Word: though
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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There is evidently no way to help these unfortunate folks (though, admittedly, they don't know what they're missing). But for instrumentalists, at least, music can evidently trigger physical changes in the brain's wiring. By measuring faint magnetic fields emitted by the brains of professional musicians, a team led by Christo Pantev of the University of Muenster's Institute of Experimental Audiology in Germany has shown that intensive practice of an instrument leads to discernible enlargement of parts of the cerebral cortex, the layer of gray matter most closely associated with higher brain function...
...colleagues talk frankly with their classes about her illness, emphasizing that even though Mrs. Dillon now has a disability, she is the same person inside that she has always been. On a recent Monday, teacher Shelly Bancroft read David Adler's Lou Gehrig, the Luckiest Man to her fourth-graders, then led a group discussion. Katha Edwards' class, which had read E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan, about a bird without a voice, talked about Dillon's muteness. Said a student: "Mrs. Dillon is brave. She has a disease, but she works and works and never gives...
...believe in brain damage though. Take Phineas Gage, for example. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1848, Gage, a construction foreman for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was preparing a powder charge for blasting rock when it accidentally exploded, sending a 3-ft. 7-in., 13-lb. iron tamping bar straight through his skull. Gage fully recovered and lived for 12 more years, but his personality changed. He became an extravagant, antisocial, foulmouthed, bad-mannered liar. And apparently he'd been a pretty nice guy before the accident...
...though Miro or Matisse is about to vanish into the oubliette--that isn't in the cards. The 20th century has seen great artists whose work and names, as the eulogists say, will live forever. But the Guggenheim's show makes you think of the impending fate of our present. It is a lead-pipe cinch that the year 2100 will see the absurdities of our taste, both private and official, and wonder how we could have been so comically wrong about such self-evident crap. A few score years from now, will Jeff Koons' porcelain confections be on view...
...curator Robert Rosenblum was eager to raise them. Most of the fashionable art of our fin-de-siecle is just as lousy as the worst stuff here, and done at a far lower level of skill. Memento mori, and send not to know for whom the bell tolls: cracked though it is, it tolls...