Spinal Cord Quotes

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.

If someone can enjoy marching to music in rank and file, I can feel only contempt for him; he has received his large brain by mistake, a spinal cord would have been enough.

You do have a tendency to severe spinal cords." "Only for you.

I often wished that more people understood the invisible side of things. Even the people who seemed to understand, didn't really.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

Through systematic meditation one can awaken the third eye and touch the cosmic awareness. Sushumna nadi is the subtle pathway in the spinal cord which passes through the main psychic centers. The awakening of these centers means a gradual expansion of awareness, until it reaches the cosmic awareness. Each center has its own beauty and gracefulness. Through generations of ignorance and unconsciousness, this channel of awareness becomes obscured and hidden. Meditation is to become aware about this internal life energy. Meditation is the procedure to rearrange, harmonize, activate, and integrate the individual life energy with the cosmic life energy.

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

I had learned quickly that life doesn't always go the way I want it to, and that's okay. I still plod on.

Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.

Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord,” she said as she did, “because this makes me very uncomfortable.

Imagine someone reaching straight into your chest, past the bones and blood and guts, and taking a nice firm hold on your spinal cord. Now imagine that they start shaking you so fast, the world starts bulging and buckling under you. Imagine not being able to figure out later if the thought in your head is really yours or an unintentional keepsake from someone else's mind. Imagine the guilt of knowing you saw someone's deepest, darkest fear or secret...

standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.

That’s it from me for now, listeners. But something in me says that this is no ending. The night outside is bright and breezy and full of dangerous secrets. There is a taste in the air like tarnished silver, like the flesh of an extinct animal now only remembered through our spinal cord and the hairs on our back.

Thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease affecting the central nervous system (CNS: the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves). It is not contagious.

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is.

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.

Nathan stared at the floor. “Honestly? He’s a C5-6 quadriplegic. That means nothing works below about here…” He placed a hand on the upper part of his chest. “They haven’t worked out how to fix a spinal cord yet.” I stared at the door, thinking about Will’s face as we drove along in the winter sunshine, the beaming face of the man on the skiing holiday. “There are all sorts of medical advances taking place, though, right? I mean…somewhere like this…they must be working on stuff all the time.

It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.

Your guts also have about 100 million nerves, more than the number of nerves in your spinal cord or your entire peripheral nervous system.

the most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling.

The pressure of events was increasing, day by day, and he could feel responsibility wrapped like a strangling vine about his spinal cord, reaching eager fingers into the base of his skull.

Hello?” I ask. No one is there. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not a single sound resonating from the other side of the receiver. “Hello? Anyone there?” I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I can feel the urgency of goose pimples begin to line up on by frightened pale skin.

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury—and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lifting sessions. These psychologists and economists want me to kill my naturalistic instinct (the inner b****t detector) that allowed me to delay the elective operation and minimize the risks—an insult to the antifragility of our bodies.

Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This neural network is shaped like that: it looks like a tangled skein of a hundred thousand golden threads that has been drawn upward. The mass of it gathers in the pelvis, but strands from the same network extend upward to the spinal cord and brain.

If you can't figure out your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose" -Bishop T.D. Jakes

The weekend was a much-needed breath of fresh air; Monday always seemed to not only take that breath right back, but add a few extra pounds to my shoulders as well.

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.

The video was still playing, although I didn't know why. It seemed as if the able-bodied dancers were mocking me.

living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.

In truth, its tentacles reach throughout the body. Thirty-two nerves branch out of the spinal cord, the tail of the brain, and they exit the spine and go into your arms and legs,

Dancing with a spinal cord injury is a challenge like no other, but I aspired to prove to myself that I could still be phenomenal dancer even with an SCI

Chris, with Dana steadfastly at his side, would battle back to become both a leader in the fight to cure spinal cord injuries and a symbol of hope for millions.

If leadership is the spinal cord of success then discipline is its lumbar vertebrae.

If 'character' had a body...'integrity' would be it's spinal cord and 'humility' it's heart.

