Ahh.... an animated brain on drugs - how could it get any better?!

Just a short note via Sports Illustrated:

Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.
...
"Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, the book's publicist at Simon & Schuster.

Carr said the book will be published in August, but gave no other details and declined to provide excerpts.

I wonder whether this developed after football? I'm curious to see the book when it comes out. Of course many in the mental health field don't buy dissociative personality disorder. But we'll give Herschel Walker a pass since he did win the Heisman Trophy.

According to Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago:

"Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like."

In his experiments he showed that the lonelier a person was the more likely they were to believe in supernatural entities such as God, angels, etc. They were also more likely to attribute human characteristics to their pets, such as thoughfulness or compassion. This effect seems to be specific to feelings of loneliness, not just any negative state. For example fear did not produce similar patterns of results.

So what's this all about?!

Loneliness is both painful to experience and potentially deadly. "It's actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you," he said.

But anthropomorphizing pets or God may actually confer many of the same psychological and physical benefits that come from connections with other people. The same benefits may not apply to gadgets, which were a component of Epley's studies.

"Non-human connections can be very powerful," Epley said. "A brain's not so sensitive to whether it's a person or not. If it's something that has a lot of traits associated with what it means to be a human, then all the better for us, it seems."

The study also provides insight into the flip side of anthropomorphism: dehumanization. People who enjoy a strong sense of social connection are less likely to perceive humanlike mental states in people who seem different from them. Classic examples occur during times of war, during which a strong sense of nationalism or group identity tend to emerge.

"It may be that strong in-group identity is one of the things that facilitates dehumanizing the opposing side," Epley said.

-Via EurekAlert-

Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure.
Now that we're done with the warning...

We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to epilepsy. This lead to a number of government investigations and media companies searching their offerings to determine whether any of their shows had similar scenes that might induce photosensitive epilepsy. According to a CNN report of the incidents:

Dr. Yukio Fukuyama, a juvenile epilepsy expert, said that "television epilepsy" can be triggered by flashing, colorful lights. Though the phenomenon was observed before television, photosensitive epilepsy, as it is also called, has become far more common as TV has spread. The same symptoms have also been observed in children playing video games.

It is relatively rare for epileptics to be the photosensitive type, and according to Wikipedia only between three and five percent of epileptics are of the photosensitive type. In the general population only about two people per 10,000 are epileptic. Epilepsy peaks in puberty, so it is relatively rare for adults to present with epilepsy, especially photosensitive epilepsy. So if you are an adult with no history of epilepsy you'll probably be safe watching the famous Pokemon Epilepsy Episode. If you're a teen, perhaps you should watch this with a parent. After all you're better off knowing if you have photosensitive epilepsy in a safe environment with a caretaker. You don't want to be walking down the street and then suddenly wake up in a hospital with your head busted open (It happened to a friend of mine - so I know it's possible!)

As soon as I heard about this effect back in college I went looking for the video but YouTube just wasn't available then so I had to wait until recently to see the Pokemon Epilepsy Episode. So here it is:

In addition to Pokemon there have been a number of other incidents on TV, Dragonball Z as well as a London Olympics 2012 ad campaign have been reported to have caused a number of seizures. Of course there a number of things that can induce seizure in people, annoying spouses, mother-in-laws (kidding about those I hope), and of course seizures can occur for no reason many many times a day. Now there is one more way to induce a seizure for one woman. The song Temperature by Sean Paul has been reported to induce seizures in a Canadian woman. Before I we continue with the story here's the song we're talking about (Warning: If you don't like crappy music you should probably not listen to this!)