Ray wrote: > People are blaming the children but where did they learn it? > > http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psych > opath.html?ref=magazine
>From the description in the article, the kids in question didn't "learn" to be as they are. All my (more or less informed) intuition says this kind of behavior derives from neurological status that deviates in some critical way(s) from the norm. Given that the human brain is, as they say, the most complex thing in the known universe, one guy can have a crowbar driven through his head with the chief result that he becomes moody and temperamental while another with apparently untraumatized brain evinces no remorse (or even evinces smug satisfaction) over keeping dead babies in the fridge. That says that we're very far indeed from connecting the observations and taxonomies of psychology with the real underlying mechanisms that give rise to the vast catalog of human thoughts, attitudes and behaviors. Psychology is all very interesting. Pharmaceutical psychiatry has managed to relieve or at least palliate a variety of afflictions. But so far as understanding how and why the outlier behaviors (or even the merely borderline harmful ones) occur, we're in a position rather like the the brightest minds of the 17th c. -- Newton, Hooke, Leibniz say -- would be were they confronted with a modern desktop computer. With bare awareness of electricity (200 years before Georg Ohm) and no clue about elemental atoms let alone solid state physics, their only explanations of how a computer worked would rely on interpreting the words and images on the screen and how they responded to keyboarding or mousing. Some, Robert Hooke perhaps, might try probing or stirring the motherboard with various tools or applying heat and cold. These brightest guys would admit frustration while lesser lights would evolve vastly involved and fantastic theories, some of them theological, to make 17th c. sense of what appears on the screen. We're not *quite* that ignorant of the brain because we know a lot about the basic nature of neural and endocrine systems. But we are as yet defeated in the pursuit of such explanations by completely unmanageable complexity. There are 100,000 neurons in each cubic mm of cortex and each makes (at least) thousands of direct synaptic connections with other neurons. *All* of the brains neurons are connected to each other at least indirectly. (Except in the case of those few with corpus callosotomy and anterior commissurotomy, which add yet another chapter of bafflement to an already intractable problem.) I was just reading Patricia Churchland's recent book, _Braintrust_. She has respectable chops in both neuroscience but, despite some interesting neurochemistry, most of the book falls back on her equally respectable chops in philosophy. We have some good *notions* about neural correlates of mothering, cooperating and trusting behaviors, variously in humans or prairie voles inter alia. But we don't really have any explanations for *anything* cultural, whether art, politics, perversity or evil. Okay, most of us learn and internalize stuff from our parents and other adults, be it good or bad, constructive of self-defeating. We internalize it and may, in many cases, never escape it. And stuff that happens to us as kids, even up to 20 or so years of age, may effect underlying neurological development if current understanding of developmental neural plasticity is right. But I'm pretty sure that extremes of behavior as in the article -- outliers -- are due to outlier brains, not learning. --- Jeez, I've digressed wayyy off topic here. But while I'm still thinkng (muttering to myself?) about Arthur's remark of a fortnight ago: > Economics has little to say about jobs. It does have much to say > about productivity....Jobs are a political objective. I haven't though of anything intelligent to say about it. :-) - Mike _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
