The Encephalitic Cry: not just a Durutti Column / Psychedelic Furs crossover band

The search for hilarity to ensue took me to the Twiddle machine, and introduced me to the concept of the Encephalitic Cry.

It turns out to be an accepted, unquestioned fact within the Antivax belief system that a distinctive high-pitched infant cry is a diagnostic symptom of (post-vaccination) encephalitis. "Unquestioned" because to question that part of the catechism would be to deny parental experience. The cry is so well-known as to need neither a medical-textbook or academic citation, nor actual reports from the throngs of parents experiencing it. Instead it is brought to us by the impersonal They Say and the all-powerful Passive Voice (is there anything that can't be accomplished by it?).

Some people call that scream the "encephalitic cry" because it sounds similar to the high-pitched crying often associated with encephalitis

[Pediatricians] even have a name for it. It's called an encephalitic cry, meaning that it is caused by inflammation and swelling in the brain.

I tried to engage the twitters in friendly corrective badinage, for "Clinical diagnostics through acoustic analysis of baby cries" was once my area of expertise (a few regenerations ago), and I can happily bore people at parties with idle talk of vocal stridor and subharmonics and jitter index and prematurity crying and cri-du-chat syndrome. Also I have memories to share from the 4th International Cry Workshop in Munich (1992)... of learning the proper way to hold a stein, and losing drinking races with Mechthild Papoušek, while Freddy DeHaen explained his rubber-band device for eliciting controlled, calibrated pain cries. But it was not to be.

In contrast, Russell Blaylock's expertise in cry acoustics (and pediatrics) came from his training in neurosurgery. For it was from Blaylock's forehead that the whole construct leaped fully-formed, in the manner of Athena Pallas, in a 2008 word-dump at the Mercola supplement-scam webstore.

Mothers and fathers are familiar with the high-pitched crying their babies have after such a series of vaccines. .... This is not due to the pain of the injection, as the pediatrician will assure you, rather it is secondary to brain inflammation – what we call an encephalitic cry.63

We are referred to a 1990 paper for proof that "we call [it] an encephalitic cry". Alas, although crying and "an encephalopathy" are mentioned in [63], they are separate -- one is not a symptom of the other -- which is to say, Blaylock was lying giving artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Wrong Blaylock, but nice un-Athenaed forehead!

Blaylock's fabrication was distributed by CIA Parker, who is admired in the Antivaxosphere for her energetic on-task willingness to copy-paste identical comments to countless newspapers and blogs. Parker's Origin Story is that she refused the offer of a HepB vaccination for her infant. However, the infant later cried, proving that she had encephalitis, proving that the vaccine had secretly been inflicted contrary to instruction... together constituting incontrovertible proof that vaccines do cause encephalitis, which causes the diagnostic cry (and autism). Parker's response at the time of her diagnosis of a life-threatening brain inflammation was to rush the child to hospital sleep through it.

she reacted with four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and was later diagnosed with autism.
it caused four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and she was later diagnosed with autism.
she reacted with four days and nights of endless screaming, vaccine-induced encephalitis, and was diagnosed with autism at 20 months.
She reacted with four days and nights of constant, inconsolable screaming (vaccine-induced encephalitis, see Merck Manual), and was later diagnosed with autism.

However, the title of "Second stage in the human centipede" properly belongs to Christina England, another antivax Thought Influencer, who has found the EC construct useful in her day-job of "Apologist for Infanticide".

Professionals often refer to high pitched screaming or seizures shortly after this vaccination, indicating a problem. Neil Z Miller an American medical research journalist, anti-vaccine and natural health advocate wrote the following in the Vaccine Safety Manual.
“Many of the mothers noticed that their children had a high-pitched cry soon after their vaccination or vaccinations. This is called the encephalitic cry, meaning that it is caused by an inflamed, swollen brain. It also explains the difficulty many mothers have in waking their children, the vomiting, passing out and irritability following vaccinations. These are all signs of an inflamed brain.”

England affects to be a Journalist and Independent Researcher. As such, she is unfamiliar with the possibility that the Foreword of a book can sometimes be written by someone other than the author of the book per se, so here she is crediting Neil Z. Miller for a passage which was in fact from Blaylock again.