Among the studies conducted by the Center, four assessed smoked marijuana's ability to alleviate neuropathic pain, a notoriously difficult to treat type of nerve pain associated with cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, spinal cord injury and many other debilitating conditions. Each of the trials found that cannabis consistently reduced patients' pain levels to a degree that was as good or better than currently available medications.

depression can occur because of biological factors such as genetic predispositions, hormonal changes (including menopause, childbirth or thyroid problems) and differences in biochemistry (an imbalance of naturally occurring substances called neurotransmitters in the brain and spinal cord). In other cases, depression is caused by psychological factors, severe life stressors, substance abuse and certain medical conditions that affect the way your brain regulates your moods.

Literally right this second, there are over five hundred million nerves in your intestines sending feedback to your brain through the vagus nerve. That’s five times more nerves than you’ll find in your spinal cord. That is a lot of information!

Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord. Entirely unprepared for such a development, I was completely taken by surprise; but regaining my self control instantaneously, I remained sitting in the same posture, keeping my mind on the point of concentration. The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder, I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. It is impossible to describe the experience accurately. I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider surrounded by waves of light. It grew wider and wider, spreading outward while the body, normally the immediate object of its perception, appeared to have receded into the distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all consciousness without any outline, without any idea of corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light simultaneously conscious and aware at every point, spread out, as it were, in all directions without any barrier or material obstruction. I was no longer myself, or to be more accurate, no longer as I knew myself to be, a small point of awareness confined to a body, but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and in a state of exultation and happiness impossible to describe.

Interesting outfit.” Clearly unabashed, she merely glanced down at herself, slicked long-fingered, bloodred-tipped hands over her hips and thighs. Then laughed low in her throat. “I know. It’s a little over the top, isn’t it? But I’ve got a hot date tonight and zero time to go home to change.” Shock reverberated in his gut and zinged down the nerve rich column of his spinal cord. Taking a hot step forward, he demanded before he could stop himself, “With who?” She gave him a cool look, clearly wondering what the hell business he thought it was of his. Still, she answered him, which he hadn’t actually expected. “Eduardo,” she said, drawing the syllables out, her lips caressing them as if they were made of Godiva chocolates. “He’s an—” Cutting herself off, she shook her head. “Well. You don’t give a rat’s rear end who he is.” “Sure I do,” he forced himself to say in a bored tone, dismayed to discover that part of him was seriously tempted to grab those spandex- wrapped arms and shake the information out of her.

During dreams, the pons also dispatches a message to the spinal cord beneath it, which produces chemicals to make your muscles flaccid. This temporary paralysis prevents you from acting out nightmares by fleeing the bedroom or taking swings at werewolves. While

Today biologists believe that during the “Cambrian explosion,” about half a billion years ago, nature experimented with a vast array of shapes and forms for tiny, emerging multicellular creatures. Some had spinal cords shaped like an X, Y, or Z. Some had radial symmetry like a starfish. By accident one had a spinal cord shaped like an I, with bilateral symmetry, and it was the ancestor of most mammals on Earth. So in principle the humanoid shape with bilateral symmetry, the same shape that Hollywood uses to depict aliens in space, does not necessarily have to apply to all intelligent life.

Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others.

Before I knew it, I was racing across the highway. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to think.

As I sat up I turned my head to the side, but immediately straightened it again when I felt a sharp pain shoot through my neck.

I was really happy because the doctor had said I would be better by then, and I was ready for this terrible nightmare to be over.

His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him. He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man.

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved traditions of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres, causing the pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenetive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis.

Before I knew it, I was once again being whisked down the hallways at the new hospital into an even bigger room, one that, unbeknownst to me, would be my home for what would feel like a long, long time.

The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”45 Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat's hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky® on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name, embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?

Cavalier King Charles spaniels, we learnt, often suffer from the brain abnormality known as a Chiari malformation, which humans also get. Labradors can develop malignant meningiomas. The spaniels’ problem is the result of selective breeding aimed to produce the small round head which wins points at dog shows. The malformation leads to spinal cord damage, and the poor creatures suffer from intractable pain and scratch themselves incessantly.

In the worms and fish, there was only one area of positive potential, just as there was only one major nerve ganglion, the brain. In humans the entire head and spinal region, with its massive concentration of neurons, was strongly positive. The three specific areas of greatest positive potential were the same as in the salamander: the brain, the brachial plexus between the shoulder blades, and the lumbar enlargement at the base of the spinal cord.

