A Deadly Wandering: Part One

He climbed out and saw that his Ford had practically bisected the sedan, severed it.

By 2006, people in the United States were sending around 12.5 billion texts a month, which sounds like a lot, but the technology really was embryonic.

Once in a while, his tenacity invited citizen complaints.

Dr. Gazzaley’s lab contains around $10 million worth of equipment that the researchers speak of only by acronyms, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the EEG (electroencephalography), and the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation).

The pair have been working on a pop science project together in which Dr. Gazzaley shows what Mickey’s brain looks like while he’s drumming, trying to elucidate not just the brain of a rock star but that of an aging one.

It told our forebears whether to run when they saw a lion or perk up at the sound of a bird that might be food.

It falls into an aspect of cognition that’s related to the selection of information to be processed.

He suggests I come to his next First Friday cocktail party, his monthly hipster soiree.

“It was kind of sacrilegious,” the devout Mormon says of naming him after a pope.

ATK and its denizens might’ve bragged about their relationship with NASA and the space shuttle

they were absolutely integral in helping redesign its boosters.

They helped explain why the community could grow so close, the families in the cities so interdependent, and their ideas in some ways so insular.

His mother had had a debilitating stroke when Ed was eleven; one of seven children.

To Lisa, Reggie was a model kid: friendly, widely liked, quick-witted, but never seeming to crave the limelight.

The entries would juxtapose the mundane thrill and confusion of being a young girl with the terror of living with Danny.

Now she was an even more voracious reader.

Among the visitors to the house was Tom Higgs, Keith’s boss—putative boss, really, given that Keith was the guy at the office answering questions.

Leaned against the wall, let the grief out. She reappeared thirty minutes later, drained, back in a modicum of control.

Roughly, he estimated that “neural conduction time” was around one hundred meters per second.

It was not obvious that people were slow to respond until the 1850s.

The increasing use of machines began to make this obvious,” says Michael I. Posner, a professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of Oregon, who is one of the modern pioneers of attention science and a student of its history.

Donders’s writing at the time shows an ebullient quality, such as when he describes the challenges of quantifying mental processing.

“But will all qualitative treatment of mental processes be out of the question then? By no means!”

In this setting, amid a cacophony of face-to-face and virtual communications, another key piece falls into place.

Danny would wake her, demand it, berate her, threaten her.

Terryl felt like her mother blamed her for antagonizing Danny, and making things worse.

Terryl was doing a command performance for her debate team, arguing about the deleterious impact of violence in advertising.

In 2007, a survey by Nationwide Insurance found that 73 percent of people reported talking on a cell phone while driving, with teen drivers showing the highest use of any demographic.

He was plenty charismatic, but in a quiet way.

Her notes, released with Reggie’s permission, read: “He reports some ruminating and wishing more than anything else he had not been on the road at that moment.”

The environment explains how Reggie could have felt himself in a fishbowl or crucible; how he’d put his family in a bad light.

After the war, he studied auditory channels, trying to understand what we focus on, and how much information we can absorb and process and under what circumstances.

His name and work would become increasingly appreciated as neuroscientists delved beyond behavioral studies and looked at the physical structures of the brain.

These were among the seminal researchers in the field, but there were others and, collectively, with the war behind them, they had a new luxury: Gone was the immediate, life-and-death pressure of figuring out how to help pilots and radar operators sustain attention under duress.

In 1945, for instance, AT&T began introducing a kind-of mobile phone service, derived from military radio technology, in a few metropolitan markets in the United States.

Far from being ubiquitous, it could only be used simultaneously by no more than twenty people in a single city.

And it was unwieldy, like two hundred pounds, and so the detailers couldn’t really move it.

These executive control neurons, unlike many other specialized neurons in more primitive parts of the brain (a neuron in the visual cortex, for instance, might have the singular role of identifying the color red) seem to have the function of bringing together lots of information from disparate parts of the brain and organizing them, helping set direction, goal, and focus.

A feral, terrified look in her dark eyes, wet with tears.

Finally, Terryl came to the rationale she felt inside so personally, so deeply, the reason that, if nothing else, was her best bet at swaying women to act.