out, but most individuals experience a greater degree of well-being and a deeper sense of meaning than they do when they are younger. I often find I get a little taste of that. I feel when I’m with older individuals, I’m as close to the fountain of knowledge as one can get.

The Insanity Defense: An Intersection of Morality, Public Policy, and Science

by Ronald Schouten, M.D., J.D. in Almost a Psychopath
 

 There are times when the insanity defense, with all the controversy that surrounds it, is in the news. This is one of those times:

• It is highly likely that James Holmes, who is facing 142 felony counts in connection with the Aurora, Colorado shootings on July 22, 2012, will raise an insanity defense. First, he’ll have to be found competent to stand trial, which is a separate issue. http://www.thealmosteffect.com/blog/trying-the-man-who-shot-gabrielle-giffords/

Breivik_GP4 (Photo credit: Uppdragsmedia)

• Anders Breivik admitted to killing 77 Norwegians in July 2011 in a carefully prepared bombing and mass murder, which he claimed was an act of self-defense against Islamization and multiculturalism in Norway. On August 24, 2012, he will learn the court’s verdict. Prosecutors urged the court to find Breivik legally insane, as this would lead to a lifetime of confinement in a mental hospital. Breivik argued against an insanity verdict, because under Norwegian law he could conceivably be released from prison some day, if found guilty.

 • Clayton Osbon, the JetBlue pilot who disrupted a March 27, 2012 flight from Las Vegas to New York by screaming about terrorists and religion, was found not guilty by reason of insanity on July 3, 2012.

What is the Insanity Defense?
 For a person to be convicted of a crime, the prosecution must prove not only that the person engaged in a guilty act (actus reus), but also that he or she had guilty intent (mens rea). If a person does not have criminal intent during an act, no crime occurs: a person who takes someone else’s property, honestly believing it is his own, is not guilty of larceny.

But what about situations in which the person commits the act, and intended to do so, but was suffering from a mental or physical condition that impairs their ability to appreciate that they are doing something wrong or to control their behavior? That’s where the insanity defense comes in.

While the insanity defense is a legal doctrine, at its heart it is the expression of a moral principle found in societies across time and multiple cultures: individuals should not be punished for their otherwise criminal acts if they lack certain characteristics that relate to the ability to engage in rational thinking, including an appreciation of the wrongfulness and consequences of their actions, or control their behavior. Take, for example, children. A five year old who sets fire to the drapes because the flames are pretty, will not be charged with arson when the house burns down. The same is true for people with severe developmental disabilities. What about people who cause harm to others or commit crimes while sleepwalking? Yes, those cases exist, and the defendants are generally not held criminally responsible.

Why Procrastination is Good for You

By Megan Gambino

In a new book, University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy argues that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decision

 In his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Frank Partnoy claims that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the last possible moment to do so.
Book jacket: Courtesy of Pete Garceau; Portrait: Courtesy of Fergus Greer

Sometimes life seems to happen at warp speed. But, decisions, says Frank Partnoy, should not. When the financial market crashed in 2008, the former investment banker and corporate lawyer, now a professor of finance and law and co-director of the Center for Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego, turned his attention to literature on decision-making.
“Much recent research about decisions helps us understand what we should do or how we should do it, but it says little about when,” he says.
In his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Partnoy claims that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the last possible moment to do so. Should we take his advice on how to “manage delay,” we will live happier lives.

Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain

Electrically stimulating the brain could make you smarter. Image: Allan Snyder

Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity.

These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder. Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain.

It sounds like a Michael Crichton plot, but Snyder, of the University of Sydney, Australia, says he wouldn’t be surprised to see a prototype of the creativity cap within a couple of years. His research suggests that brain stimulation improves people’s ability to solve difficult problems. But Snyder’s interpretation of his findings remains controversial, and the science of using brain stimulation to boost thinking is still in its early stages.

“I think it’s a bit of a minefield,” said psychologist Robyn Young of Flinders University in Australia, who has tried to replicate Snyder’s early experiments. “I’m not really sure whether the technology is developed that can turn it into a more accurate science.”

Snyder has long been fascinated by savants — people with a developmental brain disorder (often autism) or brain injury who display prowess in a particular area, such as mathematics, art or music, which far exceeds the norm. Kim Peek, who provided the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie “Rain Man,” was a savant who could memorize entire books after a single reading, or instantly calculate what day of the week any calendar date fell on. But he had a severe mental disability that prevented him from performing simple actions such as buttoning his shirt.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

Few snippets from Jennifer Egan's excellent short fiction work, “Black Box,” in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, The Science Fiction Issue.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

-----

Some citizen agents have chosen not to
return.