Even so, as an aid to responding quickly, we have reflexes, which means that the central nervous system can intercept a signal and act on it before passing it on to the brain. That’s why if you touch something very undesirable, your hand recoils before your brain knows what’s going on. The spinal cord, in short, is not just a length of impassive cabling carrying messages between the body and the brain but an active and literally decisive part of your sensory apparatus.

Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.

He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can also promote functional recovery after spinal cord injury.

Once upon a time there was a child who had a golden brain. His parents only discovered this by chance when he injured his head and gold instead of blood flowed out. They then began to look after him carefully and would not let him play with other children for fear of being robbed. When the boy was grown up and wanted to go out into the world, his mother said: “We have done so much for you,we ought to be able to share your wealth.” Then her son took a large piece of gold out of his brain and gave it to his mother. He lived in great style with a friend who, however, robbed him one night and ran away. After that the man resolved to guard his secret and to go out to work, because his reserves were visibly dwindling. One day he fell in love with a beautiful girl who loved him too, but no more than the beautiful clothes he gave her so lavishly. He married her and was very happy, but after two years she died and he spent the rest of his wealth on her funeral, which had to be splendid. Once, as he was creeping through the streets,weak,poor, and unhappy, he saw a beautiful little pair of boots that would have been perfect for his wife. He forgot that she was dead- perhaps because his emptied brain no longer worked- and entered the shop to buy the boots. But in that very moment he fell, and the shopkeeper saw a dead man lying on the ground. This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

I don’t like to use this word,” he said, “because I’m a man of science and I don’t believe in it. But what happened to your mother today was a miracle. I never say that, because I hate it when people say it, but I don’t have any other way to explain this.” The bullet that hit my mother in the butt, he said, was a through-and-through. It went in, came out, and didn’t do any real damage. The other bullet went through the back of her head, entering below the skull at the top of her neck. It missed the spinal cord by a hair, missed the medulla oblongata, and traveled through her head just underneath the brain, missing every major vein, artery, and nerve. With the trajectory the bullet was on, it was headed straight for her left eye socket and would have blown out her eye, but at the last second it slowed down, hit her cheekbone instead, shattered her cheekbone, ricocheted off, and came out through her left nostril. On the gurney in the emergency room, the blood had made the wound look much worse than it was. The bullet took off only a tiny flap of skin on the side of her nostril, and it came out clean, with no bullet fragments left inside. She didn’t even need surgery. They stopped the bleeding, stitched her up in back, stitched her up in front, and let her heal. “There was nothing we can do, because there’s nothing we need to do,” the doctor

Since under the circumstances a person is no longer conscious of their own body, we of course shouldn’t interpret the reflex reactions of the spinal cord that occur when a surgeon removes organs from a brain-dead patient as an expression of pain. That’s easily said, but it’s quite a different thing for the surgeon who sees the body respond when he makes an incision to remove its organs. In the United Kingdom, anesthesia is administered for this procedure. The Dutch association of anesthetists finds this nonsensical, and scientifically speaking they’re right. In such cases an anesthetic is given to preserve not brain-dead patients but rather transplant surgeons from discomfort.

One of the most studied organisms in this context is the tiny polyp Hydra, which possesses only a hundred thousand cells. Its neural network is concentrated in its head and foot: a first evolutionary step toward developing a brain and spinal cord. Hydra’s nervous system contains a chemical messenger—a minuscule protein—that resembles two of our own: vasopressin and oxytocin. A protein of this kind is called a neuropeptide. In vertebrates, the gene for this particular neuropeptide first doubled and then mutated in two places, creating the two closely related but specialized neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin, which have recently become the focus of interest, partly because of their important role as messengers in our social brains (see chapter 9).

The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart. "Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.

Nerve signals are not particularly swift. Light travels at 300 million meters per second, while nerve signals move at a decidedly more stately 120 meters a second—about 2.5 million times slower. Still, 120 meters a second is nearly 270 miles an hour, quite fast enough over the space of a human frame to be effectively instantaneous in most circumstances. Even so, as an aid to responding quickly, we have reflexes, which means that the central nervous system can intercept a signal and act on it before passing it on to the brain. That’s why if you touch something very undesirable, your hand recoils before your brain knows what’s going on. The spinal cord, in short, is not just a length of impassive cabling carrying messages between the body and the brain but an active and literally decisive part of your sensory apparatus.

