Family Unwittingly Handed Bag of Personal Effects that Included Deceased's Brain; Realized Due to Odor

(AP)  A New Mexico family is suing two funeral homes over a gruesome incident in which members unwittingly accepted a bag containing a relative's brain and only became aware of it by the odor a day later.

Funeral homes in New Mexico and Utah, where the woman died, are blaming each other for the mistake. Both have been named in the lawsuit.

"This is just a sad tragedy," plaintiffs attorney Richard Valle said Wednesday. "This almost feels like something you'd read about in a Stephen King book."

The suit was filed Monday in state District Court in Albuquerque. According to the complaint, the woman's relatives "smelled a foul odor coming from the bag" they received from New Mexico's DeVargas Funeral Home and Crematory of the Espanola Valley.

The woman, identified by her initials M.F.R., died in a car accident in Utah on Sept. 28.

Funeral home owner Johnny DeVargas didn't immediately return telephone messages seeking comment but denied any fault to the Albuquerque Journal, saying a Utah funeral home was responsible.

"We inherited the problem from Utah," DeVargas said. "We are a very reputable company and we were dealt a bad hand."

In addition to the New Mexico funeral home, the lawsuit also names as defendants Serenicare Funeral Home in Draper, Utah, and Inman Shipping Worldwide, an Ohio-based shipping company that transported the body to northern New Mexico.

A woman who answered the telephone after business hours Wednesday at Inman's call center said nobody from the company was available to comment.

Serenicare owner Dick Johnson said his firm's action was typical within the industry.

Characterizing the brain as "75 percent water," he said the woman's brain went into a bag because it had sustained substantial trauma from the crash.

"Rather than try to reinsert the brain into a damaged head, it is common practice to ship it inside a bag," he said.

He said said the bag containing the brain was placed in a casket with the rest of the remains for transport to New Mexico and eventual burial.

Johnson also said when someone has died in a violent crash, there's usually blood "and who knows what" on clothing or other items, so his employees typically sit down with relatives of the victim and encourage them to let the funeral home discard the bag rather than accept it.

He also denied that the Utah funeral home combined the brain and personal items in a single bag.

"I think once all the discovery takes place, it will become evident there was some negligence at that end," Johnson said. "We feel bad. We don't know what could have been done differently, but we follow standard industry practice."

During a viewing in New Mexico, the lawsuit says a DeVargas employee returned the personal belongings to a relative "in an unsealed bag." The relative "left the bag of the personal belongings in his truck until after the burial."

One day after interment, relatives noticed the smell and opened the bag.

"Plaintiffs ... experienced shock, horror and great fear upon learning that decedent's entire body had not been buried," the lawsuit says.

The brain later was buried with the woman's body.

Photo Source: Van Wedeen  

This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: "We've never really seen the brain - it's been hiding in plain sight." Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the "connectome", and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.

So how much detail do they need? Wedeen, or the like-minded Human Connectome Project in the US, will tell you that it's enough to chart the average pathways between areas of the brain (and that even this could take a decade to complete). However, this opinion has its critics: other scientists claim that a "true" connectome has to drill deeper, tracing each neuron and its hydra-headed links. It could be a fool's errand, but for some it's already their life's work.

Wired spoke to three scientists, each using a different technique to create their own extraordinary mammalian connectome.

Above: Owl-monkey brain mapped by Van Wedeen

Wedeen used a souped-up MRI scanner to detect water diffusing along the fibres that link the different areas of an owl-monkey's brain. He then traced where the broad circuitry lies and colour-coded it based on the direction of the tissue. The green, treelike structure on the left is the cerebellum, which handles perception. A next-generation scanner will allow him to image human brains. Wedeen says he wants to reveal "the symmetry and beauty in objects - from the outside, the brain is fairly ugly, but its architecture is beautiful and rational".

by David Winograd (RSS feed) on Oct 26th 2009 at 7:00PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've just discovered a curious medical finding that can be detected on MRI brain scans called the 'face of the giant panda sign' where, quite literally, it looks like there's a panda face in the middle of the brain, indicating a specific pattern of neural damage.

