Mike,
In your first paragraph you express an intuition that these kids'
behaviour stems from deviant neurological status. I'm not sure whether,
when you say, you don't think it was learned behaviour, you mean learned
because of poor modelling, or learned because of conditioning--as in
reactive self-protective response.
Studying brains of humans is helpful, and reveals many interesting
differences. Where this article mentions specific related deviations,
one still has to wonder if this was part of the mapping at the time of
birth, or did it develop after a period of stress(ors) at an early age
for the individual in question. They're not being exactly scientific in
their approach to physical abnormalities. Given that neuronal and
synaptic pathways can take significant turns quite quickly, the studies
are only partially significant or breakthrough.
As well, the 50% of children previously observed with tendencies toward
psychopathy who turn into psychopaths figures thrown around are
predictable, yet misleading. Though impossible, they would have to
observe the entire human race of children first to see how many may
exhibit similar behaviour, and take it from there. Think back to your
childhood. Remember how common it was for boys especially to blow up
bugs or frogs for fun? Torture one another? Make siblings cry? Think
further back to well attended public hangings and then to the all
popular ancient Roman sport of slaughter. Social acceptance of
inflicting pain played as much a part in the wiring then as the violence
on TV or video gaming does today.
Giving the anti-social, restive child patient natural substances they
seem to be missing may be beneficial, be it oxytocin, omegas or even C's
and B's; and some would advocate pharmaceutical suppression therapies,
though not Ritalin in this instance, however, the latter particularly
deals with symptoms only, and the idea is to also arrive at root causes
in order to affect a "cure", if possible.
Some of my first observations about the story of boy Michael consisted
of the following:
Poor kid--has a psychologist for a mother, therefore likely has been
handled in a detached, clinical, rather than emotionally supportive,
manner. Sounds a lot like RAD--reactive attachment disorder--which is,
actually, common enough. It is resultant of failure to bond within the
earliest years.
Emotional, physical or sexual abuse could easily be one of the causes.
We get no sense of the type of discipline the mother employs. We know
little about the father other than he works a lot. Who looks after the
kids when both are working? One is told the father was a commercial
pilot, but did he leave voluntarily? Surely he still battles with ASPD
issues /other than optimism/, that will affect the children adversely.
The mother sounds a bit cold, and though obviously inundated with
psychological therapy options, has succumbed to clinical evaluations by
which to react. The article leads one to presume the parents are normal,
because of their jobs and based on a couple of short visits, rather than
the writer remaining professionally detached. How could one not wish to
dig a little deeper? What of medical histories of the parents? The
possibility of a history of consumption of antidepressants, alcohol, trauma?
These children are intelligent. Are they perhaps really bored with
school? Are they in a challenging, learning environment with full
compliment of the arts for optimal development, especially if the main
caregiver has failed them.
There is no mention of school, apart from the lab rat approach of the
summer camp, where they seem to try to get the kids to conform. I
wonder, conform to working on what kind of challenges?
A camp clinic for similarly wired/deprived kids is ridiculous. They
suffer from absence of clear examples of empathetic and ethical
behaviour, suffer from having someone stable with whom to bond, and will
model the poorest of examples from such peers. Small wonder they come
back from the program even more manipulative. This is little different
than subscribing to the belief that cancer patients must be hospitalized
together, or people with schizophrenia will heal better if housed
together. Easier to control and observe behaviour of group dynamics for
studies, but rarely beneficial to the client, and certainly not an
emotional hand up. Reward/punishment is only effective for temporary
control. After the rewards are gone, the bad behaviour returns, and they
don't arrive at the important lessons to be learned about social
interactions and respect for all life, starting with themselves.
Why did they decide to bring another child, at the very least, into such
a dysfunctional environment? If things were going badly with/for Michael
at age 3, that was the red flag to stop having more babies, and deal
with Michael's etiologies. Perhaps simple parenting classes would have
helped, had the mother's ego gotten out of the way. It's possible that
her training in psychology wouldn't allow for the possibility that she
could fail as a parent. Now, two other children are at great risk, their
parents are losing it, and Michael will probably fail to experience that
essential emotional support he needs.
Could be genetic, could be a tumour pressing on a certain part of his
brain that reacts only to some as yet unknown chemical stimulus. Could
be deviant wiring. But they really should do a thorough physical and
psychiatric analysis before they condemn this child to life as another
case study.
Natalia
On 13/05/2012 11:11 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:
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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