BoomTown got the ball rolling by making a visit to Twitter HQ bearing pies. During a video tour of the premises, Biz Stone discussed rock stars and booze, and spilled the secret of the strange green deer. Later, co-founders Stone and Evan Williams were customarily nonspecific in a conversation about their revenue plans, and BoomTown was a little bit horrified to have become one of Ashton Kutcher’s million-plus followers–maybe even the one that put him over the top in his race with CNN to hit the seven-figure mark. Still on the celebrity tip (but off the Twitter one), BoomTown took a moment to appreciate the self-deprecatory stylings of Lindsay Lohan’s eHarmony spoof and to embed the video on AllThingsD.com. Finally, was there anyone this week who missed Susan Boyle’s virtually instant stardom on “Britain’s Got Talent” via Google’s (GOOG) YouTube? BT took a look at the journey the story has taken from television to Internet, back to television and back to Internet again.

Back to Twitter, MediaMemo took a look at its amazing growth as a service and as a phenomenon–the “hockey stick,” as one early investor describes the company’s trajectory so far. MM also looked at a study from the USC neuroscience group that says despite all the hype–or maybe even because of it–the human brain just isn’t built to digest information at Twitter’s pace. In the world of cable this week, just as folks were wondering whether Congress will stop the cable companies from charging by the byte, Time Warner Cable (TWX), one of the key players in the drama, backed away from its plans to do so. MediaMemo followed that story as well.

In this week’s Personal Technology column, Walt Mossberg took a look at the latest version of Apple’s (AAPL) MobileMe, and while he found it to be a big improvement over the product launch from last summer, it’s not without limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions from readers about displaying emergency contact numbers on a locked cellphone and the security of running Windows software on the Mac. And in Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at Gwabbit, a program built to mine emails for contact info.

More next week.

Ever worry that the ever-increasing barrage of status updates from Facebook, Twitter and every other real-time, hey-look-what-I’m-doing and look-what-happened-just-this-very-second service may be outstripping your brain’s capacity to process them?

You’re probably right, says a new study from a University of Southern California neuroscience group. Physorg.com:

“‘For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,’ said first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

‘Humans can sort information very quickly and can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.

Admiration and compassion–two of the social emotions that define humanity–take much longer….’”

Too many words? Want to cut to the chase? OK:

“The study raises questions about the emotional cost–particularly for the developing brain–of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

‘If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,’ Immordino-Yang said.”

Blah blah blah. I’d write more, but I just caught wind (heh) of this story about a chair that Tweets its user’s flatulence. Gotta go!

According to the Daily Mail, she said: “We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist….My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”

On Feb. 12, Ms. Greenfield–a member of Britain’s House of Lords who holds the title of Baroness–said that social-networking sites like Facebook might create short attention spans.

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Last year, BoomTown wrote about the struggle of Homer, the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur (pictured here; I met him in the mid-1990s, when he was an exec at Netscape).

Unfortunately, Homer continues to suffer from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), for which he is under treatment at the University of California at San Francisco.

“The Fight for Mike” has raised $7 million for CJD at UCSF, where Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner–who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering the prion protein that causes CJD–is working on a major project aimed at defeating neurodegenerative diseases.

Now comes a unique collaboration between YouTube and the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, organized by two well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Ron Conway and Bill Campbell, with the help of YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley.

Conway and Campbell, along with the Homer family, have led the efforts to help find a cure for Homer.

Naturally, given Homer’s background, a digital initiative was inevitable.

Thus, the new project is the kick-off of the Memory and Aging Center’s “Defeat Dementia” campaign at UCSF, which is trying to use the Web and other digital technologies to help find new ways to get information out about public health issues.

Along with CJD, the YouTube effort will also focus on Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Parkinson’s, ALS and Alzheimer’s and try to engage the public and the medical community in a search for the causes and cures of these debilitating neurodegenerative conditions.

On the channel: videos of clinical-researchers and physicians discussing characteristics of the diseases; personal stories of patients and family members; and videos featuring advice and coping strategies from health-care professionals.

There is also now a Defeat Dementia Facebook group on the topic, and UCSF also has a partnership with Veodia.

Here is a video I did with Conway this week about the effort: