neurosciencestuff:

In 1979 China instituted the one-child policy, which limited every family to just one offspring in a controversial attempt to reduce the country’s burgeoning population. The strictly enforced law had the desired effects: in 2011 researchers estimated that the policy prevented 400 million births. In a new study in Science, researchers find that it has also caused China’s so-called little emperors to be more pessimistic, neurotic and selfish than their peers who have siblings.

Psychologist Xin Meng of the Australian National University in Canberra and her colleagues recruited 421 Chinese young adults born between 1975 and 1983 from around Beijing for a series of surveys and tests that evaluated a variety of psychological traits, such as trustworthiness and optimism. Almost all the participants born after 1979 were only children compared with about one fifth of those born before 1979. The study participants born after the policy went into effect were found to be both less trusting and less trustworthy, less inclined to take risks, less conscientious and optimistic, and less competitive than those born a few years earlier.

“Because of the one-child policy, parents are less likely to teach their child to be imaginative, trusting and unselfish,” Meng says. Without siblings, she notes, the need to share may not be emphasized, which could help explain these findings.

Only children in other parts of the world, however, do not show such striking differences from their peers. Toni Falbo, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study, suggests that larger social forces in China also probably contributed to these results. “There’s a lot of pressure being placed on [Chinese] parents to make their kid the best possible because they only had one,” Falbo says. These types of pressures could harm anyone, even if they had siblings, she says.

Whatever its cause, the personality profile of China’s little emperors may be troubling to a nation hoping to continue its ascent in economic prosperity. The traits marred by the one-child policy, the study authors point out, are exactly those needed in leaders and entrepreneurs.

neurosciencestuff:

The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers.

Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.

Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.

In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train.

Patients treated with chemotherapy show changes in brain structure and function in line with diffuse brain injury, and they often report long-term cognitive effects, says Shelli Kesler, a Stanford University clinical neuropsychologist who led the research. The new study “suggests that cognitive training could be one possible avenue for helping to improve cognitive function in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy,” she says.

The results may not convince everyone. “One of the biggest challenges in the cognitive training world is to show an effect that generalizes to real-world functioning,” says Susan Landau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Several companies offer commercial cognitive training programs that promise improvements in memory, attention, mental agility, and problem-solving skills. The appeal is clear, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but whether they have lasting general effects is not.

The fact that companies are marketing these training programs to customers before their value has been rigorously proved has caused some skepticism in the field, say experts. “The field is still growing,” says Suzanne Jaeggi, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland. While studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to the training, it’s very hard to detect an impact on daily life, she says. However, some work, including research by her own group, has shown that working memory exercises can improve reading abilities in schoolchildren.

In the study conducted by Kesler and colleagues, the participants trained at home on Lumosity, a collection of gamelike cognitive exercises developed by Lumos Labs in San Francisco. (Lumos Labs did not fund the study.)

Kesler’s project is one of around two dozen efforts using Lumosity software to study human cognition. With 35 million customers worldwide, Lumosity is collecting what it says is the world’s largest database of human cognition, which could be queried for connections between lifestyle and cognitive ability. “Our technology collects a lot of data and makes it easy to run experiments to learn more generally about human cognitive performance,” says Mike Scanlon, cofounder of Lumos Labs. “We track all of the results from the cognitive testing and training, and we can combine that with demographic information to learn about how people’s cognitive performance changes and develops over the years.”

One such finding, he says, is a correlation between outside weather temperature and cognitive performance: “It turned out that the colder it is, the higher people’s performance is, even though generally they are inside doing this on a computer.”

Most of the scientific projects involving Lumosity’s software are exploring the effectiveness of brain training in different populations, from schoolchildren to stroke patients. For the study on breast cancer survivors, 41 women aged 40 and older, who were at least a year and half past their last chemotherapy treatment, were tested on several cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study. Then half the women used Lumosity training modules for 20 to 30 minutes four times a week for 12 weeks, and all were tested again.

When the investigators tested the participants in verbal memory, processing speed, and cognitive function, they found that the women who had used the brain training program improved in three of five objective measures.

“This is a well-done study—they had not just one transfer test but several,” says Hambrick, who notes that many studies of cognitive training depend on a single test to measure results. “But an issue is the lack of activity within the control group.” Better would be to have the control group do another demanding cognitive task in lieu of Lumosity training—something analogous to a placebo, he says: “The issue is that maybe the improvement in the group that did the cognitive training doesn’t reflect enhancement of basic cognitive processes per se, but could be a motivational phenomenon.”

Even if the effects are due to motivation or some other benefit not related to mental agility, that’s still useful, says Landau. “If [cognitive training] is something that makes people feel good and improves their confidence in their own skills, that’s not trivial at all,” she says. “That could be a big part of the effect that’s observed.”

2020:

It’s possible to detect the brain activity associated with movement before someone is conscious of deciding to move. Furthermore, it’s possible to reverse that decision before a person even realizes they’ve decided. MSN.

sirbromanguyboy:

amaeza:

untruc:

amaeza:

you know, i’m a raging lesbian and i was never distracted by what other girls in my classes were wearing in high school. this is a male problem, not an “attracted to women” problem.

This is an “inability to respect women” problem.

Which is a male problem.

I am male. I can personally testify that it is not a male problem. If you’re unable to focus because of what someone’s wearing, you got some serious attention issues. It’s not that hard. A huge chunk of your brain is dedicated to self control. I go to a school where girls basically wear whatever they want and it’s never made it difficult for me or any of my male friends to focus. Respecting women is not a male problem, and I feel insulted that anyone would say that it is. Sweeping generalizations are a shitty thing to make.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There is a time and place for opinion and that is in matters of preference. (It is an opinion that one song is cooler than another) When there is an answer to a question and you don’t look it up, instead erroneously forming an opinion to cover ignorance, you remain ignorant and are more likely to defend the ignorance you’ve now confused with a personally-relevant opinion. Suddenly, anyone’s attempts to correct your misconception is an attack on your personal beliefs.

That said, exposure to the “shocking” or “distracting” stimuli should render it inconsequential. The more you make a big deal about, and try to hide something, the more mental resources will be preoccupied with it.

As a male that has gone to a school where females outnumber men nearly 3 to 1, I have been the distraction. However, I understand the mechanism behind it, and that it isn’t a matter of sex, but primarily of attention.

stealingsailboats:

feminaspie:

empathy is not the opposite of autism

empathy is not the opposite of autism

empathy is not the opposite of autism

• empathy is not the opposite of autism

empathy is not the opposite of autism

what is this even supposed to mean?

this is like me saying breathing is not the opposite of asthma?

???

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the idea of race. (via theatlantic)

The important thing to realize is that the concept of race has no biological backing. It is entirely eclipsed by ethnicity, a descriptor of cultural heritage. Even then, ethnicity predicts very little, and the lines drawn between ethnicity are man-made, not biological.