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Lightning and Your Brain
Thu Jul 17, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook. Lightning can do some pretty
incredible things, from arcing over mountains to come out of a clear, blue sky, to exploding a
tree. Lightning damage to the human body has been subject to myth for many years. Dr. Mary Ann
Cooper, a lightning treatment guru, explains.
MARYANN: With high voltage electrical injuries [it's true -] you can get very deep burns.
With lightning, it's just too short to burn through the skin in most circumstances. What
lightning does do - it's a neurological injury. It damages the nervous system. That includes
the brain, so that the thought processing mechanisms don't work as well as they used to -
attention deficit problems, memory, short-term memory, personality changes, easy fatigability.
Another thing is chronic pain where the nerves are signaling, misfiring to the brain and
telling the brain that there's pain at the area that the nerve is serving.
BRYAN: I remember that people would say "Ah, these people are just lazy or faking it." How
can we tell?
MARYANN: They show up on the neurocognitive testing where you're actually testing the ability
to remember words, to, um, pull up words for a sentence, to, uh, do other kinds of mental
functions. As far as pain - none of us have good measures for how to quantify whether the
person's having pain or how severe it is - or how severe it is to that particular
person.
Dr. Mary Ann Cooper is a researcher and Emergency Department physician at the University of
Chicago. We are funded by Subaru of America and The National Science Foundation. Check out
lightning links and our new web survey at www.weathernotebook.org.
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