The image you can see on the left is the 'face of the giant panda sign' that appeared in a brain scan of a patient with multiple sclerosis who started showing unusual sexual behaviour and is taken from a 2002 study. Click the image if you want to see the whole scan.

The pattern is apparently caused by "high signal in the tegmentum, normal signals in the red nuclei and lateral portion of the pars reticulata of the substantia nigra, and hypointensity of the superior colliculus".

It is most associated with Wilson's disease, a genetic condition which causes a toxic build-up of copper in the body, but obviously can appear in other disorders as well.

Thanks to Twitter user @sarcastic_f for alerting me to this.

It's not just pandas that appear in brain scans of course, the Virgin Mary has also been known to make an appearance.

Link to PubMed entry for MS study.
Link to brief description from Neurology.

Out of your head: Leaving the body behind

• 13 October 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy

THE young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumours, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives.

People without any obvious neurological disorder can have an out-of-body experience

So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelgänger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelgänger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Surprisingly pleasant

Some out-of-body experiences involve just one of these stages; some all three, in progression. Bizarrely, many people who have one report it as a pleasant experience. So what could be going on in the brain to create such a seemingly impossible sensation?

The first substantial clues came in 2002, when Blanke's team stumbled across a way to induce a full-blown out-of-body experience. They were performing exploratory brain surgery on a 43-year-old woman with severe epilepsy to determine which part of her brain to remove in order to cure her. When they stimulated a region near the back of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the woman reported that she was floating above her own body and looking down on herself.

This makes some kind of neurological sense. The TPJ processes visual and touch signals, balance and spatial information from the inner ear, and the proprioceptive sensations from joints, tendons and muscles that tell us where our body parts are in relation to one another. Its job is to meld these together to create a feeling of embodiment: a sense of where your body is, and where it ends and the rest of the world begins. Blanke and colleagues hypothesised that out-of-body experiences arise when, for whatever reason, the TPJ fails to do this properly (Nature, vol 419, p 269).

More evidence later emerged that a malfunctioning TPJ was at the heart of the out-of-body experience. In 2007, for example, Dirk De Ridder of University Hospital Antwerp in Belgium was trying to help a 63-year-old man with intractable tinnitus. In a last-ditch attempt to silence the ringing in his ears, Ridder's team implanted electrodes near the patient's TPJ. It did not cure his tinnitus, but it did lead to him experiencing something close to an out-of-body experience: he would feel his self shift about 50 centimetres behind and to the left of his body. The feeling would last more than 15 seconds, long enough to carry out PET scans of his brain. Sure enough, the team found that the TPJ was activated during the experiences.

Insights from neurological disorders or brain surgery can only take you so far, however, not least because cases are rare. Larger-scale studies are required, and to achieve this Blanke and others have used a technique called "own-body transformation tasks" to force the brain to do things that it seemingly does during an out-of-body experience. In these experiments, subjects are shown a sequence of brief glimpses of cartoon figures wearing a glove on one hand. Some of the figures face the subject, others have their back turned (see diagram). The task is to imagine yourself in the position of the cartoon figure in order to work out which hand the glove is on. To do this, you may have to mentally rotate you own body as one image succeeds another. As volunteers performed these tasks, the researchers mapped their brain activity with an EEG and found that the TPJ was activated when the volunteers imagined themselves in a position different from their actual orientation - an out-of-body position.

The team also zapped the TPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive technique that can temporarily disable parts of the brain. With a disrupted TPJ, volunteers took significantly longer to do the own-body transformation task (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 25, p 550).

Other brain regions have been implicated too, including ones close to the TPJ. The emerging consensus is that when these regions are working well, we feel at one with our body. But disrupt them, and our sense of embodiment can float away.

