Monday, December 28, 2020
The Frontal Lobes and Neuropsychiatric Illness (2001) by Drs Stephen P. Salloway, Paul F. Malloy, and James D. Duffy (editors) provides an excellent summation on the state of knowledge of prefrontal lobe dysfunction in neuropsychiatry. It is written in four parts. Part 1 is Introduction; Part 2, “Functional Organization of Prefrontal Lobe Systems” consists of 5 chapters; Part 3, “Prefrontal Syndromes in Clinical Practice” consists of 4 chapters; and Part 4, “Frontal Lobe Dysfunction in Neuropsychiatric Disorders” is composed of 5 chapters — 16 chapters and 264 pages in all. The book is fully illustrated and pages are of ample size, ideal for graphs, tables, photographs, and other illustrations. The book is well organized and the chapters vary in the quality of the presentation and depth, depending on the experts who wrote them. The majority of the 26 writers are psychiatrists, followed by neurologists and other neuroscience specialists. There are only three neurosurgeons, and only the final chapter is written from the perspective of neurosurgery. This is a bit of a shame because neurosurgeons are the researchers and clinicians who have in vivo access to the frontal lobes of...
Friday, January 1, 2021
The Christian existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote about the corruption in the Danish State Church, declaring that everyone knew privately that the system was rotten and corrupt but they would not say so publicly. “Just as one says that death has marked a man, so we recognize the symptoms which demand to be attacked. It is a battle against lies,” he said.
The problem we face today is corruption in government, the media, and the church that runs so deep that it is uncomfortable for some to even talk about it publicly.
In his landmark 1975 book, The Corrupt Society, Robert Payne wrote, “There are many weapons that can be used to prevent the corruption of societies. The most powerful of these weapons are vigilance and knowledge. Hence the importance of the press, radio, and television to break through all imposed restrictions to discover how the government works, how it arrives at its decisions, how it manages its defenses, how it deals with traitors, especially the traitors in its midst.”
The tragedy is that, since Payne’s book was published, the press has become as corrupt as government. I actually noticed this trend when I went to...