Dana Foundation Blog

Off Broadway Play Tackles Football Concussions

Tim Cain plays a researcher who stresses the damaging effects of football on the brain. (Credit: Gerry Goodstein)

Many sports fans would argue that football is America’s new pastime. Some college football stadiums hold over 100,000 fans, the Super Bowl attracts a television audience of about a third of the nation, and media coverage of the National Football League is overwhelming. With such widespread popularity it’s surprising that a degree of uncertainty surrounds the future of the sport that so many live and die for. However, it is the fact that football players may literally die because of their participation that the sport is in flux. On Wednesday night, I attended Headstrong at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, a play that embodies the struggle between love for football and the danger of playing it.

I Am Science

I was fascinated to find out my co-worker Caitlin earned her undergraduate degree in neuroscience. Until then, I didn’t even know neuroscience was a major and never considered how people got into the field. Some of my questions were answered on Tuesday evening at the “I Am Science” event at The Bell House in Brooklyn, N.Y. The event was part of The Story Collider series, which brings people in the field of science together to illustrate science’s impact on our daily lives. It was the second anniversary of this event. (Tweets related to the event can be found by searching for the hashtag #IAmScience.)

Joe LeDoux, middle, and the rest of The Amygdaloids, on stage at the I Am Science event.

 

Preventing and Treating Strokes

If I asked you what happens if you have a “brain attack,” what would you say? Louis Caplan, a stroke expert, did just that to see how people viewed stroke; he used the term brain attack because it is similar to heart attack, and “transient ischemic attack” is a mouthful. Ask people what happens during a heart attack, Caplan says, and they’ll describe a bad chest pain. They associate cancer with a lump or bleeding. But ask people about a brain attack and they’ll say one of four things: you go crazy; you go unconscious; you have a seizure; you become stupid.

“But they don’t tell you that you can lose vision in one eye or your hand may go weak,” Caplan says. “We don’t think of the brain as controlling the puppet strings. If people have weakness or numbness in the hand they think of it as a problem in the hand.”

Brain Oddities: All You Need Is Love

Several months ago, my roommate and I were sitting in our kitchen talking about our various relationship issues. After a lengthy discussion, we finally concluded that feelings were just too complicated, and we’d rather be robots.

“But really,” my roommate pointed out, “without love, there would be no, like, books.”

At first this struck me as a pretty bold, sweeping statement, but then I thought, she’s kind of right. Most works of literature (and music, and film, and visual art) that came to my mind are about one form of love or another—love for a partner, or a child, or a place of origin. It’s a cross-cultural universal that can be a source of deep pain or immense joy, and it can dominate your mind.

Secret Science Club Celebrates Ignorance

The secret is out about the Secret Science Club, and probably has been since at least January when The New York Times featured it in an article about educational events in bars around the city. A few hundred people packed the room at the Bell House in Brooklyn, sipping on a house cocktail named WTF?! in honor of the evening’s event,“Ignorance: A Whiff of the Unkown.”

Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, author of the book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, was on hand to discuss the importance of questioning and examining what we don’t know to advance science research. Firestein explained that many people perceive science as mass fact memorization, but in reality it’s more exciting to talk about what we don’t yet know. He took that notion, and in 2006 created an entire course for college seniors called “Ignorance,” which he teaches at Columbia University.