Later in Blaylock's Foreword we meet a population of Schrödinger's Pediatricians. Simultaneously they (1) know about the Encephalitic Cry, but conceal it from parents for fear of lawsuits, and (2) are unaware of the EC because they confine themselves to mere evidence as a source of knowledge rather than Blaylock's superior Aristotelean intuition, unsullied by observation.

The reason that pediatricians are telling these mothers that their children’s reactions to these vaccines are normal is based on at least two factors. One, most pediatricians, in my experience, know absolutely nothing about a child’s brain. When I was practicing, if anything happened to a pediatrician’s patient that in any way indicated something was wrong with the child’s brain, the doctor was on the phone with me in an instant. Most admitted they knew nothing about the brain. The second reason is that they are trying to avoid a lawsuit. If they can convince the mother that everything is well, they may avoid a trip to the courtroom.

But the notable point here is Blaylock's formulation -- "It is called..." or "We call it..." -- with its simultaneous appeal to objectivity, popular acceptance, and the authoritative voices of the leprechauns in Blaylock's underpants. It was conserved as the construct entered the antivax catechism of consensus fact. Perhaps it fitted well into the lab-coat-&-stethoscope Clinician Cosplay that dominates the antivaxosphere. It also minimises any personal investment in the claim one stakes. At any rate, the word-pair of "Encephalitic cry" is seldom encountered on its own: the whole phrase is the unit or single building-block for conceptual prefabrication.

The Argument-by-Encephalitic-Cry is preserved in an almost prototypal form, down in the archives of a 2017 Respectful Insolence comment thread.

That high-pitched encephalitic scream after vaccination–don’t worry, it’s all perfectly normal...
So many parents have noted a distinctive high-pitched scream in the hours or days following vaccination...
Some people call it the “encephalitic cry” because it is similar to the high pitched scream observed in children with encephalitis. Some theorize it is caused by a swelling of the brain following vaccination.

I can only speculate that Blaylock's thought process, such as it was, worked by magical-thinking analogy with a whistling kettle. Just as the pitch of the whistle goes up as the kettle boils and the pressure increases, so the inter-cranial pressure of imaginary encephalitis would manifest as a higher-pitched cry. If babies' skulls happened to be kettles.

I've the whitish blue eye of my Gallic ancestors, the narrow skull, and the awkwardness in combat...The Gauls were the most inept flayers of cattle and burners of grass of their age

This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing, frame-story, and additional background about Neandertal mini-brains.

Previous generations didn't have the video games and social media and digital communication that they could conjure into dire warnings about mental deterioration and the reversion of the young peoples into Morlocks. Instead they made do with the unprecedented speed and easy availability of automotive transport, which would inevitably change the skulls of drivers into a more elongate shape, as a form of streamlining, with concomitant effects upon the mind, heralding a a future of brutish, degraded, degenerate mentalities when the asylums would overflow. ***
.

A natural train of thought - the local commuter train, not the fast express service - leads us to Tochiyama et al. (2018), who recently compared the Neandertal and the Anatomically Modern Skull, to delineate the differences in shape and infer how this must have impacted on Neanderthal cognition. By "the Neandertal Skull" we mean four individual crania, each reassembled from fragments with state-of-the-art 'guesswork' methods to interpolate the missing bits; and the same for the four representatives of Cro-Magnon. Later steps in the guesswork logic assume that the volumes of brain lobes are linked rigidly to the shape of the skull, and only radial deformations are possible: for instance, if someone's forehead is compressed, the frontal lobe behind it must be smaller.


This explains the absence of frontal-lobe functioning among Mayans, other pre-Columbian cultures, East Germanic tribes, French peasants, and umpteen other groups known to modify their infants' cranial profiles with head-binding for aesthetic purposes and status enhancement.



Anyway... Tochiyama et al. are described as pioneers in this burgeoning new field of Quantified Neanderthal Phrenology:

But as SR co-author Naomichi Ogihara told Scientific American, they are the first to actually digitally reconstruct Neanderthal brains.
“Our method allows estimation of the shape and volume of each brain region, which is quite impossible just by analyzing the endocranial surfaces.”