You see, if a baby is born alive, it’s alive and you and nobody else has the right to take some kind of a step to kill it, whether it’s twenty-three weeks, twenty-four weeks, nineteen weeks, whatever it is,” she said. “You’re a doctor. You have to do the minimal to keep that baby alive. If the baby is alive and you don’t want it to be, that doesn’t mean you have the right to take a pair of scissors and plunge it into its neck and sever its spinal cord, what they did on an everyday basis.” “They called it snipping, and he told all those workers that it was okay. Well, it’s not okay. It’s not okay in this state and in any other state. If a baby is born outside of its mother’s womb, you can’t kill it. If it moves or breathes or has a pulsating umbilical cord or heartbeat for a second, a minute, you can’t kill it. That’s murder.

That’s when Musk started pushing the idea of using Neuralink to enable paralyzed people to actually use their limbs again. A chip in the brain could send signals to the relevant muscles, bypassing any spinal-cord blockage or neurological malfunction. As soon as he got back to Hatchet Alley from the pig barn, he gathered his top Austin team, with their colleagues in Fremont dialing in, to announce this new additional mission. “Getting someone in a wheelchair to walk again, people will get it right away,” he said. “It’s a gut-punch idea, a fucking bold thing. And a good thing.

The development briefly outlined here seems to have been anticipated in medieval and Gnostic symbolism, just as the Antichrist was in the New Testament. How this occurred I will endeavour to describe in what follows. We have seen that, as the higher Adam corresponds to the lower, so the lower Adam corresponds to the serpent. For the mentality of the Middle Ages and of late antiquity, the first of the two double pyramids, the Anthropos Quaternio, represents the world of the spirit, or metaphysics, while the second, the Shadow Quaternio, represents sublunary nature and in particular man’s instinctual disposition, the “flesh”—to use a Gnostic-Christian term—which has its roots in the animal kingdom or, to be more precise, in the realm of warm-blooded animals. The nadir of this system is the cold-blooded vertebrate, the snake,30 for with the snake the psychic rapport that can be established with practically all warm-blooded animals comes to an end. That the snake, contrary to expectation, should be a counterpart of the Anthropos is corroborated by the fact—of especial significance for the Middle Ages—that it is on the one hand a well-known allegory of Christ, and on the other hand appears to be equipped with the gift of wisdom and of supreme spirituality.31 As Hippolytus says, the Gnostics identified the serpent with the spinal cord and the medulla. These are synonymous with the reflex functions.

In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

There have been cases of people with stable neck fractures that only compress the spinal cord after the person starts moving again.  This rare occurrence, coupled with the fact that most patients who come in as head traumas are too groggy, concussive, or drunk to cooperate, warranted the collars, straps, precautions, and numerous studies.  And people wonder why healthcare is so expensive.  There should be an ER tax on beer.

At the present, a plausible nominee for the neural substrate of consciousness is one of the most important neurological discoveries of our time. T h is is that tangle of tiny internuncial neurons called the reticular formation, which has long lain hidden and unsuspected in the brainstem. It extends f rom the top of the spinal cord through the brainstem on up into the thalamus and hypothalamus, attracting collaterals from sensory and motor nerves, almost like a system of wire-tabs on the communication lines that pass near it. But this is not all. It also has direct lines of command to half a dozen major areas of the cortex and probably all the nuclei of the brainstem, as we ll as sending fibers down the spinal cord where it influences the peripheral sensory and motor systems. Its function is to sensitize or “awaken” selected nervous circuits and desensitize others, such that those who pioneered in this work christened it “ t he waking b r a i n

Part of the brain’s job in managing our dreams is to keep us safe, so during REM sleep, the brain shuts off neurons in our spinal cord (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, n.d.). This renders us unable to move our muscles, which prevents us from acting out our dreams. In effect, the brain “switches off” our behavior. Some people report experiences of coming out of a dream and for a few seconds feeling “paralyzed.” That’s known as sleep paralysis, and is the brain’s way of protecting us from harming ourselves or others while we dream.