They have left their bodies behind, and
now they shimmer sublimely in the
heavens.

-----

...Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.

When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.

-----

Some powerful men actually call their beauties "Beauty."

Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties.

If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you've gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind.

Kindness feels good, even when it's based on a false notion of your identity and purpose.

-----

Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France....

------

Eagerness and pliability can be expressed even in the way you climb from the sea onto chalky yellow rocks.

"You're a very fast swimmer," uttered by a man who is still submerged, may not be intended as praise...

------

...The directive "Relax" suggests that your discomfort is palpable.

"No one can see us" suggests that your discomfort has been understood as fear of physical exposure.

"Relax, relax," uttered in rhythmic, throaty tones, suggests that your discomfort is not unwelcome.

Newyorker Subscribers can read the full version of this story

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here Deborah Treisman talks with Jennifer Egan about her story “Black Box,” written as a series of Tweets. And Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, and Sam Lipsyte share their science-fiction thoughts and book recommendations.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/2012/06/04/120604on_audio_egan

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No Country for Old Men

Wikipedia has a great article about the movie "No Country for Old Men" (2007), I think it's one of the best movies of the past decade and deserves all the accolades that it has received.

The Script of Script of No Country for Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy (Draft) also makes for fascinating reading!

Some notable insights from the Wikipedia article [among many others, including Themes and analysis]: 

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of 20th-century Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium.":

”THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect”

Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’ film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.”

Differences from the novel

Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:
“• The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her. She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss, Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the chase/shootout begins.
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’ conversation.
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
• The chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and doesn't appear in the book in any way.
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”
Other listed differences include:
“• [The film] omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II, which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
• The opening [voice-over narration] is composed of lines taken from 3 different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
• [In the] shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him, momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track of Moss.”
Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”
Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as ‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth.”

Film ending and final scene

"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"

–Actor Josh Brolin on the film's ending

Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which [Sheriff] Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”
Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says [Sheriff] Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”
Actor Josh Brolin, however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.
Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream, the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that the country – that country and every country – could eventually find out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”
Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene. "Considering that [Sheriff] Bell opened the film by musing that his law enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the West was lost."

"Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book Urges Us to Unplug

BY DAVID ZAX @ fastcompany.com

 

In her new book, an MIT professor shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, "proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."

Sherry Turkle, has been an ethnographer of our technological world for three decades, hosted all the while at one of its epicenters: MIT. A professor of the social studies of science and technology there, she also heads up its Initiative on Technology and Self. Her new book, Alone Together, completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology. It can be, at times, a grim read. Fast Company spoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company's bottom line. 

 

The title of your book, Alone Together, is chilling.

If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you're alone, you get into this situation where you're continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You're alone but looking for approval as though you were together--the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody's validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it's your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook...we're losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.

You only mention Twitter a few times in the book. What are your thoughts on Twitter?

I think it's an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's, "I share therefore I am." Sharing as you're thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you're thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you're thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don't have an anti-Twitter position. It's just not everything.

You write in your book that we today seem to view authenticity with the same skittishness that the Victorians viewed sex.

For some purpose, simulation is just as good as a real. Kids call it being "alive enough." Making an airline reservation? Simulation is as good as the real. Playing chess? Maybe, maybe not. It can beat you, but do you care? Many people are building robot companions; David Levy argues that robots will be intimate companions. Where we are now, I call it the "robotic moment," not because we have robots, but because we're being philosophically prepared to have them. I'm very haunted by these children who talk about simulation as "alive enough." We're encouraged to live more and more of our lives in simulation.

 

 

Read more here.

 

 

The power of lonely: What we do better without other people around

(Tim Gabor for The Boston Globe)

By Leon Neyfakh

You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us smarter and more creative. Hanging out with friends makes us more emotionally mature and better able to deal with grief and stress.

Spending time alone, by contrast, can look a little suspect. In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.

But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.

 

“There’s so much cultural anxiety about isolation in our country that we often fail to appreciate the benefits of solitude,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University whose book “Alone in America,” in which he argues for a reevaluation of solitude, will be published next year. “There is something very liberating for people about being on their own. They’re able to establish some control over the way they spend their time. They’re able to decompress at the end of a busy day in a city...and experience a feeling of freedom.”

