Most
of us know researcher and Dana Alliance member Brenda Milner from her
decades-long work with amnesiac Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) and the peek into
memory he offered. While Mr. Molaison died in 2008, she still is at the lab
bench, continuing to delve into the mind and brain.
In
this week’s New York Times, she told interviewer Claudia Dreifus she’s working
to tease out what are left/right brain differences. Here’s my favorite
exchange:
We all loved H.M. Yet it was very
strange, psychologically, because when he died we all felt as if we’d lost a
friend. And this is funny because one thinks of friendship as a bilateral
thing. He didn’t recognize us or know us, and we felt we’d lost a friend.
We also did a Q&A with Milner, in 2010, with this fabulous photo of her:
Photographer: Owen Egan; Courtesy of the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University
If you were unable to attend the Neuroscience and Law event in D.C. in April, you can now watch it in its entirety by viewing the webcast on the Dana Foundation website. Focusing on the use of neuroscience research in the courtroom, the event was part of the Neuroscience & Society series sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Dana Foundation.
Featured panelists included Dana Alliance and Dana Foundation Board member Steve Hyman, director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Owen Jones, director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience and a law professor at Vanderbilt University;and Honorable Barbara Rothstein, U.S. District Judge from the Western District of Washington state.
Photo of Steven E. Hyman, Owen D. Jones, and Judge Barbara Rothstein [Credit: AAAS]
During last Saturday's Staying Sharp session, we covered the event live using Storify, a program that allows users to pull information from all over the internet—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.—and assemble it in one place. You can find Dana's Storify post from Staying Sharp here: http://storify.com/dana_fdn/staying-sharp-mount-vernon.
As you can see, the Storify post includes many tweets and photos, listed chronologically, and allows readers to follow the event as if they were there. Towards the end, you can find the panelists' "one important nugget" they shared with the audience.
We will be using Storify again at the next Staying Sharp event in Las Vegas in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
Tune in
tonight to the free webcast, “Raising Drug-Free Kids: How Can the Science of Addiction Help Us?” to
hear Dana Alliance member and Director of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse Nora
Volkow, M.D., discuss how drug addiction impacts our youth and the importance of
prevention.
This webcast
is part of the Child Mind Institute’s Speak Up for Kids series, and will run
from 8-9pm EST. Register here.
For more
information on youth addiction, visit NIDA for Teens.
At a recent TEDxCaltech talk, Dana Alliance Executive Committee member Tom Insel, M.D., began by offering some sobering yet motivating statistics:
Suicide is the most common cause of death for individuals ages 18 to 25.
There are 38,000 suicides every year; one every five minutes.
90 percent of suicides are directly related to brain diseases and disorders.
Over the past 30 years, the mortality rates for heart disease, stroke, Leukemia and AIDS have decreased by as much as 80 to 90 percent, while suicide mortality rates remain the same.
Neuropsychiatric disorders cause the highest morbidity among all medical causes including 30 percent of all disability, mainly because such conditions affect young individuals who must manage them for a lifetime.
