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Lightning and Your Brain
Wed Jun 22, 2005
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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