Neuroscience
From tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine:
The Gregarious Brain
By DAVID DOBBS
Published: July 8, 2007
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.”
Another Williams encounter: The mother of twin Williams boys in their late teens opened her door to find on her stoop a leather-clad biker, motorcycle parked at the curb, asking for her sons. The boys had made the biker’s acquaintance via C.B. radio and invited him to come by, but they forgot to tell Mom. The biker visited for a spell. Fascinated with how the twins talked about their condition, the biker asked them to speak at his motorcycle club’s next meeting. They did. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears.
[ ... Read the full article ... ]
- Business World: Myriad Genetics, Flurizan (mpc-7869), And Alzheimer Disease
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- Williams Syndrome: Fmri Study Of Social Cognition
From the BBC‘Over-friendly' brain clues found Scientists have uncovered clues about what happens in the brain to make some people "over-friendly". US National Institute of Mental Health experts looked at differences in the brains of people with...
- Williams Syndrome
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- Oliver Sacks Now
["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Oliver Sacks is plugging his new book, Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain (New York : Knopf, 2007), and you can follow along: * He had an article in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Yorker...
- Tv News
Very interesting development in TV News: blogging by the news presenters. Brian Williams, NBC’s nightly news anchor, has a blog (can’t link directly; click on "The Daily Nightly" to see the most recent entries). An August 25 New York Times story...
Neuroscience
Williams Syndrome
From tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine:
The Gregarious Brain
By DAVID DOBBS
Published: July 8, 2007
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.”
Another Williams encounter: The mother of twin Williams boys in their late teens opened her door to find on her stoop a leather-clad biker, motorcycle parked at the curb, asking for her sons. The boys had made the biker’s acquaintance via C.B. radio and invited him to come by, but they forgot to tell Mom. The biker visited for a spell. Fascinated with how the twins talked about their condition, the biker asked them to speak at his motorcycle club’s next meeting. They did. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears.
[ ... Read the full article ... ]
- Business World: Myriad Genetics, Flurizan (mpc-7869), And Alzheimer Disease
From the AP, via Yahoo! News: Largest-Ever Alzheimer's Drug Trial Begins By PAUL ELIAS, AP Biotechnology Writer Sun Mar 12, 6:58 AM ET SAN FRANCISCO - It's tragedy enough that Pat Williams' mother...
- Williams Syndrome: Fmri Study Of Social Cognition
From the BBC‘Over-friendly' brain clues found Scientists have uncovered clues about what happens in the brain to make some people "over-friendly". US National Institute of Mental Health experts looked at differences in the brains of people with...
- Williams Syndrome
From the National Institutes of Health: Rare Deficit Maps Thinking Circuitry Using brain imaging, neuroscientists at the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have pinpointed the site of a defect in a brain circuit associated with...
- Oliver Sacks Now
["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Oliver Sacks is plugging his new book, Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain (New York : Knopf, 2007), and you can follow along: * He had an article in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Yorker...
- Tv News
Very interesting development in TV News: blogging by the news presenters. Brian Williams, NBC’s nightly news anchor, has a blog (can’t link directly; click on "The Daily Nightly" to see the most recent entries). An August 25 New York Times story...