“We’re really at an infant stage in terms of our clinical ability to assess traumatic brain injury,” a medical expert said.

Before he ended his life, Ryan Larkin made his family promise to donate his brain to science.

The 29-year-old Navy SEAL was convinced years of exposure to blasts had badly damaged his brain, despite doctors telling him otherwise. He had downloaded dozens of research papers on traumatic brain injury out of frustration that no one was taking him seriously, his father said.

“He knew,” Frank Larkin said. “I’ve grown to understand that he was out to prove that he was hurt, and he wasn’t crazy.”

In 2017, a postmortem study found that Ryan Larkin, a combat medic and instructor who taught SEALs how to breach buildings with explosives, had a pattern of brain scarring unique to service members who’ve endured repeated explosions.

  • NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The video is making a decent point, but doing it in a very, very flawed way. IQ tests are far from unbiased and don’t really test intelligence; they test how well you can take an IQ test. And since the structure and questions on IQ tests are very biased against every demographic that’s not “white, upper/middle class, male” all this video really shows is that a dude in the military knows how to take an IQ test.

    • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I only linked it to support OP’s point that doctors are just normal people but tend to be very overconfident. Your point is correct but I don’t think it detracts from what I’m using the video to illustrate.

      The whole video is a fun watch to see how people behave in tense social situations with strangers.