A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery.

Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.

Critics of DCD contend that some patients may still be alive five or even 10 minutes after cardiac arrest because, theoretically, their hearts could be restarted, and some of their brain function might still remain. In such cases, critics assert, the patients were clearly not dead because their condition was reversible. Advocates of DCD counter that do-not-resuscitate orders from a patient or family render the argument about irreversibility moot.

In any case, there would be little debate about DCD if organs in a body remained viable for transplantation 20 or 30 minutes after heart and lung failure. But they become damaged quickly, so surgeons have to act fast — ideally, within about 10 minutes of cardiac arrest.

According to the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which was drafted about 30 years ago and has since been adopted, in some form, by all of the states, you can be declared dead in one of two ways: Your brain can irreversibly cease functioning, or your heart and lungs can irreversibly stop working. “Irreversibly,” in this context, has fueled the controversy. Does it mean the heart is unable to spontaneously start by itself? Or does it mean that even resuscitation efforts fail to restart the heart? (…)

More than 100,000 potential organ recipients idle on the waiting list maintained by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the U.S. transplant system. An average of 18 people on the list die each day because of a shortage of donor organs.

{ Stanford Medicine | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, London, 1952 }

{ Todd Fisher }

For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.

One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you’re wheeling around a dance floor in love. Psychologists argued that these experiences tweaked the pulse generator, speeding up the flow of pulses or slowing it down.

But the fact is that the biology of the brain just doesn’t work like the clocks we’re familiar with. Neurons can do a good job of producing a steady series of pulses. They don’t have what it takes to count pulses accurately for seconds or minutes or more. The mistakes we make in telling time also raise doubts about the clock models. If our brains really did work that way, we ought to do a better job of estimating long periods of time than short ones. Any individual pulse from the hypothetical clock would be a little bit slow or fast. Over a short time, the brain would accumulate just a few pulses, and so the error could be significant. The many pulses that pile up over long stretches of time should cancel their errors out. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As we estimate longer stretches of time, the range of errors gets bigger as well.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

{ Ezra Stoller | Top: Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Bottom: General Motors Technical Center, Eero Saarinen, Warren, MI, 1950 | Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC | more }

related { At about 3.45pm, witnesses recalled, Barthes paused before crossing the street at 44 rue des Écoles; he looked left and right, but failed to spot an advancing laundry van, which knocked him down. | Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes | Roland Barthes, ‪Camera lucida: reflections on photography, 1981 | Google Books }

The ‘Regrets of the Typical American’ have been analysed in a new study that not only looks at what US citizens regret most, but provides some clues for those wanting to know whether it is better to regret something you haven’t done, or regret something you have. (…)

Women, who tend to value social relationships more than men, have more regrets of love (romance, family) compared to men. Conversely, men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets. Those who lack either higher education or a romantic relationship hold the most regrets in precisely these areas.

The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading + Chart }

strip { Milo Manara }

unrelated { Envy is a stronger motivator than admiration, according to a new study }

A venomous Egyptian cobra went missing from New York’s Bronx Zoo, prompting the closure of the zoo’s reptile house until further notice. (…)

The Egyptian cobra is most commonly found in North Africa. Its venom is so deadly that it can kill a full-grown elephant in three hours — or a person in about 15 minutes, according to wildlife experts. The venom destroys nerve tissue and causes paralysis and death due to respiratory failure.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden. (…)

We can try hitting delete more often.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Michael Rubenstein }

The most familiar domain, though arguably not the most important to the Earth’s overall biosphere, is the eukaryotes. These are the animals, the plants, the fungi and also a host of single-celled creatures, all of which have complex cell nuclei divided into linear chromosomes.

Then there are the bacteria—familiar as agents of disease, but actually ecologically crucial. Some feed on dead organic matter. Some oxidise minerals. And some photosynthesise, providing a significant fraction (around a quarter) of the world’s oxygen. Bacteria, rather than having complex nuclei, carry their genes on simple rings of DNA which float around inside their cells.