The claim to precedence is true as long as one ignores a slightly-earlier and less-well-publicised study (Neubauer, Hublin and Gunz, 2018). Isn't it always the same? You wait for ages for a paper on Neandertal Phrenology and then two come along at once.

Fig 1, Neubauer et al.

It is quite likely that the notion of extrapolating from skull shape to brain function had occurred to many people in the past, but had previously been rejected as patently daft. In the Golden Age of craniometry in the early 1900s, skull-caliper hobbyists and gentlemen dilettante-anthropologists liked to divide populations into those with bradycephalic and dolichocephalic heads... long narrow heads (the latter kind) were more common in Europe, and therefore superior. But no-one argued that the owners of wider, brachycephalic skulls also possessed larger temporal lobes and would be more skilled in language, memory and facial recognition.*

Now both studies fall within a recognised literary genre in which novelists and evolutionary psychologists and other authors of fiction speculate about the mental differences between Neanderthals and their anatomically-modern contemporaries, and about the racial-memory Original-Sin scars inflicted on the latter by the trauma of having to exterminate the former. Authors follow a roughly 30-year cycle, explaining the current revival of this literary tradition: see Wells 1921; Harness 1953; Golding 1955; Kurtén 1978; Auel 1980.**

It goes without saying that Neandertals must have differed in some respect, for they are no longer extant and there must be some reason for this. Also no-one wants to miss an opportunity to talk about ourselves and 'human nature' in the guise of talking about what we are not. If Neanderthals had not existed then it would be necessary to invent them.

Avid Riddled readers (is there any other kind?) will recall the beginning of this revival with the 'visual brain' theory from 2013. In this, evolution assigned so much of the Neandertal cortex to processing visual information (in compensation for the lower level of lighting in their Northern European habitat of icecaps and blizzards and cave-bears) that no brain-power was left for social-cognition skills and they could not cooperate in groups. Larger eye-sockets were adduced as evidence, and explained as an adaptation to capture more photons. This is SCIENCE so evidence is not merely 'provided' or 'tabled', it is adduced.

It is a very silly theory even by the relaxed standards of Riddled, and I can only suppose that it was accepted into Proc. Roy. Soc. B because the third author was Dunbar (of the eponymous Number). Some people might think that if Neanderthals had enlarged light-trap tarsier eyes, this would do away with the need for special night-sight neural processing requiring half their cortex... but those people are the same nay-saying skeptics and cavilling pedants who also point out that Neandertals lived all across the Levant and were not exclusively adapted to Northern Europe (that's just where a lot of caves are where their bones turned up), so their opinions can safely be ignored.

Press-release-regurging science churnalists at the time dwelt on the elongation of the Neanderthal side of the comparison:

And in fact, Neanderthal skulls suggest that the extinct hominids had elongated regions in the back of their brains, called the "Neanderthal bun," where the visual cortex lies.
"It looks like a Victorian lady's head," Dunbar told LiveScience.

Here at the Riddled Institute of Impure Science and Gratuitous Innuendo, we attribute this cerebral elongation to the extreme rapidity of the Paleolithic forms of transport favoured by Neandertals (or perhaps they practiced head-binding), but other scholars are slow to accept this explanation.

Neubauer et al. (2018) went along with the elongation / globular narrative to account for Cro-Magnon ascendancy. In contrast, Tochiyama et al. (2018) (returning to them at last!) struck off in a new direction. Unable to find any convincing cerebral differences between their Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon reconstructions, they kept fishing, and eventually reported that modern brains have larger cerebellums. Or cerebella, as the case may be. This in turn led them to the startling conclusion that the cerebellum, previously regarded as responsible for 'muscle sequencing / coordination' computations for routine movements, must in fact be the centre of our highest cognitive qualities. I am not making this up:

A new scientific analysis shows that human skulls are shaped in a way that suggests they encased brains with slightly larger cerebellums than Neanderthals. The cerebellum is a brain region associated with activities like planning, adapting to new environments, switching between tasks, and building social relationships

And because cerebellar volume is linked to abilities like cognitive flexibility, language processing, and working memory capacity, the scientists argue larger cerebellar hemispheres may have helped humans survive and adapt to a dangerous world while Neanderthals could not.