 

Solitude has long been linked with creativity, spirituality, and intellectual might. The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. The poet James Russell Lowell identified solitude as “needful to the imagination;” in the 1988 book “Solitude: A Return to the Self,” the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr invoked Beethoven, Kafka, and Newton as examples of solitary genius.

 

But what actually happens to people’s minds when they are alone? As much as it’s been exalted, our understanding of how solitude actually works has remained rather abstract, and modern psychology — where you might expect the answers to lie — has tended to treat aloneness more as a problem than a solution. That was what Christopher Long found back in 1999, when as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst he started working on a project to precisely define solitude and isolate ways in which it could be experienced constructively. The project’s funding came from, of all places, the US Forest Service, an agency with a deep interest in figuring out once and for all what is meant by “solitude” and how the concept could be used to promote America’s wilderness preserves.

 

“Aloneness doesn’t have to be bad,” Long said by phone recently from Ouachita Baptist University, where he is an assistant professor. “There’s all this research on solitary confinement and sensory deprivation and astronauts and people in Antarctica — and we wanted to say, look, it’s not just about loneliness!”

 

Continue reading here.

 

Autism’s First Child

As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.

By John Donvan and Caren Zucker

Image credit: Miller Mobley/Redux

In 1951, a Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz Polgar was booked for a single night’s performance in a town called Forest, Mississippi, at the time a community of some 3,000 people and no hotel accommodations. Perhaps because of his social position—he went by Dr. Polgar, had appeared in Life magazine, and claimed (falsely) to have been Sigmund Freud’s “medical hypnotist”—Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest’s wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as their personal guest.

Polgar’s all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be dazzled, when he met the couple’s older son, Donald, who was then 18. Oddly distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements, Donald nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out “87 times 23,” and Donald, with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered “2,001.”

Indeed, Donald was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns had heard of the Forest teenager who’d calculated the number of bricks in the facade of the high school—the very building in which Polgar would be performing—merely by glancing at it.

According to family lore, Polgar put on his show and then, after taking his final bows, approached his hosts with a proposal: that they let him bring Donald with him on the road, as part of his act.

Donald’s parents were taken aback. “My mother,” recalls Donald’s brother, Oliver, “was not at all interested.” For one, things were finally going well for Donald, after a difficult start in life. “She explained to [Polgar] that he was in school, he had to keep going to classes,” Oliver says. He couldn’t simply drop everything for a run at show business, especially not when he had college in his sights.

But there was also, whether they spoke this aloud to their guest or not, the sheer indignity of what Polgar was proposing. Donald’s being odd, his parents could not undo; his being made an oddity of, they could, and would, prevent. The offer was politely but firmly declined.

What the all-knowing mentalist didn’t know, however, was that Donald, the boy who missed the chance to share his limelight, already owned a place in history. His unusual gifts and deficits had been noted outside Mississippi, and an account of them had been published—one that was destined to be translated and reprinted all over the world, making his name far better-known, in time, than Polgar’s.

His first name, anyway.

Video: The authors reveal how they tracked down Donald and discuss the significance of his long, happy life.

 

Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

That was 67 years ago. Today, physicians, parents, and politicians regularly speak of an “epidemic” of autism. The rate of ASDs, which come in a range of forms and widely varying degrees of severity—hence spectrum—has been accelerating dramatically since the early 1990s, and some form of ASD is now estimated to affect one in every 110 American children. And nobody knows why.

There have always been theories about the cause of autism—many theories. In the earliest days, it was an article of faith among psychiatrists that autism was brought on by bad mothers, whose chilly behavior toward their children led the youngsters to withdraw into a safe but private world. In time, autism was recognized to have a biological basis. But this understanding, rather than producing clarity, instead unleashed a contentious debate about the exact mechanisms at work. Differing factions argue that the gluten in food causes autism; that the mercury used as a preservative in some vaccines can trigger autistic symptoms; and that the particular measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is to blame. Other schools of thought have portrayed autism as essentially an autoimmune response, or the result of a nutritional deficiency. The mainstream consensus today—that autism is a neurological condition probably resulting from one or more genetic abnormalities in combination with an environmental trigger—offers little more in the way of explanation: the number of genes and triggers that could be involved is so large that a definitive cause, much less a cure, is unlikely to be determined anytime soon. Even the notion that autism cases are on the rise is disputed to a degree, with some believing that the escalating diagnoses largely result from a greater awareness of what autism looks like.

