If it were true, nine out of ten patients with a stroke would show no symptoms Unfortunately this is not the case. A number of other misconceptions about brain mechanisms are taken for granted even by well- read, educated people. These include the belief that people can be resuscitated from a coma by listening to their favourite songs; the idea that the right hemisphere is where creativity lives; that magic pills preventing ageing do exist; that we can be trained to capitalise on non-physical energies of the brain; that one can retrieve pre-adolescent sexual abuse by means of hypnosis or learn a language by listening to tapes while sleeping; or even the possibility of cloning the human brain.The recent debate about the rights and wrongs of human cloning has led us to the alarming suggestion that it could be possible to reproduce evil people: could Hitler live again? Could we duplicate somebody like the football superstar Eric Cantona? Studies of identical twins, who are natural clones, do not support the myth that they also have identical brains, and by implication, identical minds. If two identical foetuses look once in opposite directions, their brains will be different. Indeed, clones can never be exact replicas of each other (as we duly learned from movies like Multiplicity).Myths are beautiful fables devised to account for all the mysteries of life and death. Few people now would maintain a supernatural cause of infections, though only little more than a century ago, before the discovery that bacteria caused diseases, this was the common view.
In the dearth of understanding of the mechanisms of the mind and the brain, and the effects of their diseases, we still tackle their mysteries by aping early man: invoking divine intervention or taking shelter in simplistic dogmas.Popular books sustaining such myths overflow from the shelves We live in a very credulous world. Any right-minded alien visiting us would wonder whether there is intelligent life on earth. As with most domains of human knowledge, the various disciplines loosely lumped together as neurosciences are not exempt from personal beliefs, prejudices, faith, hopes, hunches, and ultimately myths.The neuroscience and psychology literature is the principal myth-maker. Nevertheless, the scientific tradition has embedded rules which decrease the chance of blunders existing for very long. The acceptance of these rules in accruing knowledge marks the difference between science and beliefs, between what we do know about the mind and the brain and what we think we know about them. Perhaps more important, accepting these rules allows us to admit what we do not yet know.Understanding how the brain functions through the methods of science can be a creative endeavour; unsubstantiated beliefs are tedious.Sergio Della Sala is the editor of `Mind Myths: exploring popular assumptions about the mind and the brain' (Wiley, pounds 19.99).
11 June 1999 Regina v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and Regions, ex parte Bath and North East Somerset District Council Court of Appeal (Lord Justice Roch, Lord Justice Otton and Lord Justice Pill) 26 May 1999 THE SECRETARY of State for the Environment, Transport and Regions had jurisdiction to hear an appeal against the failure of a local planning authority to determine an application for planning permission or for listed building consent within the necessary time period, notwithstanding that the local authority had determined that the application was invalid.The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of Bath and North East Somerset District Council against the dismissal of its application for judicial review of the decision of the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and Regions to hold a public inquiry into the council's failure to determine certain applications for planning and listed building consents.The council was the local planning authority for the City of Bath, which was a Unesco-designated World Heritage Site containing a 1,915 hectare conservation area and about 5,000 listed buildings.Applications for planning and listed building consents were made to the council by Ski Enterprises (UK) Ltd ("the company") which involved internal and external alterations to a listed building and a material change of use. Considerable detail, by way of narrative and drawings, was supplied to the council in support of the proposal.The council wrote to the company stating that the documents which had been submitted were not adequate to enable them to consider the proposal, and that the applications could not be accepted or processed further until additional detailed information was provided. The company declined to provide the detail requested on the ground that until they knew whether the change of use was acceptable in principle, the detail could not sensibly be provided.The council then told the company that the applications had not been registered and would not be processed further until receipt of the details requested. The company appealed to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and Regions, pursuant to section 78 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and section 20 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, on the ground that the appellants had failed, within the appropriate period, to determine the applications.The Secretary of State fixed the time and date of an inquiry into the appeals.
The council applied by way of judicial review for an order prohibiting the Secretary of State from holding a public inquiry, on the ground that he had no jurisdiction to hear the appeals as the council had decided that the applications on which they were based were invalid, and it was the sole arbiter as to whether sufficient detail had been included with the applications.Meyric Lewis (Sharpe Pritchard) for the council; Alice Robinson (Treasury Solicitor) for the Secretary of State.Lord Justice Pill said that in the light of Geall v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and Regions (unreported, 11 December 1998), and upon a purposive construction of the statutes and a consideration of the statutory scheme as a whole, a right of appeal under section 78 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and section 20 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 arose even when the local planning authority had formed the view that the application which was the subject of the appeal was invalid.The words "which the local authority considers to be valid" should not be read into section 78 or section 20 to govern the word "application". A determination of invalidity by the local authority did not exclude the right of appeal to the Secretary of State on the question of validity.The applications in the present case accordingly remained applications for the purpose of triggering the operation of the appeal provisions in the legislation notwithstanding the view of the council that the applications were invalid.. "TODAY I had a slapping walk." One might think this a Bright Young Thing's remark, not that of the cerebral poet Wallace Stevens when writing to his wife in 1912. The OED omits its survival in America this century, but notes the two 19th-century usages: large and fast. In each case, this refers to both men and horses, as does spanking, which goes back to the 17th century, possibly from spanke, Danish for strut.
Whether Stevens's walk from Manhattan was long, brisk, or both, he enjoyed it, and thought of the poet Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles' phrase: "J'ai le gout de l'azur", although, eight years earlier, Stevens wrote, "God! What a thing blue is! It is one of the few things left that bring tears to my eyes (or almost) It pulls at the heart.". EVEN BEFORE kick-off in Sofia on Wednesday night there were indications that it would not be all right on the night, notably the sight of Gareth Southgate, in full England kit, queuing for the public toilets, the dressing- room facilities being too grim for words. The same may apply to England's fate come the autumn though, doubtless, the headline writers will find the words. The pall of despondency which fell over England at the final whistle will not have been improved upon being met on their return by headlines such as "Hopeless", "On their knees", "Second-raters" and "A load of Bul". It was a harsh reaction to what, in ordinary circumstances, would be regarded as a decent result, but it matched the mood of the team and coaching staff.