This is the point where the usual pedants and critics object that the volume and neural density of the cerebellum also tend to be greater in men than in women. "Which probably means: Neanderthals were as unorganized, antisocial, unimaginative, multi-task failures as modern-day womenfolk!"

After all that, it is a relief to turn to a recent paper with a different approach to the question of Neandertal craniometry: Gregory et al. (2017) introduced the useful concept of the "NeanderScore" and reconstructed that prototypal skull shape by measuring living people and ranking them by their proportion of Neanderthal ancestry. High NeanderScorers tended to have bigger brains, especially at the back in an "occipito-parieto-temporal patch", and were especially endowed in the region of the intraparietal sulcus (perhaps best described as important for visual-motor skills).

Figure 2. NeanderScore related brain changes in the intraparietal sulcus. Structural variation of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) related to percentage of Neanderthal-derived SNPs (NeanderScore). Left and middle show lateral and posterior views of the right IPS on the average brain surface, illustrating the anatomical convergence of the associations of NeanderScore with greater sulcal depth (orange; p < 0.05 FWE-corrected), gray matter volume (blue; p < 0.005), and white matter volume (yellow; p < 0.005).

There was no downside:

It should be noted that we did not find associations of NeanderScore with smaller frontotemporal volumes³⁸ or shortened anterior extension of the temporal lobes¹³, as might have been hypothesized from previous cranial analyses of H. neanderthalensis

The most recent, best-founded reconstructions of Neandertal appearance have an uncanny resemblance to Paula Modersohn-Becker's portraits of herself and husband Otto. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Thanks to Tom Björklund for permission;
more of his work here

* Racial skull-shape differences had already entered popular culture when Rimbaud wrote 'Une Saison en Enfer' (1873). In 'The Anthropologist at Large' (1910), the globular, brachycephalic nature of a bowler hat was a crucial clue for identifying a burglar.

** There is also Vendramini's provocative idea that Neandertals were superior predators while their anatomically-normal contemporaries were merely prey to be stalked and consumed. This provides a possible explanation for the extinction of the Cro-Magnons. As for Kurup and Kurup's audacious but not particularly coherent notions about the autistic Neanderthal civilisation of Dravidian Lemuria, the less said the better.

*** Going back to the 'Automotive brain'... Oglaf's Dwarves demonstrated the effect of chariot speed on skull shape.

In our continuing experiments at Riddled, travel velocity has so far proved unpromising as a way of restructuring heads and brains, but that may simply reflect the fact that the fastest modes of transport accessible to the Riddled staff are the #23 bus, and Another Kiwi's pizza-delivery motortrike on days when he is not rostered on.

We are naturally interested in any technology that lends itself to cranial ductility and cortical remodelling... especially after that experiment with the Cosmic Ray Concentrator that was supposed to increase Space-Time Eddie's cerebral capacity (or at least to shrink his body).

Suffice to say that the side-effects were undesirable.

Skullblogging: Fragile Eggshell Mind edition

Marcel Duchamp hommage? New treatment for migraines?

HA HA these suggestions are only japes of the leg-pull variety,and as any fule kno the image [above left] is really Marco Ruggiero -- a person of interest to Riddled -- ultra- scanning his head, using a LA523 linear-array soft-tissue probe (rather than a transcranial probe designed for the task of sending pulses through the skull and getting back a detectable echo) (because reasons).

This is reckless behaviour, and the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League is concerned for Professor Ruggiero's well-being. Really he should be performing these examinations upon villagefolk abducted from the lands around his castle, or upon unwary wayfarers who avail themselves of his hospitality, has he no respect for tradition? For Ruggiero's many contributions to the edifice of Science include his discovery that normal diagnostic-intensity ultrasound is far more biologically potent than previously believed, and in the hands of the talented radiologist a LA523 probe is a weapon OS Star-Trek Medical Tricorder, capable of many things like killing cancer, and opening the Blood-Brain Barrier to let drugs into the brain, and toggling gene function, so we go ahead and the meters are over in the red, It's a mistake in the making

Colour-coded like a tequila hangover

OOPS Sorry we're getting some interference from the Riddled Prog-Rock Channel there. Anyway I am not making this up.

it is not surprising that there are genes in our DNA that are turned on by ultrasounds, and, by a leap of imagination, we could visualize someday having a remote control that lets us turn on or off genes [...] we noticed that ultrasound at certain frequencies can kill cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells unharmed.

