Carey, Benedict. “Yes, Aaron Hernandez Suffered Brain Injury. But That May Not Explain His Violence.” New York Times, 22 Sept. 2017.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, has been a big problem in contact sports for many years, and for the past decade has been a problem in the NFL. It is caused by constant hits to the head and could lead to short-term memory loss, impulsive behavior, difficulty thinking, suicidal thoughts, and other serious problems. In the early 1900s, CTE, or as it used to be called, dementia pugilistica, was thought to only affect boxers but now scientists know that it can affect anyone playing a contact sport. Due to the high rate of head injuries like concussions in the NFL, CTE has become synonymous with the league. More attention has been drawn towards CTE with the suicides of former NFL players like Junior Seau and Andre Waters, both of whom had CTE. It has recently been found that disgraced former player Aaron Hernandez had CTE. Hernandez, who has had a history of violence, was jailed for murder recently before he, too, killed himself. It was theorized that maybe his violence was caused by his severe CTE, but recent evidence says that may not be true. In his article, Benedict Carey states that the science relating brain biology to behavior is a little unclear. He states that even though doctors such as Dr. Samuel Gandy, the director of the NFL neurology program, say that “... rage and irritability are ‘far and away the most prominent symptoms’ among former players with likely CTE,” and that “similar behavior” has been found in players who are likely to have CTE, there is little evidence to prove that extensive brain damage causes irritability and violence. Carey states that people with dementia, a similar degenerative disorder of the brain, often do have times where they act in “uncharacteristically aggressive ways.” This could be a factor in proving the link between brain biology and behavior. While that could be a factor, Carey then states that Hernandez’s history of drug abuse makes him more impulsive and could possibly make the impulsivity and emotional instability caused by his CTE even worse. Carey says that testosterone could make somebody- especially a football player who could have excess testosterone in their system due to performance enhancing drug use- more violent. Carey concludes the article by saying that there might never be a definitive answer to whether or not brain damage is the cause for a specific act of violence.
The subject of this article is very important because of the prevalence of contact sports in our society. If people of all ages want to continue playing contact sports, then there needs to be safer ways to play the sports. Parents aren’t going to let their kids play the sport if they worry about permanent brain damage. Aaron Hernandez, who was 27 when he died, had severe damage to his brain and most of his temporal and frontal lobes were degenerated. The extent of his brain damage was akin to that of former NFL players with CTE in their 60s. The popularity of football will decline if more and more players die young because of CTE, and more people will lose their lives if we can’t find a way to make the game safer.
Carey’s article was very well written and entertaining. It had an intriguing first sentence which made me want to continue reading the article, and the article itself was just as interesting. Carey had relatively few weaknesses. The main weakness was that Carey should have included more details about how the CTE scientists were conducting their experiments and coming up with their conclusions. I feel that would have made the article more interesting. Also, I don’t think it was necessary to include the part about Hernandez’s fiancée and daughter’s lawsuit against the NFL because it is not relevant when discussing whether or not brain biology is related to behavior.
Posted for P. Kinon
2 comments:
Reading both the article and Peyton's wright up, I can deduce that Peyton perfectly
summarized the article highlighting whats important and leaving out stuff that is less true tot he evidence presented from CTE. I also though Peyton perfectly connected his article to something that is present in a lot of teenagers lives who play any contact sport. I also liked how Peyton flowed his write up changing the sequence of certain things mentioned in the article, Although I would say that he touch up on punctuation and grammatical error. I also didn't enjoy how Peyton integrated quotes when he could have added the menial quotations into the text. I was however, impressed to learn how far we have come with CTE technology and how many things we have deduced in the patterns of the disease
Peyton did a wonderful job discussing what CTE is I had no prior knowledge to this before but now tat I've read Peyton's review I feel extremely knowledgeable on it. I've never been a fan of watching football so I hadn't had much information on it's players but so I really liked how Peyton would mention a certain player and explain who he was and why he's relevant in his current event review. He really did do a great job when intertwining football players and what had happened to them and connecting it back to the article.
There wasn't much on Forensics in Peyton's review it was mostly just talking about CTE and how it effects the brain but there wasn't much on how forensics is incorporated into all of this. He was so informative when talking about what CTE is and how it inserts itself into so many NFL players life but it was almost too much. I enjoyed learning but there needs to be more information on other aspects of CTE and football for Peyton's review to be greater than it already is.
I was impressed by the end of this review, I hadn't really thought about what might happen if these injuries continue and how it would effect football and how it's perceived all around but Peyton mentioned people may not want to continue this sport if these injuries continue to get worse.
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