These X-rays show a knife plunged into the skull of a 16-year-old boy from southeast London. Fortunately, his injuries were nowhere near as serious as they might have been - according to a police officer quoted in The Times, "the blade was a kitchen knife and because of that it was flexible and went around the bone." He has, however, started walking with a limp, and his reaction times have slowed.
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(C. D. Tavares) writes:
Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice, Second Edition, U.S.
Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ-105506,
March 1988.
I've noticed, of myself, lately, that I never have a knife or a bottle opener handy, but I was once the guy who always had a knife or a bottle opener handy. That is generally true of archaeologists, and I used to be a full time archaeologist.
Over on Quiche Moraine I'm writing up a series of short posts on the influences of 1960s and 1970s TV on the sociocultural growth and development of Ammerican Yoots of the age.
Yours truly is currently on a plane which left Detroit at 2pm today (well, or I will be shortly) and is headed towards Shanghai, China. I'm off to visit my parents in Suzhou and then a week each in Malaysian Borneo and Phi Phi/Koh Phenang Thailand. I'm so unbelievably psyched!
scaryyyy , i dnt fink it wz dun by accident who wud do dat az an accident i mean even i cnt get a knife by accidently into my head
1) I'm happy I don't live in London.
2) Any further tests of cognitive performance, or any fMRIs to show the degree of damage done to the tissue? I am sure that many neuropsychologists would like to see the effects of a Phineas Gage imitator.
:P
I'm sure he must have been referred to a neuropsych unit, but the news story is all I have to go on.
I don't think his injury is very similar to Gage's - the knife appears not to have penetrated the brain at all, but instead scraped the outer surface.
Ow. That has completely given me the willies. I think it's actually extra freaky that the knife bent on his skull, although it no doubt saved him a great deal of cognitive functionality.
Fortunately, the skull protected his brain (which is what a skull is supposed to do). It's interesting that the victim is walking with a limp. Is that due to damage to the motor cortex or is something else going on?