This does not, however, explain the most striking feature of out-of-body experiences. "It's a great puzzle why people, from their out-of-body locations, visualise not only their bodies but things around them, such as other people," says Brugger. "Where does this information come from?"

One line of evidence comes from the condition known as sleep paralysis, in which healthy people find their body immobilised as in sleep despite being conscious (see "The twilight zone"). In a survey of nearly 12,000 people who had experienced sleep paralysis, Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, found that many reported sensations similar to out-of-body experiences. These included floating out of their body and turning back to look at it.

Cheyne suggests that this might be the result of conflicts of information in the brain. During sleep paralysis, it is possible to enter a REM-like state in which you dream of moving or flying. Under these circumstances you are conscious of a sensation of movement, yet your brain is aware that your body cannot move. In an attempt to resolve this sensory conflict, the brain cuts the sense of self loose (Cortex, vol 45, p 201). "It resolves by splitting the self from its body," says Cheyne. "The self seems to go with the movement and the body gets left behind." Perhaps similar sensory conflicts cause classic out-of-body experiences.

The brain resolves sensory conflict by splitting the self from the body. The body gets left behind

Brugger, meanwhile, has a suggestion for how someone might see things even though their eyes are shut, based on one of his patients who reported an out-of-body experience. According to this patient's father, who was sitting by the bedside, he had his eyes closed. Yet he later reported seeing, from a perspective above his bed, his father going to the bathroom, returning with a wet towel and towelling his forehead.

The patient presumably heard his father walk to the bathroom and run some water, and must have felt the wet towel on his head. Brugger speculates that his brain converted those stimuli into a visual image, not unlike what happens in synaesthesia. This still does not, however, explain the external vantage point. "It's not clear how the brain constructs that," says cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Metzinger does have a suggestion. Imagine an episode from a recent holiday. Do you visualise it from a first-person perspective, or from a third-person perspective with yourself in the scene? Surprisingly, most of us do the latter. "In encoding visual memories, the brain already uses an external perspective," says Metzinger. "We don't know much about why and how, but if something is extracted from such a database [during an out-of-body experience], there may be material for seeing oneself from the outside."

Whatever the mechanism, the study of out-of-body experiences promises to help answer a profound question in neuroscience and philosophy: how does self-consciousness emerge? It's abundantly clear to us that we have a sense of self that resides, most of the time, in our bodies. Yet it is also clear from out-of-body experiences that the sense of self can seemingly detach from your physical body. So how are the self and the body related?

To address that question, Metzinger has teamed up with Blanke and his colleagues in an experiment that induces an out-of-body experience in healthy volunteers. They film each volunteer from behind and project the image into a head-mounted display worn by the volunteer so that they see an image of themselves standing about 2 metres in front. The experimenters then stroke the volunteer's back - which the volunteers see being done to their virtual self. This creates sensory conflict, and many reported feeling their sense of self migrating out of their physical bodies and towards the virtual one (Science, vol 317, p 1096).

To Metzinger, these experiments demonstrate that self-consciousness begins with the feeling of owning a body, but there is more to self-consciousness than the mere feelings of embodiment. "Selfhood has many components," says Metzinger. "We are trying to fill them in, building block by building block. This is just the beginning."

Anil Ananthaswamy is a contributing editor for New Scientist

HOW WE DECIDE: mind-blowing neuroscience of decision-making

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 8, 2009 5:22 AM

Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide is the latest in a series of popular neuroscience books (Brain Rules, Stumbling on Happiness, Mind Wide Open, The Brain that Changes Itself) to (literally) blow my mind.

Lehrer, author of the celebrated Proust Was a Neuroscientist, lays out the current state of the neuroscientific research into decision-making with a series of gripping anaecdotes followed by reviews of the literature and interviews with the researchers responsible for it.

Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

But overly emotional decisions are also likely to lead us into trouble. There is clearly a sweet-spot between white-hot emotional thinking and ice-cold reason, and Lehrer is trying to find it. By the end of the book, I'm nearly convinced he has.

My copy of How We Decide has literally dozens of dogeared pages that I've marked to return to in this reviews as examples of the kind of thing that made me go Wow! and sometimes even buttonhole nearby friends to read them passages. I'll run a few down for you here:

Lehrer's description of the amazing ability of dopamine to "predict" upcoming events is gripping all the way along, but I was delighted to learn that neuroscientists call signals for missed predictions (that is, the signal released when dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward that doesn't come), emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex the "Oh shit" circuit. The ACC is closely wired to the thalamus, so activation of the "Oh shit" circuit galvanizes the conscious mind, bringing the stimulus right to the front of our attention.

These mistakes are critical to good decision-making, as they are our best tutors. Lehrer describes a famous study from Stanford psych research Carol Dweck, who administered easy tests to 10-year-olds, who did well on it. The control group was praised for "being smart." The experimental group was praised for "trying hard." With only this difference, the two groups were then administered progressively harder tests. Dweck discovered that the "smart" kids did worse: they believed their initial good result was due to some innate virtue beyond their ken or control, and feared that a failure would show that they lacked this intangible. But the "hard-trying" group had been rewarded for taking intellectual risks, and so they continued. Afterwards, the "smart" kids rated the hardest tests as their least favorite; the "tryers" rated it as their most favorite.

Dopamine is the neurochemical star of the book, and its many pathologies make for gripping reading. There's a case study of Ann Klinestiver, a sedate school-teacher who was given strong doses of Requip a dopamine agonist (it imitates dopamine's action in the brain), as treatment for worsening Parkinson's Disease. Like 13 percent of Requip patients, Ann developed a gambling compulsion for slot machines that eventually ruined her life, costing her her husband, her family, and all her assets (she finally went off Requip and opted for severely constrained movement but no gambling).

The pathology here is all about missed predictions. Dopamine helps the brain to find patterns and thus make predictions about the future. But slots are random, and so in a normal brain, slot-play follows a common pattern: first the brain is delighted by the chance to chew on such a meaty problem. It formulates hypotheses about the slots' action, and then new input (mistakes that light up the Oh shit circuit) cause it to start over. But after a short time, a normal brain gives up -- there is no pattern to see, so there's no point in playing on.

But in a brain where the dopamine levels are abnormal, surrender never happens. The brain is in a constant state of reward, because of all the "new input" (random noise) that arrives every time the lever is pulled.

Irrationality doesn't just play a role in pathological gambling; the big casino on Wall Street is also a great confounder of reason. Neuroscientist Read Montague performed an experiment in which subjects were given play money and sat down in front of stock-market simulators that had, unbeknownst to them, been programmed to simulate great crashes (Dow 1929, Nasdaq 1998, Nikkei 1986, S&P 1987). Montague found that the subjects played out exactly the same panics that real-world investors fell prey to.

Subjects set out conservatively, with small bets that rocketed upward in the pre-crash bubble. Their Oh shit circuits lit up at the thought of all the money they hadn't made (the brain overvalues loss, which is why "One day only!" sales work). Subjects progressively increased their bets, putting more and more money into the bubble (which grew and grew). And then the bubble burst and Oh shit fired again, and the same subjects refused to cut their losses and take their money out of the market, because they were fixated on how much they'd lost, and couldn't bear the thought of leaving the game while they were down.

Indeed, investors follow this trend more generally, selling stocks that do well, and holding onto stocks that do poorly (because they can't part with them while they're still "behind"). Eventually, the investor's portfolio is filled with nothing but declining bad bets.

However, this loss-aversion can be short circuited with simple gimmicks, especially credit-cards. The brain just doesn't register the same loss when you swipe your card as it does when money leaves your pocket. Carnegie Mellon neuroeconomist George Loewenstein says, "credit-cards...anaesthetize your brain against the pain of payment." MIT business professors demonstrate this by showing that students bidding for tickets to a Celtics game on average bid twice as much when the betting is done by credit-card than by cash.