Published results in prestigious journals focussed on the implication of this research for ME/CFS, which is why they featured transcranial scans of individuals (the authors) without ME/CFS.


The resulting choppy seas of ripples and artefacts reveal -- when viewed through the eyes of faith -- such fine structures as Cortical Layers V and VI, while closer to the surface, the main reflective density-discontinuity is identified as the temporal bone itself, 1.4-1.6 mm thick. Other ripples are the dura mater, 3.8-5 mm thick, and the subarachnoidal space, 0.6 mm. These values would be publishable in themselves, as usual widths for these structures have ranges like 2.5-5 mm, 1 mm and 3 mm respectively.* Perhaps the authors shared the same aberrant cranial anatomy, or their skulls had been pared down to eggshells by the ultrasound radiation.

Above: Twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the
back of each one explaining what each one was

Another slice of the salami was published in a journal of embryology and anatomy, and therefore was couched within a comparative-anatomy frame-story. Here for shits-'n'-giggles and for tequila-hangover enhancement purposes is that paper's Introduction, garishly colour-coded to distinguish the passages copy-pasted from Schwartz et al. (2004), Lieberman (2011), Carroll (2003) and Bruner et al. (2011).

So last Thursday night after the Old Entomologist Chaetognatha Phylogeny Debate Club and Poetry Slam, and after several pints of Old Iambic Pentametric Porter [brewed with real Iams for extra Taurine], we were inspired to put these discoveries to the test of replication, having exhausted the limerick-rhyme possibilities of 'chaetognatha'.

The contents of Another Kiwi's temporal lobe were not organised quite as neatly as we had anticipated.

Pay no attention to Open Mike's complaints about "Can't find my pate" side-effects, he is just acting out and being a sook.


It was rather disturbing to find that the contents of Space-Time Eddie's skull were looking back at us.

Then we were subject to fits of hysterica shouting and even laughter, which could be the first signs of Sonic Attack, or just the usual sequelae of Old Iambic.

--------------------------------------------------------

* In another paper from the same group, Bradstreet et al. report that the subarachnoidal space is non-echoic and is vanishingly thin in normal children ("< 0.05 cm"), citing Authorities:

consistent with published observations of equally minimal EAF in children ages 2 and older (Lam et al., 2001), i.e., measuring <0.03 cm.

Thus we must question these authors' ability to read as well as their radiographic competence, for the actual values in Lam et al. are larger by a factor of 10, while in practice the space is hypoechoic (because full of trabeculae).

--------------------------------------------------------

When Marco Ruggiero attended the Inaugural GcMAF Congress (in Frankfurt, April 2013) as the newly-appointed Scientific Director of Immuno Biotech, his head-scanning party trick was hailed as one of the Highlights :

Professor Ruggiero demonstrated transcranial sonography, where the effects of an administration of GcMAF can be immediately seen on brain scans, and how the same technology can be used to improve the wellbeing of those with ME/CFS.

Such was its success that popular demand insisted a repeat performance at the 2nd GcMAF Congress (in Dubai, December 2013). Here Ruggiero passed on his expertise in repurposing ultrasonography equipment, finding meningeal details unknown to mainstream anatomy, and restoring brain function by way of sonic massage, all with professional-development points:


Alas, the recent disappearance of the "gcmafconference.org" website leaves us without the details of the professional body providing the Level One Certification.

Ruggiero was also a major attraction at the 3rd Congress (back in Frankfurt in 2014), but he was occupied by new responsibilities and collaborations with the DrReinwald Group -- purveyors of diet supplements, magic water and coloured-light-and-theremin-music Healing Machines, also co-sponsor of the Congress. So no ultrasonography on show CHIZ CHIZ.