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
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