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Brain Scans Show the Impact of Neglect On a Child's Brain Size
An anonymous reader writes "A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother's love has on a child's brain development. The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark 'fuzzy' areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect. Neurologists say that the latest images provide more evidence that the way children are treated in their early years is important not only for the child's emotional development, but also in determining the size of their brains. Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers."
Were both children same sex, race....other variables with genetic implications?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
While I agree in theory with the findings in theory (though I haven't read TFA due to them putting two of the same obnoxious ad with sound on the same page so it plays with an echo) I think a sample size of two children is a bit small to declare any sort of scientific result.
>"of the remarkable impact a mother's love has on a child's brain development."
Oh, so only a MOTHER'S love could cause that, not a father's or anyone else...
This would only be valid if it was a comparison of identical twins raised in the different environments.
Unfortunately, while it comes up for very understandable reasons every time a story about looking at brain structure appears, the spectre of phrenology is really only useful as a cautionary tale about optimism....
Phrenology falls especially flat because it used skull morphology as an (inaccurate) proxy for measurements of the brain that weren't nondestructively available at the time(not that knowledge of brain function was good enough to have made such measurements useful even if available); but it was an early stab at the theory that psychological phenomena, and 'mind' in general, are ultimately dependent on the physical operations of the brain.
That's the nuisance. Phrenology was embarrassingly lousy as an actual scientific theory of anything resembling predictive power(and pop-phrenology was even worse, barely better than horoscopes and speculations about why undesireables look like monkeys); but made an early grab for the only really viable premise in neurology, the idea that mental phenomena are ultimately based on physical activity in the brain.
Unless you are some kind of Cartesian dualist, an Occasionalist, or take monads really seriously, you don't have a whole lot of options other than being a (hopefully much improved) post-phrenologist...
When you fail to clearly define what Extreme Neglect is you're giving crazy Helicopter Parents the excuse to be as crazy as they are. What is Extreme Neglect for 3 and under? Is leaving the child screaming for an hour in the bassinet extreme neglect, or is that just sleep training? I'd personally call hitting a child Abuse but is these also considered extreme neglect? Or is Extreme Neglect for those parents who never hold or cuddle their child, but rather just shove a bottle in the kids mouth and make sure their needs are only minimally met? Is leaving a child with their Grand Parent for the Day so you can have a night out Extreme Neglect, or is that Normal? I don't like these kinds of child studies because they overly generalize what they are looking at because they don't want to say something like we scanned the brains of children who were under the care of convicted child abusers who left their children at home unattended.
So basically this qualifies as a glorified anecdote. We're taking the researcher's word for age and conditions of these two brain scans. The article chooses to talk solely about mother's love, and not any confounding factors. Where are the correlation statistics for mother, father, age, genetics, economics, poverty, education, community, nutrition, illness, accidents, grandparents, number of siblings, geographic location, social services, etc., etc.?
Offhand I would bet that simple nutrition is more highly correlated with brain size than mother's emotional attention -- and the former is something we can change with social programs. For this kind of stuff I want to see scientific studies, not People magazine exposes.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
As long as at least one is nurturing and attentive in the formative years, wich one is doing it or their gender does not really matter.
Your "study's" sample size is two. But gratuitous use of words like "shocking" and "chilling" will probably make most people ignore that.
Liberty in your lifetime
Sorry, is this Slashdot, or Yahoo! Answers? I think I'm lost.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Well, during the "50 years of sexual liberation where youth descended into rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" wouldn't you say the vast majority of children (like greater than 99%) were still brought up by different sex couples?
Probably true, I should have stated the inverse -- I suspect the percentage of same sex couples raising children would comprise less than 1% of families over the last 50 years.
In any case, the parent AC was responding to a previous AC who asked for evidence that it (being brought up by same-sex couples) mattered. The '50 years of sexual liberation' argument looks meaningless in that light because likely only a very small fraction of same sex couples raised kids during those 50 years.
Ah, you mean 100,000 years where it "worked", in the sense that the human race failed to die out? I agree. Of course during most of the last 6000 years (where we actually have a historical record) the mean life expectancy was less than 20, women were de facto chattel and slaves, crime was no less commonplace than it is today (for all that it was punished far more severely), humanity was trapped in a state of unbelievable ignorance concerning the natural state of affairs that led them to adopt the most extravagant and absurd mythologies and use them to transform the status quo into "the will of the gods", and life was sufficiently close to the state of nature that it was ugly, nasty, brutish and very, very short even in what laughingly passed for "civilization". No noble savages these, but men and women for whom violence and misery were the normal state of affairs.
The poorest and meanest individuals living in modern society live better than the rulers of vast empires lived a mere century or two ago.
And then there is war. And the fact that what you call "sexual liberation" has never been anything but the rule for the lusty old human species, however much some of those antique and false mythologies sought to demonize it and regulate it. That, in fact, is why sex "worked" to perpetuate the species. Evolution requires warm bodies, produced in abundance, and lets abilities and luck sort it all out afterwards.
Personally, I think that while TFA is undoubtedly correct that it is really gangbusters good to love your children and provide them with a stimulating environment and the occasional kick in the pants to overcome the natural sloth to which our species (with its energy conserving reptile-brain core) is prone, "sexual liberation" has far less to do with any sort of social ennui or malaise visible among youth than the fact that our society forces them to delay acceptance into society as adults until they are in their 20s, when their evolved biology presumes that they would be 50% likely to be dead by their 20s and that "adulthood" begins at age 13 or thereabouts.
There is a deadly window in the teenage years where every hormone flooding a young brain is whispering to them to have sex, start a family, challenge the tribal leaders for status, run away to found your own tribe. It stimulates risk taking (which fuels evolution, successful risk takers being good genetic stock). It is the occult cause of gangs (tribes where youth can gain status), teen-age pregnancy, overt and covert rebellion against parents, society, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, tattoos and piercings. Failure to attain social status during these years is deadly indeed -- it is often the kids that are "outsiders", who don't fit in, who become depressed, although mere brain dysfunction due to imbalances of various neurotransmitters or damage from the toxins rampant in modern civilization no doubt contribute more than their fair share. One of the largest causes of death at this age is the humble automobile -- we let children in the throes of this transition drive massive machines at high speeds largely because it is more convenient to the adults to permit them to do so, and pay the price in human misery when they not terribly surprisingly run their cars into trees, into other cars, into ditches and rivers as they drive them too fast, without enough fear of consequence or attention, with other equally distracted youth in the car with them egging them on in pushing the envelope.
For all that -- your "rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" -- youth outlive their predecessors from more than 50 years ago by an increasing margin, and one that is clearly correlated with both reproductive age/female fertility (negatively) and education (positively) across many countries and social strata. Not to introduce anything like data into a good social rant, but you might look at things like: www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/.../BulledSosis2010.pdf to see how the actual numbers work out.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.