Frankenstein’s new options

The comedy version of Frankenstein that starred Gene Wilder was one of my favorite science fiction films when I was a kid. The main comedic twist there started when Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Igor, unintentionally dropped the jar that contained the brain of H.S. Delbruck, the brain he was asked to retrieve from storage, and so he quickly replaced it by one marked "A.B. Normal" so as not to disappoint Dr. Frankenstein. This explained why the resurrected Frankenstein ended up having a brain that made him less like a monster but more like an accidental, badly stitched, gentle giant of a clown. It is now 2006 and in this flourishing age of neuroscience, if Igor had to choose from a storage of brains to find a replacement for one he has dropped, his head will spin from the many "labels" that human brains have come under. He will also have accompanying brain scans that reveal what parts that brain were active or how they were wired, depending on the exhibited skills, talents or so-called "learning deficiencies" or even personality disorders of the persons whose skulls these brains inhabited.

I instantaneously laughed imagining a brain labeled "W. Tracy" to be transplanted to Frankenstein. Then we would finally see an obsessive-compulsive Frankenstein because the person I love to whom this brain belongs, drove the neurologists nuts when he was placed inside the MRI machine and while in there, yelled out a complaint that the insides of the MRI tube he was in was not evenly painted! But fortunately for Frankenstein and for science, Igor has other choices than brains from relatives of mine. Based on current brain research I have come across, he can, for instance, get a brain labeled "D.Y. Scalculia" which means that that brain part has difficulty telling the difference between "how much" and "how many." Termed "dyscalculia" by scientists led by Dr. Fulvia Castelli from the California Institute of Technology, with co-authors from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, Daniel E. Glaser and Brian Butterworth, it maybe the physiological distinction that is the math equivalent of "dyslexia" which concerns itself with difficulty with words. Their study is entitled "Discrete and analogue quantity processing in the parietal lobe: A functional MRI study," and published in the March 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The mental processing for dyscalculia supposedly lies in the intraparietal sulcus" (sounds like a Harry Potter spell) or IPS long known to enable us to conceive numbers but which scientists now suspect do much more math than that. Activity in the IPS, located toward the top and back of the brain and across both lobes, told them how the brain creates an accurate representation of objects (how much) without having to count each object (how many) so an "abnormality" in this region then may account for "dyscalculia." 

I am curious as to the IPS regions of businessmen since it is in business where the distinction between "money" (how many) and "wealth" (how much) is crucial for success. I also wonder if there is a brain region that also distinguishes between "plenty" and "enough" of anything. But I think that would involve more than our conception of numbers but the meaning we attach to things, those that sit in our memory and as such, the brain labeled "H.P Thymesic" would have an enormous amount to process.

"H.P. Thymesic" stands for the brain with hyperthymesic syndrome which means "over-remembering" (from the Greek word "thumos" meaning "mind"). This is the brain that a certain 40-year-old woman apparently possesses. She has the most remarkable memory of things that she can remember to the detail, from years ago, saying in a report by Randall Parker last March 16 in Futurepundit.com that her life is like a "running movie in my mind." The five-year study done on her by UC Irvine researchers Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill and James L. McGaugh is published in the current issue of the journal Neurocase.  She seemed to remember to the most minute detail, everything that affected her life from years back but surprisingly had difficulty recalling anything that she was asked to memorize by rote. What did not surprise me were the comments from men who in summary said that they have always known that all women really remember their men’s mistakes in remarkable detail. With that kind of memory, she is now a real contender to Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction) in scaring every nerve out of every man on the planet. But maybe Igor would do well to transplant this kind of brain to Frankenstein. We women could do with a few examples of thoughtful men, even when they look like Frankenstein.

How this hyperthymesia seems to work may also shed light on how we could learn more easily. The study found that for the things that she felt a connection with, she remembered in detail but those that she was "forced" to learn stuck like jello on the wall. This seems to make sense in areas in child development and education so that kids who are diagnosed with ADHD may have clear basis for "solving" their "problems." In an article in the New York Times last March 7 by Dr. Paul Steinberg, he offered to balance our perception of those with ADHD with the idea of another psychiatrist named Dr. Ned Hallowell: those with ADHD may not have a deficit in their attention span but it may just be that most people have "attention surplus disorder" or ASD. ASD is not so much a disorder as much as spending mental energy to ALL things – even to the ones that really do not matter. This is what I have observed in most of us now who are driven by so much stimuli, especially from technology. We feel "forced" to pay attention to everything, without real thought on the content or relevance of the things we encounter (120 channels and nothing on!). ADHD begins to be seriously noticed with kids who are immersed in activities that are routine like most school activities and a lot of jobs. Dr. Steinberg suggests that studies have shown that once kids with ADHD are made to "connect" with something through various ways that they find enjoyable or meaningful, for example, through nature exploration or arts and crafts, then they get to be more creative and are more willing to learn.

The most recent controversial brain study I have seen so far is on how an intelligent brain "looks like" in children. Published in the journal Nature this month, and reported by Nicolas Wade in the New York Times last week, the study had 307 children undergoing regular brain scans since 1989. The project was initiated by Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health while those who analyzed them included Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the institute and at McGill University in Montreal. They homed in on the cortex, the seat of higher mental processes, and found that it changes this way – it thickens, rewires itself and then thins itself out, seeming to get rid of redundant connections. This is what their data revealed: average children (IQ scores 83 to 108) had their cortices’ thickness peak at age seven or eight while highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in IQ) reached that peak much later, at 13, followed by a "more dynamic pruning process" or "trimming of connections." No one knows yet what causes this to happen, whether it is mostly genetics or environment (how they are being raised) so please do not try this at home and do all sorts of things to delay the thickening of your child’s cortex.

I wonder what my brain, now trying to make sense of how the brain works, looks like. I have always suspected that it will look like a hand trying to hold itself. I had thought of volunteering for this kind of imaging but I hesitated since being a subject in a study published in a journal called Neurocase may send everyone running away from me. But then again, after almost four years of writing this strange column, it may already be too late to worry about that.

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