|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
LA TIMES Monday, January 24, 2000 A Scalpel, a Life and Language The brain's sites for nouns, verbs and concepts emerge as a cancer patient answers questions during surgery. By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer In every human thought and reflection, there is a word. For Paul Sailer, the essence of all his words is concealed in the cells along a pastel furrow of brain tissue behind his ear, just to the left of the surgeon's probe. On this day, Sailer, 32, lies on an operating table with his head clamped firmly in a surgical vise, in a subbasement of the UCLA Medical Center. His skull is open. His brain pulses as he breathes. The exposed tissue steams in the cool dry air. A brain tumor is slowly crushing his left temporal lobe and with it, his capacity to make sense of words and sentences. Only a few weeks before, Sailer, a newly wed electrical engineer at Point Mugu Naval Station, was in training for a mountain bike marathon. Now, to save his life, Sailer must risk the uniquely human ability to express his thoughts. The surgeon's chance of preserving life and words depends on a revolution in neurobiology that for the first time is revealing exactly where nouns, verbs, sentences and the concepts they articulate are rooted in the brain. Full text: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/science/20000124/t000007551.html (from peter.kabai@gmail.com) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| webmester | Kabai | ISO-8859-2 |
||