But I had already fallen. Fallen into this deep, dark hole. I was trapped. Trapped in this nightmare.

Some expect persons to care for themselves. Sometimes therapists go too far in expecting an individual to perform self-care; some individuals prefer to spend their time in other occupations and accept the help of others to do basic self-care. Therapists are familiar with the use of personal attendants with persons following spinal cord injuries; persons who have had a stroke benefit from a personal attendant, so that they have choice in how they spend their time in occupations more important and meaningful to them.

Chakras are energy centers where the body's life energy is concentrated. The concept of chakra is found in the Hindu tradition in India & some disciplines of Buddhism. Of the seven major chakras, six are located along the spinal cord & one is located at the crown of the head. The chakras are closely related to the endocrine system,which secretes hormones, and they are known to influence each and every part of the human body through the autonomic nervous system. They are highly attuned sensors that respond to the state of your physical, mental & spiritual health.

DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.

■Protection. The fused bones of the skull protect the brain. The vertebrae surround the spinal cord, and the rib cage helps protect the vital organs of the thorax.

the imprints of the killer’s hands on his neck was like two catcher’s mitts squeezing a softball. He was not only strangled, but his trachea was crushed and his spinal cord severed in two places. Whoever did this, must have looked like “The Rock” or Hulk Hogan. Your hundred and seventy-five pound frame doesn’t fit the profile.

continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot’s perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for “surrogates” like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or “locked in” individuals—spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state.

In the mid-1990s, at Duke University, Miguel Nicolelis and John Chapin began a behavioral experiment, with the goal of learning to read an animal’s thoughts. They trained a rat to press a bar, electronically attached to a water-releasing mechanism. Each time the rat pressed the bar, the mechanism released a drop of water for the rat to drink. The rat had a small part of its skull removed, and a small group of microelectrodes were attached to its motor cortex. These electrodes recorded the activity of forty-six neurons in the motor cortex involved in planning and programming movements, neurons that normally send instructions down the spinal cord to the muscles. Since the goal of the experiment was to register thoughts, which are complex, the forty-six neurons had to be measured simultaneously. Each time the rat moved the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin recorded the firing of its forty-six motor-programming neurons, and the signals were sent to a small computer. Soon the computer “recognized” the firing pattern for bar pressing. After the rat became used to pressing the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin disconnected the bar from the water release. Now when the rat pressed the bar, no water came. Frustrated, it pressed the bar a number of times, but to no avail. Next the researchers connected the water release to the computer that was connected to the rat’s neurons. In theory, now, each time the rat had the thought “press the bar,” the computer would recognize the neuronal firing pattern and send a signal to the water release to dispense a drop. After a few hours, the rat realized it didn’t have to touch the bar to get water. All it had to do was to imagine its paw pressing the bar, and water would come! Nicolelis and Chapin trained four rats to perform this task.

The FBL's attention to individual virtue obscures the ableist attitudes inherent in these billboards. Reeve appears strong and “super” to many Americans, and Ali “courageous,” simply by virtue of their living with a disability. In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.

• Brain Computer Interface Race: Contestants will be equipped with brain–computer interfaces that will enable them to control an avatar in a racing game played on computers. • Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike Race: Contestants with complete spinal cord injuries will be equipped with Functional Electrical Stimulation devices, which will enable them to perform pedaling movements on a cycling device that drives them on a circular course. • Leg Prosthetics Race: It will involve an obstacle course featuring slopes, steps, uneven surfaces, and straight sprints. • Powered Exoskeleton Race: Contestants with complete thoracic or lumbar spinal cord injuries will be equipped with actuated exoskeletal devices, which will enable them to walk along a particular race course. • Powered Wheelchair Race: A similar obstacle course featuring a variety of surfaces and environments. • Arm Prosthetics Race: Pilots with forearm or upper arm amputations will be equipped with actuated exoprosthetic devices and will have to successfully complete two hand–arm task courses as quickly as possible.

Traditional sitting postures—whether on a bench, zafu, or some other type of support—were developed to make the most of the body’s natural energy flow. An upright, neutrally aligned spine allows for the most efficient movement of energy. When the spine, and therefore the spinal cord, is in an easy, neutral position, the nervous system has a much better chance of finding equilibrium, which creates a supportive environment for the mind to quiet.

