Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 50 — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION sure, the person involved is far from normal. Nevertheless, there may be disturbance of one aspect of mentality while all the rest of the mind is un- affected. There is a case on record of an elderly lady who was mentally normal in every respect except that she claimed to be constantly seeing a column of people in highly coloured clothes marching across her field of vision. Examination disclosed a quite small, non-malignant growth in her brain. In another case, a young soldier had a motor cycle accident in which the frontal part of his brain was injured. This had no effect on his body, but his personality underwent a dramatic change; he became highly aggressive and over- familiar with strangers. And the records of sleeping-sick- ness (which attacks the brain) patients are full of instances in which the patients became antisocial, secretive and miser- able, even after they had been cured; the brain tissue was permanently damaged, and was keeping these people in this unhappy state. There is also on record the case of a healthy, decent young labourer who had the greater part of his forebrain destroyed—and turned into a $1 liar, cheat and complete wastrel. How many other people of this type, we must ask ourselves, are not, in effect, to blame for their behaviour? A classical ex- ample is the woman who was diagnosed as a nymphoma- niac and treated by psychia- trists for several years before an observant doctor discovered that her abnormal behaviour was due entirely to a small tumour in her brain. The tumour was removed and she became a perfectly normal woman. If such a serious thing as a tumour can produce such a profound distortion of mind, is it not likely that consider- ably less serious injuries will also result in an impairment of mental function, but on a lesser scale ? One would expect that the smaller or less exten- sive the injury, the less would be the deviation from the mental norm. And this is what is actually observed to be the case. On the very mild level, we find that the condition of the brain synapses (junctions be- tween nerve fibres) has its out- ward manifestation in mental life. The person whose synapses are fairly wide apart or whose transmission of impulse across the junction is slow, is found commcloooks.com