Friday, October 17, 2014

Putty for Brains


As complex and powerful as the human brain is, it has the consistency of jelly. As Daniel Bor explains in his novel The Ravenous Brain, our brains top the list in terms of powerful organs in the body, as all physiological functions result from interactions between our brain and other parts of our body.  The brain registers neuronal impulses in milliseconds, and yet an injury as slight as a punch to the head has the potential to lead to various degrees of brain trauma. When an action as simple as being punched in the head can lead to serious brain injuries, one can imagine how easily athletes who play the sport of football professionally may suffer from various levels of brain trauma.
            Over the past year, there has been a major uproar within the National Football League regarding currently retired football players and their mental health status due to playing football. Approximately 5,000 former NFL players sued the league for deceiving them and telling them football would not affect their mental health while they played in the league. For years the NFL refuted claims regarding research done illustrating correlations between playing in the NFL and degraded mental capacity among retired players. The article, titled Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees, describes how recent studies have shown that playing professional football increases the odds of developing certain neurological disorders, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
            As Bor states in The Ravenous Brain, patients with disorders related to consciousness twenty years ago would have had very mediocre aid from the medical community. Though a vast majority of the players in the NFL who filed the lawsuit do not have brain trauma as severely as some patients that Bor described do, they were essentially lied to about how playing football would affect their health in the future and felt obligated to demand compensation. As more research has been conducted regarding football players and mental health, more studies have concluded that playing football indeed plays a major factor in the degradation of one’s mental state. As the studies became more numerous, the NFL last year settled on a $675 million settlement with the former NFL players as compensation for their injuries and aid for their continuing treatments.
            The actuaries hired by the NFL have shown that approximately 28 percent of former players will develop a neurological disease liable to be compensated through the lawsuit. As the title of the article states, this illustrates that almost one out of every three NFL players will develop a form of some neurological condition such as CTE, dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease. This is an incredibly high percentage in regards to the number of players in this league. To put this into perspective, there are 32 teams in the NFL, and each team consists of a 52-man roster. That means there are 1,664 total players in the NFL (and this is ignoring each team’s practice squad), and so years from now, approximately 554 of them will exhibit some form of mental degradation.  The number of potential people who will suffer and have already suffered from neurological degradation is extraordinary, and something must be done in order to maintain their mental health.

Bor, D. (2012). The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Belson, Ken. (2014, September 12). Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees: Article. The New York Times. Retrieved October 16, 2014.



 

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