Psychology

Picture thoughts -before they are converted correctly to words. Eonverye taht can raed tihs rsaie yuor hnad.. To my 'selected' strange-minded friends: If you can read the following paragraph, forward it on to your friends and the person that sent it to you with 'yes' in the subject line. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Only great minds can read this This is weird, but interesting! fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I…

The PBSKids show "Arthur" ran an episode featuring a new character, Carl, who has Aspergers Syndrome.  Aspergers is either an autism-like condition or a form of high-functioning autism, depending on which definition you subscribe to.  Its marked by good intelligence and memory, difficulty learning social cues, and a tendency towards non-supervillian monologuing about a favorite topic. And how good a job did they do of portraying an Aspie?  The show already has an asthmatic kid (Buster), ADHD twins (the Tibbles), and a woody-alleneque neurotic (George), so it's not like Carl…

The surging number of autism diagnoses is driven in part by social interaction between parents, according to a study published in the American Journal of Sociology. The study found that children living near a child who has been previously diagnosed with autism have a much higher chance of being diagnosed themselves in the following year, mainly because of parents learning about autism from other parents who have a child diagnosed with the disorder. "We show that the likelihood of getting an autism diagnosis is clearly associated with person-to-person transmission of information," said Peter…

From the dark ages of autism when we did some sort of traditional life.  Experience is the only teacher in life and the experts of autism just can't fathom the ideal (nor can contemporary medicine) of a pain free human.  Perhaps we were the circus acts of time gone by. Pulling a rail road car with your teeth or being shot from a cannon might have been easier if you didn't feel too much.  Even Old Pre Rain Man Autism publications were a-buz with non cuddly babies and the storys of us falling from trees 'unhurt'.  I started out life "on the farm as a mechanic" and…

Alan Turing 1912-1954 Alan Turing an autisitc guy from the glory days of Autism before the Rain Man Era Curse was able to absently overcome autism and like many of us learned a different kind of human thought process the results were OUTSTANDING -he was father of the computer!  The Biography of his Life, the book, The Enigma (1983 Hodges) is the blueprint for autism we all absently followed. Had Autism not been blowen away with Rain Man and forced to become a buzzword and a puzzle  and indeed an Empire of ignorance like it is today man would be have the depths…

A loose quote or two from and old Autism of America  handout sheets that were pre Rain Man. "Non cuddly babies that will not move to be comfortable in mothers arms" "pain toleance - shows no reaction to pain"  Of course with normal people investigating autism and claiming to be the expert authority on autism they just assume our Pain Tolerance is psycho somatic . OR they think we are too stupid to even register the pain.  Unless they lived our pain tolerance , (experience is the only teacher) they flow threw life puzzled to some degree of our pain tolerance. Of Course…

Psychologists at Baylor University say that people primed with Christian concepts are likely to express  racial prejudice and general negative views toward African-Americans. The researchers don't know why the association exists but speculate that it may be that "priming religious words activates cognitive representation of things like right-wing authoritism and a Protestant work ethic.” The study was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Priming occurs when an earlier stimulus influences a response or behavior to a later stimulus. For instance, when a person is…

When I was the president of an international private coeducational boarding school for teenagers with dyslexia and other kinds of learning disorders, I was frequently asked by parents to curtail their children's use of video games. I often wondered why they thought I could curtail the use of their children's video games when they themselves could not, but that is the subject of my next blog on effective parenting. I found myself challenging parents' statements asserting that video games were bad. I disagree. I think the research on the link between video games and violence is weak at best.…

Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army, researchers from Tel Aviv University say they have demonstrated an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ--young men who smoke are likely dumber than their non-smoking peers. The average IQ for a non-smoker was about 101, while the smokers' average was more than seven IQ points lower at about 94, the study determined. The IQs of young men who smoked more than a pack a day were lower still, at about 90. An IQ score in a healthy population of such young men, with no mental disorders,…

Despite understanding the long term benefits of eating healthy and exercising,  people often forgo these potential gains for the immediate satisfaction of a big mac and a night of cable TV. What makes people go for the quick reward even though they know they'll be worse off for doing so? According to a new study in Judgment and Decision Making, it's because people have to repeatedly feel the benefits of long term decisions, like eating healthy and exercising, to fully appreciate them. Simply having complete information about their choices isn't enough. "You'd think that with more…