I love it. I earlier blogged about a new study in PNAS concerning the relationship between changes in adolescent brains and behavior. I title the blog “Teen Brains.” Because blogging is a new thing for me, I am slowly letting trusted friends and family know about the site. So I point my friend Howard to my blog and ask for his…how did I put it…”recklessly honest” opinion. Howard is on vacation, and so uses a public computer in one of the finer hotel chains in the US to connect to this blog. The page won’t load, because the built-in filters didn’t like “Teen” and “Brain.”
Right. So I’m not going to deal with the question of whether filters are a good thing. We’ve heard in the past that as most of them are implemented, they are pretty draconian. Try to search for information on “breast cancer” and see what happens. In any event, I can understand why “Teen” might be blocked, but “Brain?” Maybe it is “Teen” and “Brain” together that raises the flags (so to speak) of the filter. I’ve been the brain business for over 25 years, and while I am aware of the wealth of neuroscience literature, I take pride in keeping…er…abreast of the variety of disciplines. It saddens me deeply to now realize that there was a subspecialty of my field that may have been far more interesting than what I’ve been pursuing. That said, I think I would recall those posters at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
I think the title of this blog will definitely spoof the filters.
For more detailed information and analysis for the lay public, see here => http://tinyurl.com/95vbr
Left by Lex on February 28th, 2008