Close to a century ago, New York's Coney Island was famed for its sideshows. Loud-lettered signs crowded the island's attractions, crowing over tattooed ladies, sword swallowers — and even an exhibition of tiny babies.

The babies were premature infants kept alive in incubators pioneered by Dr. Martin Couney. The medical establishment had rejected his incubators, but Couney didn't give up on his aims. Each summer for 40 years, he funded his work by displaying the babies and charging admission — 25 cents to see the show.

In turn, parents didn't have to pay for the medical care, and many children survived who never would've had a chance otherwise.

Lucille Horn was one of them. Born in 1920, she, too, ended up in an incubator on Coney Island.

"My father said I was so tiny, he could hold me in his hand," she tells her own daughter, Barbara, on a visit with StoryCorps in Long Island, N.Y. "I think I was only about 2 pounds, and I couldn't live on my own. I was too weak to survive."

She'd been born a twin, but her twin died at birth. And the hospital didn't show much hope for her, either: The staff said they didn't have a place for her; they told her father that there wasn't a chance in hell that she'd live.

"They didn't have any help for me at all," Horn says. "It was just: You die because you didn't belong in the world."

But her father refused to accept that for a final answer. He grabbed a blanket to wrap her in, hailed a taxicab and took her to Coney Island — and to Dr. Couney's infant exhibit...

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"I was staying with my daughter and they like to have the television on in their house. I turned to my daughter and said 'you ought to get a decent telly, one where the sound and programme are synchronised'. I gave a little chuckle. But they said 'there's nothing wrong with the TV'."

Puzzled, he went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. "They've got another telly up on the wall and it was the same. I went into the lounge and I said to her 'hey you've got two TVs that need sorting!'."

That was when he started to notice that his daughter's speech was out of time with her lip movements too. "It wasn't the TV, it was me. It was happening in real life."

PH is the first confirmed case of someone who hears people speak before registering the movement of their lips. His situation is giving unique insights into how our brains unify what we hear and see.

It's unclear why PH's problem started when it did – but it may have had something to do with having acute pericarditis, inflammation of the sac around the heart, or the surgery he had to treat it.

Brain scans after the timing problems appeared showed two lesions in areas thought to play a role in hearing, timing and movement. "Where these came from is anyone's guess," says PH. "They may have been there all my life or as a result of being in intensive care."

Read more at New Scientist 

But it turns out that popular health movements that advocate going back to a more natural way of living are nothing new.

Consider this quote: "It is reasonably certain that man was originally made to live and exercise in the open air, bathe in rivers, and expose his body to the healthful action of the sun."

And this one:

"Civilized man is manufacturing and eating many substances that slowly but surely lead to degeneration, disease and premature death."

These nuggets could easily come from a paleo lifestyle blog, the kind that argues our modern diet and way of life are making us sick.

Except that the first one is from an 1894 book called Athletics for Physical Culture. And the second is from a 1926 book called Natural Foods: The Safe Way to Health.

Both were written by proponents of physical culture, a fringy movement of health enthusiasts, which lasted from the 1880s to 1920s in the U.S. and Europe.

As Hamilton Stapell, a historian at the State University of New York, New Paltz, found when he went digging into the archives of physical culture, there are striking resemblances to the paleo movement today. And, he argues, this shows that people seem to romanticize a healthier past in the midst of great societal upheaval: the Industrial Revolution, in the case of physical culture; and the digital revolution, in the case of paleo.

"The problem, according to physical culture and paleo, is modern civilization," Stapell tells Shots. "With so much change, people reject overconsumption of food, alcohol and mainstream medicine, and look for ways to get back to nature. Both movements have a clear sense of going back to the past to fix the present, and a willingness to throw out what's normal and acceptable to try an alternative."

The paleo movement, also known in scholarly circles as the "ancestral lifestyle," looks at modern health from an evolutionary perspective, and finds inspiration for what to eat and how to exercise from the past — the distant, preagricultural past, in some cases. Followers adhere to a simple diet of meat, fruit and vegetables, and exercise in ways that mimic the movements of our ancestors — like lifting heavy objects.

Rewind to the 1880s in England when Eugen Sandow, a Russian-German, was pioneering the sport of bodybuilding. Over the years, Sandow fine-tuned his ideas about "natural" dietary habits and weight training, sowing the seeds of the physical culture movement. Rather than the preagricultural era, he drew inspiration from the Greeks and their ideas of the perfect physical form — he even modeled his own body after Greek sculpture. He would eventually open the first of many Institutes of Physical Culture to teach diet and exercise to the masses.

As Stapell notes, weightlifting was at first seen as a peculiar activity 100 years ago in the same way that CrossFit and Vibram FiveFinger shoes — staples of the paleo community — seemed extreme when they first appeared a few years ago.

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It's one thing to have a song stuck in your head for a few hours or even a day or two, but most of humanity surely has no idea what Susan Root is dealing with.

The Telegraph reports that the 63-year-old British woman has had the 1950's classic"How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" stuck in her head for three years, with no end in sight.

Root has been diagnosed with a form of tinnitus that a spokesman for the British Tinnitus Association called "musical hallucinations," more commonly referred to as earworms.

"It's like having a radio that you just can't turn off," Root said. "I began hearing tunes in my ears three years ago and it just has not stopped since."

The Sun reports that Root has also been "tortured" by tracks like "God Save the Queen", "Happy Birthday" and "Auld Lang Syne."

Root said doctors have tried various methods of curing her disorder, but nothing has helped.

“I’ve come to accept that I’m probably going to be stuck with this hellish condition for the rest of my life,” Root said.

The more common form of tinnitus is defined by the Mayo Clinic's website as "noise or ringing in the ears." The problem affects one-in-five people, according to the site.

"Tinnitus isn't a condition itself — it's a symptom of an underlying condition, such as age-related hearing loss, ear injury or a circulatory system disorder," the site reports.

Read more...