The answer to this is meta-cognition: think about what you're thinking. Think about what you're feeling. Think about your circumstances and what happened the last time you were here.

But don't think too much. There are classes of problems -- ones in which there are more variables than the conscious mind can juggle -- where thinking overwhelms your brain's ability to synthesize all these variables into a good conclusion. Timothy Wilson, a U Virginia psychologist, asked two groups of female college students to choose and keep their favorite art print from a selection containing a Monet, a van Gogh, and some inspirational kitten posters. A control group was asked to rate each poster from 1 to 9 and keep their top one. The experimental group was asked to fill in questionnaires about what they liked about each poster.

The controls overwhelmingly picked the fine art. Follow-up questions established that they were still happy with their decisions weeks later.

But the experimental group -- the group that had to explain what they liked about each poster -- chose the kittens. And when they were followed up, they were disappointed with their decision.

Wilson explains that the failure arises because the good things about fine art are difficult to describe: they are intangible aesthetic elements. We like them, but most of us can't explain why. On the other hand, the virtues of a kitten-picture are easy to enumerate. When asked to explain, rationally, which one is best, kittens win every time. But it is this very superficiality that causes us to quickly tire of the kittens and wish for a Monet.

Of course, it's not just kittens. Ap Dijksterhuis at the Dutch Radbout University has shown that the same failure plagues house-buyers. When given the choice of a modest house in the city near work and amenities and a huge McMansion in the suburbs, introspection favors the McMansion. It has easy-to-enumerate virtues: we can have big dinners there, the family can come to stay, and so on. But we only have a few big dinner parties and houseguests a year, and the rest of the year we're stuck with long commutes and no night-life.

Introspection is also critical to the placebo effect. Being told that you are about to experience a pharmacological effect primes you to feel that pharmacological effect. And vice-versa: students who are administered an energy beverage after being told that it is expensive experience 30 percent higher alertness than those who are told that it is a discount alternative. Likewise, people tasting wine they are told is cheap have measurably different brain activity -- and preferences -- from subjects who are told the same wine is expensive.

All this introspection takes place in the prefrontal cortex, which has lots of other work that it has to keep on top of, so when it is distracted, our ability to make good decisions decline. In one experiment, control subjects are asked to remember two numbers and are then walked down a hall to another room where they will be asked to recall them. On the way, they pass a refreshment table with chocolate cake and fresh fruit. The experimenters measure their ability to pick the "right" snack -- that is, the one that, in the light of cold reason they would opt for.

The experimental group goes through the same test -- only they're asked to remember seven numbers, which is somewhere near the upper range of what the average person can remember.

The experimental group eats cake. The control group eats fruit. When we're distracted, we stop introspecting and listen to our emotional minds. This fact is not lost on retail psychologists who design stores to maximise this effect.

Having too much information is a plague in many fields. In an experiment with MIT business students, one group is given extremely detailed reports on companies and asked to buy and sell their stocks based on what they learn. Another group is just given the stock-prices. The latter group -- betting blind -- bets better than the "overinformed" group, who have so much information that they can't decide what is and isn't important. The same thing happens to guidance counsellors who are given detailed dossiers on students and asked to predict their academic performance -- they do worse at predicting performance than counsellors who are just given student transcripts.

By the end of the book, Lehrer is ready to draw some conclusions from all this fascinating material. What he comes up with, basically, is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (a technique that has worked for me during a bout of depression). CBT consists, basically, of introspectively interrogating your emotional response to events, to see where and how emotion is influencing reason and vice-versa. CBT requires that you write things down (at first, anyway) so that your brain can't pull a fast one by selectively recalling your track record. It's the Goldilocks of introspection: not too much, not too little, just enough.

It's great advice, and a great book, too.