Are Prodigies Autistic? Prodigies dazzle us with their virtuoso violin concertos, seemingly prescient chess moves, and vivid paintings. While their work would be enough to impress us if they were 40, prodigies typically reach adult levels of performance in non-verbal, rule-based domains such as chess, art, and music . Their performances are hard to explain from a purely deliberate practice perspective. While it's true that many prodigies receive support, resources, and encouragement from parents and coaches early on, such support is typically the result of a demonstrated " rage to learn", as the prodigy expert Martha J. Morelock refers to the phenomenon. Researchers who have spent years working with prodigies and witnessing their development firsthand have come to a different conclusion . Unfortunately, there really aren't that many systematic studies of prodigies, at least in comparison to the study of adult experts. The third child prodigy was 18 years old at the time of testing.
47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. Dr. Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See| On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue | Color Opponency Theory Try to imagine reddish green — not the dull brown you get when you mix the two pigments together, but rather a color that is somewhat like red and somewhat like green. Or, instead, try to picture yellowish blue — not green, but a hue similar to both yellow and blue. Is your mind drawing a blank? That's because, even though those colors exist, you've probably never seen them. The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place. Almost never, that is. Colors without a name The color revolution started in 1983, when a startling paper by Hewitt Crane, a leading visual scientist, and his colleague Thomas Piantanida appeared in the journal Science. Images similar to those used in a famous 1983 experiment in which so-called "forbidden colors" were perceived for the first time.Credit: Life's Little Mysteries The observers of this unusual visual stimulus reported seeing the borders between the stripes gradually disappear, and the colors seem to flood into each other.
The Experience and Perception of Time What is ‘the perception of time’? The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations. Kinds of temporal experience There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Duration One of the earliest, and most famous, discussions of the nature and experience of time occurs in the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine. Augustine's answer to this riddle is that what we are measuring, when we measure the duration of an event or interval of time, is in the memory. Whatever the process in question is, it seems likely that it is intimately connected with what William Friedman (1990) calls ‘time memory’: that is, memory of when some particular event occurred. The specious present Time order Φ-β-κ
The 5 Smartest Non-Primates on the Planet Katharine Gammon, Life's Little Mysteries Contributor | July 29, 2011 05:56pm ET Credit: Walter Siegmund We humans tend to think we're pretty smart. We've got descriptive language. We've got art and can build museums in which to showcase it. The flip side, of course, is that we've also learned to build bombs. Neuroscience clues to who you arent Michael Bond, consultant THE problem of the self - what it is that makes you you - has exercised philosophers and theologians for millennia. Today it is also a hotly contested scientific question, and the science is confirming what the Buddha, Scottish philosopher David Hume and many other thinkers maintained: that there is no concrete identity at the core of our being, and that our sense of self is an illusion spun from narratives we construct about our lives. Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion is a thoroughly researched and skillfully organised account of the developments in psychology and neuroscience that are helping to substantiate this unsettling vision of selfhood. Hood is well placed to tackle all this: he is an experimental psychologist and expert on child development. Book InformationThe Self Illusion by Bruce HoodConstable & Robinson/Oxford University Press£12.99/$29.95 American DNA holds some surprising secrets Debora MacKenzie, consultant Richard Webb, deputy features editor
Whoa, scientists just reversed autism symptoms in mice For those that have kids that are non-verbal and mostly in their own world, my son was the same way. He would cry if someone touched him, he never looked at anyone and he wasn't potty trained until he was six. My husband and I refused to accept that state as the best he could achieve, so we worked with him constantly (I'm lucky enough to have been able to stay home with him from birth) to get even the smallest of improvements. We taught him sign language for his needs, physically moving his hands into the signs when he was reaching for something he wanted, etc. As we did this, we would say the word clearly, starting with "want" and "more". Before I knew he had autism, I noticed that he didn't like being touched, so I started doing baby massage to try to desensitize him. I know even with the hardest work, some kids won't respond, and that we have been VERY lucky. My son is now ten and in mostly mainstream classes, he has also skipped a grade. /end tl;dr
PSICOSYSTEM Physicians in China treat addictions by destroying the brain's pleasure center "Many Chinese scientists conduct shoddy and unethical research where 'rewards for publication in international journals are high.'" I'm am so fed up with China & all their stupid antics, it's one thing after another & it's all negative, shortcuts to shortcuts, fast & cheap, screw originality, screw safety, screw the environment, & yet we are to play nice or else. They're like the big crazy person in the mall's food court that's acting out, but no one is willing to say or do anything because they're afraid if what might happen. 5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know. But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want. We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain... #5. So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald's, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you're going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood... hopefully. "SLEEEEEEEEEP... uh... What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? Holy Shit!
THE NORMAL WELL-TEMPERED MIND I'm trying to undo a mistake I made some years ago, and rethink the idea that the way to understand the mind is to take it apart into simpler minds and then take those apart into still simpler minds until you get down to minds that can be replaced by a machine. This is called homuncular functionalism, because you take the whole person. You break the whole person down into two or three or four or seven sub persons that are basically agents. They're homunculi, and this looks like a regress, but it's only a finite regress, because you take each of those in turn and you break it down into a group of stupider, more specialized homunculi, and you keep going until you arrive at parts that you can replace with a machine, and that's a great way of thinking about cognitive science. The idea is basically right, but when I first conceived of it, I made a big mistake. The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. It's going to be a connectionist network.