friday night lights

[ironymaiden]

via a locked post, a cool brain science article combined with a comparison of football and dogfighting cultures: football, brain trauma, and being "game". (includes vivid description of dogfighting.)

key bit for the teal deer crowd: repeated knocks to the head cause the same kind of brain damage as second-stage Alzheimer's. the only way to see it is by dissecting the brain; the damage is already present at 18, and NFL vets have visible scar tissue. research is just starting, but this is also bad news for soldiers.

ugh. both of my brothers were linemen in high school and then went on to a couple decades of employment that involved getting knocked around. not in any way equivalent, but bad news when there's also family history of dementia.

what if the people who were such thugs in the land of my youth were suffering from brain damage, and had grown up with a brain-damaged parent (football/military/heavy machinery)? what extra frosting of awful does this add to physical abuse?

Comments

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing it.

[irishninja.livejournal.com]

I wrote a tl;dr comment and decided it was even more rambling and pointless than usual for me. So I deleted it in favor of this shorter one. ;)

Thanks for the link. This is the second article I've read about the brain damage in football. The addition of the dog fighting doesn't really add much to the article and should have been separate, and it seems like the writer is trying too hard to tie them together at the end. But c'est la vie. An interesting article, if not well organized. :)

[ironymaiden]

agreed. i'm guessing that the writer was able to sell the article by pitching the tenuous connection to current events.

[ivy]

Yeah, the abuse thought occurred to me too, and that was deeply horrifying.