Sinfest

[Adyon]

Yeah, and a lot of these studies are fairly new anyway. We didn't used to know as much about what does what with the brain.

But yeah, that practice based on the pressure would definitely cause what my wife was talking about. It's bad when fashion actually causes you to have less mental capabilities AND can cause changes in behavior. It makes the foot binding and all that seem sane by comparison.

It would be interesting to study those cultures on a localized scale. To see how they've been affected.
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[Lich Mong]

There is a wiki page on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation
But, it does not go into the problems caused. Anthropologists are often hesitant to imply they are passing judgment on ancient practices by talking about negative effects.

I know the brain rubbing against the skull can cause dogs to go crazy violent. I expect humans react similar.
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A MtG Webcomic

[Adyon]

Yeah. I don't think anyone has done research with them, considering how new all this stuff is. And frankly most of the traditional medicines aren't focused on that kind of thing as how to treat things via reactive surgery or some sort of drug. As far as I know, Chiropractic is one of the few sections focused on the preventative issues, based on focusing on the nervous system in how they treat people. So, they're always looking at what can cause problems from the start and talk about it a lot in her school.
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[mouse]

it's a difficult thing to study scientifically. it would be hard to find a good control group. if it's a cultural thing, than probably everyone in the culture will have had it done - so you have no within-culture control. and you would have to be really careful of comparing them to another culture without head-binding, because then behavioral or mental differences might be due to other factors that differ between the cultures - one might have a diet that provided better nutrition, for example. and it's not the sort of thing you can just randomly do to infants to see what the effect will be.
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aka: neverscared!

[Adyon]

Yeah, exactly. Probably why they haven't mentioned this specifically, but they talk about how simply putting something tight on a kids head all the time can cause it, because it's easy to monitor that. Granted, it's probably safe to assume that if a head band pressing against the skull can cause stuff like that, squeezing your skull into a different shape would be very likely to cause effects. The brain is a fairly damageable thing, and any change in shape hurts it a lot.
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[mouse]

does the head-banding you are talking about cover the entire head? because the impression i get of the traditional head-binding is that it doesn't just squeeze the head, it give it a direction to go - so the infant would retain the same size brain as it would have otherwise. i think. but if you were restricting the head's ability to grow in _any_ direction, then you potentially be restricting the growth of the brain, which would result in problems.
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aka: neverscared!

[Adyon]

I think the idea is that if the head's shape changes as it grows, it restricts how the body intended for the head shape to grow to allow the brain to grow, so that causes pressure and hurts the frontal lobe in particular. The brain and head grow proportionately though, so anything that causes the head to be restricted or in this case change shape, would force the brain to do the same. I haven't seen an X-ray of them, but I did come across this inconclusive study:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/74744944/New-World-cranial-deformation-practices-historical-implications-for-pathophysiology-of-cognitive-impairment-in-deformational-plagiocephaly

Basically what you'd expect, we have no reason to show that it affected them that we can prove, etc. Either way, it's not exactly something we can prove does or doesn't exist. So I don't know for sure. And it looks like it may not always happen. Some people will just grow to fit the shape it sounds without causing the pressure. Really, who knows. Ha ha. I should have asked my wife a little more info earlier. It might only be pressure that's more traumatic that we're talking about too, something that could be similar to a pressure injury.
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[Wheel]

That's always been a question to me, looks male to me too.