The third great domain of life, the archaea, look, under a microscope, like bacteria. For that reason, their distinctiveness was recognised only in the 1970s. Their biochemistry, however, is very different from that of bacteria (they are, for example, the only organisms that give off methane as a waste product), and their separate history seems to stretch back billions of years.

But is that it? Or are there other biological domains hiding in the shadows—missed, like the archaea were for so long, because biologists have been using the wrong tools to look? A paper published in the Public Library of Science suggests there might indeed be at least one other, previously hidden, domain of life.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

How well do you know your friends? (…)

There are lots of ways to know someone’s personality. You can say “she’s an extrovert” or “she’s usually happy.” You may also know how he or she reacts to different situations and other people’s behavior. “It’s a more detailed way of understanding personality,” says Charity A. Friesen, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, who co-wrote a new paper with Lara K. Kammrath.

“You might know the person is extroverted when they’re out with their friends but more introverted when they’re in a new situation.” When a person is faced with one of a list of situations, then how does he or she behave? Friesen identifies this as an “if-then profile.” (…)

Some people knew their friends’ triggers well; others had almost no idea what set their friends off. And that made a difference to the friendship. People who had more knowledge of their friend’s if-then profile of triggers had better relationships. They had less conflict with the friend and less frustration with the relationship.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Psychologists investigating the well-being of patients with an acquired brain injury (ABI) have documented a curious phenomenon, whereby the more serious a person’s brain injury, the higher their self-reported life-satisfaction.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

When we look at the world around us, we feel that we are seeing it as it is. Most of the time, we are — but not because our visual system perceives the world precisely as it is. Rather, our visual system makes informed guesses about the contents of the world based on the compressed signal projected onto our eyes. And, for most practical purposes, those guesses are pretty good. Moreover, this “guessing” system work so seamlessly that we rarely notice any discrepancy between our guesses and reality. Only when we “break” the system can we reveal these default assumptions.

My 7-minute long talk at TEDxUIUC in February 2011 explains why we have to break the visual system to understand how it works.

{ Daniel Simons | Watch the video }

related { Sean Penn faced skepticism when he arrived last year with no medical expertise and no N.G.O. experience, but he has built one of the most efficient aid outfits in Haiti today. | NY Times | full story }

Researchers looked at the role tomato products play in health and disease risk reduction. Results indicate that eating more tomatoes and tomato products can make people healthier and decrease the risk of conditions such as cancer, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease.

{ SAGE Insight | Continue reading }

{ James Joyce Quaterly, Vol. 29, No. 4, Summer, 1992 }

{ Why Does Paz de la Huerta Always Match Her Lipstick to Her Dress? }

Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera – the “whites” of the eyes – of any species. This fact intrigues scientists, because it would seem actually to be a considerable hindrance: imagine, for example, the classic war movie scene where the soldier dresses in camouflage and smears his face with green and brown pigment – but can do nothing about this conspicuously white sclera, beaming bright against the jungle.

There must be some reasons humans developed it, despite its obvious costs. In fact, the advantage of visible sclera – so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis” – is precisely that it enables humans to see clearly, and from a distance, which direction other humans are looking.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos – our nearest cousins – follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

{ Brian Christian, The Most Human Human | via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Salvador Dali by Richard Avedon, 1963 }

{ The cellphone has been more than a cellphone for years, but soon it could take on an entirely new role — standing in for all of the credit and debit cards crammed into wallets. There’s just one hitch: While the technology is already being installed in millions of phones — and is used overseas — wide adoption of the so-called mobile wallets is being slowed by a major behind-the-scenes battle among corporate giants. | NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Andy Warhol, Blue Liz As Cleopatra, 1963 | silkscreen ink and acrylic paint on canvas | Related: Jerry Saltz on Andy Warhol’s Portraits of Liz }

Despite wide acceptance of the stereotype that women apologize more readily than men, there is little systematic evidence to support this stereotype or its supposed bases (e.g., men’s fragile egos). We designed two studies to examine whether gender differences in apology behavior exist and, if so, why. (…)

Findings suggest that men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior.

{ Psychological Science/SAGE | Continue reading }