There is no longer much dispute, however, about the broad outlines of what constitutes a case of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the so-called bible of psychiatry—draws a clear map of symptoms. And to a remarkable degree, these symptoms still align with those of one “Donald T,” who was first examined at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in the 1930s, the same boy who would later amaze a mentalist and become renowned for counting bricks.

In subsequent years, the scientific literature updated Donald T’s story a few times, a journal entry here or there, but about four decades ago, that narrative petered out. The later chapters in his life remained unwritten, leaving us with no detailed answer to the question Whatever happened to Donald?

There is an answer. Some of it we turned up in documents long overlooked in the archives of Johns Hopkins. But most of it we found by tracking down and spending time with Donald himself. His full name is Donald Gray Triplett. He’s 77 years old. And he’s still in Forest, Mississippi. Playing golf.

The question that haunts every parent of a child with autism is What will happen when I die? This reflects a chronological inevitability: children with autism will grow up to become adults with autism, in most cases ultimately outliving the parents who provided their primary support.

Then what?

It’s a question that has yet to grab society’s attention, as the discussion of autism to date has skewed, understandably, toward its impact on childhood. But the stark fact is that an epidemic among children today means an epidemic among adults tomorrow. The statistics are dramatic: within a decade or so, more than 500,000 children diagnosed with autism will enter adulthood. Some of them will have the less severe variants—Asperger’s syndrome or HFA, which stands for “high-functioning autism”—and may be able to live more independent and fulfilling lives. But even that subgroup will require some support, and the needs of those with lower-functioning varieties of autism will be profound and constant.

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A Gene to Explain Depression

ALICE PARK @ healthland.time.com

ATSUSHI YAMADA

 

 

As powerful as genes are in exposing clues to diseases, not even the most passionate geneticist believes that complex conditions such as depression can be reduced to a tell-tale string of DNA.

But a new study confirms earlier evidence that a particular gene, involved in ferrying a brain chemical critical to mood known as serotonin, may play a role in triggering the mental disorder in some people.

Researchers led by Dr. Srijan Sen, a professor of psychiatry at University of Michigan, report in the Archives of General Psychiatry that individuals with a particular form of the serotonin transporter gene were more vulnerable to developing depression when faced with stressful life events such as having a serious medical illness or being a victim of childhood abuse. The form of the gene that these individuals inherit prevents the mood-regulating serotonin from being re-absorbed by nerve cells in the brain. Having such a low-functioning version of the transporter starting early in life appears to set these individuals up for developing depression later on, although the exact relationship between this gene, stress, and depression isn't clear yet. 

 

 

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/03/a-gene-to-explain-depression/#ixzz1Wg9RvFWW

How to Train Your Own Brain

Lauren Gravitz @ technologyreview.com posts about a new way to create and interpret real-time brain scans could help addicts control their cravings.

Brainstorm: This fMRI scan highlights areas that are most active during two thought processes: One (SMA) is active when subjects think about tennis, the other (PPA) lights up when they imagine roaming through a familiar space.
Credit: Anna Rose Childress, University of Pennsylvania

Technology might not be advanced enough yet to let people read someone else's mind, but researchers are at least inching closer to helping people to read and control their own. In a study presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, scientists used a combination of brain-scanning and feedback techniques to train subjects to move a cursor up and down with their thoughts. The subjects could perform this task after just five minutes of training.

The scientists hope to use this information to help addicts learn to control their own brain states and, consequently, their cravings.

Scientists have previously shown that people can learn to consciously control their brain activity if they're shown their brain activity data in real time—a technique called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers have used this technology effectively to teach people to control chronic pain and depression. They've been pursuing similar feedback methods to help drug users kick their addictions.

But these efforts have been difficult to put into practice. Part of the problem is that scientists have had to choose which part of the brain to focus on, based on existing knowledge of neuroscience. But that approach may miss out on areas that are also important for the particular function under study.

In addition, focusing on a limited region adds extra noise to the system—much like looking too closely at just one swatch of a Pointillist painting—the mix of odd colors doesn't make sense until you step back and see how the dots fit together. Psychologist Anna Rose Childress, Jeremy Magland, and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have overcome this issue by designing a new system of whole-brain imaging and pairing it with an algorithm that let them determine which regions of the brain are most centrally involved in a certain thought process.

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