Free Republic

Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics, edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler, Chicago: Open Court, 450 pages, $36.95 paper In 1980 Thomas Szasz testified for the prosecution in the trial of Darlin June Cromer, a 34-year-old white woman charged with kidnapping and murdering Reginald Williams, a 5-year-old black boy. There was no question that Cromer, who attracted suspicion because she had a history of talking about “killing niggers” and trying to lure black children into her car, had abducted Reginald from an Oakland, California, supermarket, strangled him, and buried his body near her home. She had told police...

TAMPA - A team of Finnish researchers working with Tampa's Johnnie B. Byrd Sr. Alzheimer's Center and Research Institute has developed a drug that could be a major advancement for people with spinal cord injuries and degenerative diseases including Alzheimer's. The researchers, led by Paivi Liesi, at the University of Helsinki, isolated a combination of amino acids known as tripeptide lysine-aspartic acid isoleucine. When tested in rats, the combination prevented neurotoxins from destroying neurons in the rats' brains. The therapy could slow or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said. It could be a boon for the...

NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER NO sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes. To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business." He didn't care. "The thing about A.D.D. is how much it affects your self-esteem,'' Mr. Harper said....

The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain. The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say."This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such...