Foerster's Syndrome

there appears to be a part of the brain responsible for puns.

When the surgeon began to manipulate the tumor, affecting those sensitive structures, the (conscious) patient burst into a manic flight of puns. He exhibited typical sound associations, and with every word of the operator broke into a flight of ideas. The sound of one word swiftly echoed in the sound of the next, and all of the words had something to do with knives and butchery.

added 2012-03-29T14:12:03Z by anders

Prisoner's Cinema

The Prisoner’s Cinema is a phenomenon reported by prisoners confined to dark cells and by others kept in darkness, voluntarily or not, for long periods of time. […] The “cinema” consists of a “light show” of various colors that appear out of the darkness. The light has a form, but those that have seen it find it difficult to describe. Sometimes, the cinema lights resolve into human or other figures

added 2012-03-23T11:57:40Z by anders

patient HM

Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 - December 2, 2008), famously known as HM or H.M., was an American memory disorder patient whose hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala were surgically removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy.

added 2012-03-21T11:53:35Z by anders

human brain has roughly 6.4e18 nerve impulses per second

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10^18 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,”

added 2012-03-21T11:23:10Z by anders

vagal nerve stimulation is used to treat epilepsy

One of [them] obviously, of course, involved with epilepsy. It turns out that stimulation of this nerve can actually desynchronize the EEG, where synchrony in the EEG is the sign of epilepsy, or of active seizure.

added 2012-03-19T16:53:05Z by anders