Bird’s Eye: Hockey fans know about concussions, and football fans are learning. Less well known, and clearly explicated is the problem that these injuries are equally likely to happen and much more serious medically among high school age players, an overwhelming percentage of whom will never play for millions of dollars. It isn’t clear that there are solutions: the best “anti-concussion” helmet reduces injuries by 2%. And linked in the vaguest of fashion is an article about what Magic Mushrooms do to your brain, and why they may be useful for long term treatment of depression.

*  Concussions In Adolescents And The Future Of Football  Jonah Lehrer Grantland

If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) …While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it’s now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.

The consequences appear to be particularly severe for the adolescent brain….Although these teenagers are suffering concussions at higher rates and with worse consequences — the head trauma of football targets the most vulnerable areas of the developing brain — the overwhelming majority of these kids will never play the sport competitively again. They are getting paid nothing and yet they are paying the highest cost. 

* Helmets For Snow Sports  Ski Injury

Shealy et al conclude “…the findings are not particularly supportive of the notion that wearing helmets will significantly reduce the number of fatalities in winter snow sports”. This was supported by a presentation at the last ISSS meeting by the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Vermont, USA – Dr Paul L. Morrow. Dr Morrow was of the opinion that of 54 deaths at commercial ski areas in Vermont from 1979/80 to 1997/98, helmets would not have been of any particular value in saving any of the lives lost – as the degree of trauma simply overwhelmed any benefits that the helmet might convey in an impact. To quote Shealy et al again – a team of highly respected ski injury researchers – “On the basis of results to date, there is no clear evidence that helmets have been shown to be an effective means of reducing fatalities in alpine sports”. 

Its a sobering fact for example that more than half of the people involved in fatal accidents in 2008/09  at ski areas in the USA were wearing helmets at the time of the incident (Source – NSAA). As Shealy states “Even though the prevalence of helmet utilization is rising by 4 to 5 percent per year in the U.S., there has been no statistically significant observable effect on the incident of fatality.”

* Magic Mushrooms Expand the Mind By Dampening Brain Activity Heartland

Aldous Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” necessary to “help us to stay alive.”

A new study by British researchers supports this theory. It shows for the first time how psilocybin — the drug contained in magic mushrooms — affects the connectivity of the brain. Researchers found that the psychedelic chemical, which is known to trigger feelings of oneness with the universe and a trippy hyperconsciousness, does not work by ramping up the brain’s activity as they’d expected. Instead, it reduces it.

“The results seem to imply that a lot of brain activity is actually dedicated to keeping the world very stable and ordinary and familiar and unsurprising,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, a postdoctoral student at Imperial College London and lead author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Indeed, Huxley and Blake had predicted what turns out to be a key finding of modern neuroscience: many of the human brain’s highest achievements involve preventing actions instead of initiating them, and sifting out useless information rather than collecting and presenting it for conscious consideration.