In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt—“perceived.” But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity. We already have many examples of this sort of activity: for example, breathing, digestion, and walking are controlled by autonomously running activity generators in your brain stem and spinal cord. During dream sleep the brain is isolated from its normal input, so internal activation is the only source of cortical stimulation. In the awake state, internal activity is the basis for imagination and hallucinations.

Pike dug his index finger into the soft tissue beneath the man’s collarbone where twenty-six individual nerves joined into the brachial plexus. The supraclavicular nerve, which carried information into the spinal cord, ran close to the skin at that point, following a groove in the bone. When Pike crushed the nerve bundle hard into the bone, the entire brachial plexus fired a pain signal not unlike that from a root canal without novocaine.

Just a few years ago, when I asked a neurologist if the brain and spinal cord could heal and regenerate, he said "no" and in his world, maybe 20 years ago, that was true. Not particularly useful but in that time and space—true. The cool thing about today is a neurologist reading his or her own medical research literature is compelled to answer "yes, under certain circumstances.

brain and other nerve-related problems such as headaches from concussions, vascular dementia (dementia caused by blood vessel problems in the brain), migraines, Bell’s palsy (a paralysis of the facial nerve), and tinnitus (ringing of the ears). He emphasized he was influenced by research that had been done in Israel on light therapy and the brain. Dr. Shimon Rochkind, a neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv University, originally pioneered work using lasers to treat injuries in the peripheral nervous system, that is, all the nerves in the body except those in the brain and spinal cord. Injury to peripheral nerves can lead to problems sensing or moving.

Route 27 was the spinal cord of Florida, practically vacant since the interstates, which took them up through towns with main streets that had the same early-evening closing hours since 1957. The only signs of life were the parking lights of local police cars on side streets, waiting for the local delinquents. Clewiston, Sebring, Clermont, Leesburg.

The Golgi tendon organ detects increases in tension in the region and relays this information to the spinal cord, which then inhibits the muscle from contracting.

Now try to bring the fork to your mouth.” I had to be careful to avoid stabbing myself, but

The notion that emotions are simply the result of our higher cognitive appreciation of certain forms of bodily commotion has been largely negated by the observation of essentially normal emotional responsivity in people who have suffered massive spinal cord injuries.

Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.

Your gut has capabilities that surpass all your other organs and even rival your brain. It has its own nervous system, known in scientific literature as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, and often referred to in the media as the “second brain.” This second brain is made up of 50-100 million nerve cells, as many as are contained in your spinal cord.

Amygdala Hijack Our perception of our world occurs via our five senses.19 Information from these senses enters our brain stem from the spinal cord and travels along neural pathways to the limbic system. When our senses perceive a threat, our sympathetic nervous system is stimulated, resulting in a fight or flight response, also known as a stress response. When this happens, we are no longer able to think rationally. Instead, we are in reaction mode. When a threat is perceived, emotional memories stored in the midbrain’s amygdala can be evoked. When the amygdala is stimulated by a perceived threat, it signals to the hypothalamus, and this results in the release of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones are released into the bloodstream and transported to the brain, where they disconnect the frontal lobes and leave us at the mercy of our emotions and caught in amygdala hijack. This is a strong emotional state. The oxygen and glucose necessary for effective frontal brain high-order thinking are then diverted to the amygdala in the limbic system to process these emotions. While this takes place, the frontal brain is deprived of oxygen and glucose and unable to function effectively at a rational level. Emotional self-regulation20 activates the para-sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the release of hormones into the bloodstream to act as antidotes to the stress hormones. These antidotes gradually slow breathing and reduce the heart rate, enabling oxygen and glucose to return to the frontal brain, which permits rational thinking to take place again.

A ewe usually is a good mother, but she will turn bad if for some reason she is separated from her lamb shortly after birth. Then she is likely to reject the lamb, refusing to nurse it. Sheep farmers have a way of persuading her otherwise. They stimulate her vagina with a kind of sheep dildo. The tickling releases a stream of oxytocin in her brain, and she then takes the lamb to udder. An oxytocin pump in her spinal cord will have the same maternogenic impact.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?