Every week, she goes happily to work in one of the busiest, densest, most famous tourist destinations of the world; and every day, lurking in some distant corner of her brain, vague anxiety that she's carefully sealed off waits for just the right key to set it free: an attempted car bombing, for example, on 45th Street near Seventh Avenue.
The Edison Electric Light Company issued a terse statement explaining she was a victim of "congestion of the brain" — that vague ailment cited in so many 19th-century obituaries.
Called a "Brain Bug," it vaguely resembled a giant snail's head with a pair of short tusks, several protuberant eyes and a large, wrinkled mouth that strongly suggested female genitalia.
As for the voice she conjures up for IT, the evil brain on the vaguely North Korean planet of Camazotz who telepathically controls the planet's inhabitants, it's as nauseating as I've ever heard in a villain, by turns wheedling, officious, cold and filled with self-pity.
Apart from a few lizard-brain attachments – a vague sense of Englishness, a sporadic violence towards foreigners – the normal man can only be defined apophatically, in terms of what he isn't: he isn't clever, he isn't fancy, he isn't allowed nice things, he isn't in support of any political ideology, he isn't different in any way.
Doctors shrugged; a brain scan suggested a vague abnormality near a nerve at the base of the brain that controls hearing and balance.
In contrast, the brain only needs a vague sense of the color to know, for example, a light is red or a strawberry is ripe.
This is because of several diagnostic difficulties: the symptoms of brain microabscesses can be vague and fleeting, and such symptoms can be difficult to distinguish in gravely ill sepsis patients [ 2].
More importantly, although a picture of whole brain activity can be vaguely inferred from electrophysiology recordings, these techniques cannot provide a direct visualization of activity across individual brain regions over the entire brain.
As Poeppel says, what we need now is "the meticulous dissection of some elementary brain functions, not ambitious but vague notions like brain-based aesthetics, when we still don't understand how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line".
This has happened in large part because there is no quantifiable diagnostic test for the injury, and the language used by the Veterans Affairs Department to rate traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., is vague.
