You know... I was a little concerned that Omni Brain wasn't edgy enough with that G rating. After all we talk about drugs and sex ... well... all the time! So I went back and checked the rating site again to see if were just having a clean fluke here at Omni Brain. Thankfully we're up to an R rating... perfect!

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Today starts a new series that I perhaps blatantly stole from Shelley over at Retrospectacle but It's such a darn great idea! From the mouth of Shelley:

Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.)

Clearly I'm not doing the same thing but her idea gave me one of my own. We here at Omni Brain will be digging into classic media coverage of all things science (usually brain related - clearly). I have a feeling most things will be from the NY Times since they are archived very very well all the way back into the 19th century. But if I can find it online or you can point me in the right direction any media source will be fair game. So without further ado here's our first entry into the world of....Pseudoscience in the Press of the Past

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When Psychology, Anthropology, Physiognomy and Phrenology were uttered as equals in the same sentence.
From the NY Times Classifieds March 5, 1864:

P.S. I think we'll do this series on Mondays (I have another one already scheduled) and they will always be in the History Category if you'd like to find the whole series in the archives.

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Thanks to Vaughan over at Mind Hacks we've discovered that the great movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die is now in the public domain :) You can watch it below the fold or even download it in full right here or here. This movie is a wonderful wonderful movie! ... ok really. I've never seen it nor do I think I'll take the time to watch it unless I'm really bored. But you should! let us know how it is. It is after all about brains!

Here's the plot summary from imdb:

After a car crash, a man keeps his wife's head alive in his laboratory. As if this weren't enough, an evil beast pounds and screams from a locked room adjacent to the lab. Written by Sam Volchenboum {volcs@mayo.edu}

The unethical surgeon Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers) is developing a technique of transplantation of organs and members using a serum against rejection. When he has a car accident with his girlfriend Jan Compton (Virginia Leith), he saves her head only, and tries to find a woman with a beautiful body to transplant Jan's head against her will. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Brilliant but borderline psychotic surgeon does secretive, experimental work with limb transplants and tissue rejection drugs, much to the chagrin of his surgeon-father. When he crashes his car and his fiancee is decapitated, his research - far from complete - is put to the test. His focus then becomes finding an appropriate donor body to make his fiancee whole, while the current and failed experiments in his basement laboratory grow restless. Written by Alan Brewster {radiobrewster@yahoo.com}

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Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel Rant is, first of all, not a rant. It's the fictional oral history of Buster "Rant" Casey, a fearless antihero who enjoys poisonous spider and snake bites yet loves his mom. Though not as creepy as previous novels like the self-injury splatterfest Haunted, or as intense as Fight Club, the story is sprayed with gore and gross-outs. Every time Rant sticks his arm into a hole in the ground or hides dozens of spiders in his jumpsuit and waits to be bitten, I cringe.

Influenced by sci-fi concepts from Aldous Huxley, William Gibson and J.G. Ballard's fetishistic Crash, Palahniuk makes them his own with twists venturing into the supernatural and neuroscientific. When I began reading I wondered how my review might fit with Omni Brain's focus on brain sciences, but I was soon cheered with descriptions of brain jacks and rabies infections in the central nervous system. "Out-cording" is the recording of someone's full sensory experience, a "neural transcription" sold as mass-market entertainment. A "boosted peak" is an out-cording filtered through the sharper senses of a German Shepherd or a baby's unsullied nervous system. But even those boosts grow tiresome to an audience of the not-so-distant future.

What I adore about Palahniuk is his lush imagination. Just as contemporary films are more violent and pr0n is more extreme than a decade or two ago, this novel jabs to revive dulled senses but is more successful than formulaic slasher flicks. It's not easy to shock but there are some jolts encountered by his thrillseeking characters. At the same time, Graphic Traffic reports on car accidents (with details from paramedics) are treated as mundane. Snotballs also play an important role in the plot.

Rant joins a group of boredom chasers called the Party Crashers, who hunt each other's cars in a cross between slam dancing and bumper cars without bumpers. Jaded by boosted peaks, they fester in an underclass of citizens of the night in an engineered society divided by curfews between night and day. Alienation leads to polarization in an overpopulated world. Crack-of-dawn-risers disdain night-dwellers as lazy and "other," and that bigotry fuels a violent class war.

Rant's personal quest for immortality also spreads an epidemic of rabies. Part vampire, part zombie, rabies-infected people lunge at and bite others in turn. The infected are mostly nighttimers, who become targets for daytimers. Parents disown children and cops shoot to kill as the sun rises. With crisis comes climax.

Rant goes out in a high-speed chase with multiple crashes and a flaming Christmas tree on the roof of his car. His final words, broadcast on Graphic Traffic as he screeches off a cliff, "What if reality is nothing but some disease?"

Just how much is society a construction of neurobiology? The novel teases with descriptions of plagues and viruses affecting the brain before asking that question. With Rant's departure and an unusual method of screwing with genetics, it seems possible to escape both the past and the future.

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