Recently there was a clever series of commercials that featured celebrities like Larry Bird and Aretha Franklin showing off their respective talents, and the announcer urged us to do the same. “Are you a prodigy?” he wanted to know. Sadly, for most of us the answer is no. Our abilities are too ordinary. The term…
When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever…
Fear is normally a healthy emotion that helps keep us from danger, but for some people it becomes an unmanageable force that consumes their every waking hour. I know because it happened to me when I was fourteen and suffered my first panic attack in Madame Andreassion’s third period French class. It was terrifying because…
In the Beginning All human beings begin life as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, which is a single cell about one-fifth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. By adulthood, the human body has grown to more than a hundred trillion cells, most of which are highly specialized for particular…
What is your earliest memory? A frightening fall down the stairs? Blowing out candles on your third birthday? Or perhaps it is a trip to the hospital to visit a newborn sibling? Whatever the content, it is probably short and rather hazy. Adult recollections of infancy and early childhood are typically fragmentary. We forget so…
Phineas Gage began the day of September 13, 1848 as a man remarkable only to those who knew him personally. He worked as the foreman of a railway construction gang in Vermont, where his group was preparing the bed for the Rutland and Burlington Rail Road. At just twenty-six years old, Gage was already a…
