Glider

Probably wouldn't want to carry it about in your hip pocket though...probably better in your jacket pocket I think..

Probably, but then if parthenogenesis results in an embryo that won't survive to term (or even to the foetal stage) then I can't see how they could have a problem with it.

Yep, SARS only has a 10% mortality (principally among the very young, the very old and the already ill), and moreover, it's mutating rapidly. Infected individuals have been found with two different strains of the SARS corona virus 'on board'. Anybody releasing such an unstable virus, with a view to 'thinning' the population would have to be as mad as a badger.

True, but what's your point? Neither children nor the 'mentally incapable' have been judged 'stupid'. Children are encouraged to develop autonomy, as, wherever possible, are the 'mentally incapable' (whatever that means).

Cool!

You asked "Why do people assume that a "social life" is always important to everyone?" I answered "Because generally speaking, it is." This means that, people assume a social life is important because, a social life is important. This means that, within certain bounds, there is nothing wrong with being more interested in adults than your 'peers'. Very nearly, but not quite. My definition involved the term "critical stage...in development". This is why that stage of childhood is known as 'The formative years'. Adults may have the ability to 'act like a kid' (they clearly cannot "be a kid"), but they have the choice. Conversely, people who never developed socially and psychologically during their formative years will always have trouble being adults, and they won't have the choice. The definition provided is in context, both in terms of your question "What is a kid?", and in terms of previous posts in this thread concerning the kid in question, e.g.: Ok...Now I'm just wasting my time, aren't I?

No we don't. Functional autonomy is encouraged and developed in both wherever possible.

This absolutely the most important thing. It is the fundamental key to guiding a child. It is the rarity and discretion with which such verbal 'prods' are applied that makes them valuable (and more important, effective). If life for a child is one long tirade of arguing and shouting, a raised voice means nothing; it is simply the norm. Such parents will have completely undermined their ability to control their child without resorting to physical assault. Radical Edward: The term 'hit' simply means to apply force of whatever intensity acutely (i.e. rapid onset, short duration, as in a blow or an impact). There is no implication of the intent to cause injury (e.g. we 'hit' a nail with a hammer). I use the term 'physical assault' above, but is not emotive. It simply means to apply physical force without the consent and against the will of the assaulted. The term carries no implicit indication of degree or severity. This is what the anti smacking people are arguing; to debate this subject effectively, we must define clearly our terms of reference, and avoid the use of misleading terms that evoke inaccurate concepts (e.g. 'spanking').

Personally, I have no particular stance on this. I haven't thought about it enough, but... They (the anti smacking lobby) do this deliberately because they believe that those in favour have done the inverse, i.e. that by using terms such as 'smacking' and 'spanking', they have 'cutsified', and so altered the reality of what the debate is about: An adult hitting a child. The antis feel that people should be aware of precicely what the debate is about before it can be debated effectively. The argument is about 'hitting', which (they feel), is abuse. They argue that as it is unnacceptable (and illegal) for one adult to hit another, how can it be acceptable for an adult to hit a child? Gardengnome raised a point strongly supported by the antis, in that hitting a child serves no other purpose than to teach it that when you get a bit frustrated, the thing to do is to hit somebody. This is very true (see below). The antis argue that tone of voice and volume are sufficient. If you haven't 'wasted' your impact by 'nagging' the child for every minor incident (which only habituates the child to constant negativity, so it begins to ignore it), a loud "NO" tends to do the trick. It's perfectly valid to put it here I think. This is a major area of research in developmental psychology. One significant finding is that children have been shown to mimic agressive behaviours they observe in adults. This indicates that point raised by the anti smacking group, that hitting a child teaches it that physical aggression is an appropriate response to frustration, is valid. Increased levels of physical agression towards peers, toys and other objects has been observed in (a statistically representative sample of) children exposed to aggressive acts by adults.

There's unlikely to be any one determined outcome for all child prodigies, so the answer has to be, it depends on how they grow up.

Possibly so, but that doesn't mean anyone has the right to deny them functional autonomy. ...nonetheless, even 'informed' choices would differ from one onother. So, based on 'informed' choices, some would own guns, some wouldn't; some would take drugs, some wouldn't. What practical difference does the 'informed' bit make if we're all apparently making choices on the bases of different information and beliefs anyway?

Because generally speaking, it is. Nothing at all, within certain bounds. Being a kid is a critical stage in physical, psychological and emotional development. It is the period in which we develop the ability to relate to others, and where we acquire the social and cultural norms within our societies, including for example, gender identity. It is the stage where, in interaction with our peers, we experiment with what is and isn't acceptable social behaviour, and where learn how to function in social situations. Because if they don't, they tend to become lonely, disfunctional adults, unable to operate in social situations because they never learned the 'rules' governing human social interaction. True.

...against someone without a gun

On the contrary, it has everything to do with this topic. This is one of many rituilistic self-mutilations that certain groups undergo, such as the (Asian) Indian hook-swinging ceremony; (North American) Indian rights of passage, African tribal rights of passage and so-on. It's one of big questions in pain; how can these people undergo what to most other people would be ubearable physical trauma? These are examples of the modulation of pain at the limbic level. The limbic reagion contains the medial division of the pain matrix (the part that's responsible for the affective-motivation response to pain, and the 'suffering' associated with it). Also in the limbic area is the circuit of Papez, which it responsible for the detection and processing of emotionally salient information. hese two 'circuits' share several components. The fact that people can undergo quite severe physical trauma in the apparent absence of pain (or at least tolerate the pain), leads people to think that certain states of limbic (emotional) arousal can modify the nociceptive signals recieved by the medial division of the pain matrix, resulting in their being 'reinterpreted', and also increase the amount of central feedback via raphespinal pathways (from the periaqueductal grey area in the brainstem), which provides a degree of modulation at the spinal level also.

Sort of. Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is a medical condition. It's a very weird form of epilepsy. Ergot is a fungus which infests wheat and is toxic and extremely hallucinogenic. The similarity is in that ergot produces nurological effects in some (but not all) of the same brain areas that are affected by TLE. The generator loci for TLE, as the name suggests, lie in the temproal lobe, often the medial region and around the hippocampal formation. This may account for some of the strange effects of TLE compared to 'normal' epilepsy. Interestingly, there is a correlaton between outbreaks of ergot infestation and witch hunts/witch burning. It has been suggested that people eating bread contaminated with ergot had hallucinations and displayed strange behaviours resulting in their being accused of witchcraft and/or satanic posession and leading to a witchhunt. Often entire villages would suffer the effects of ergot poisoning, which is not surprising as there would usually only be one baker, baking bread from the crop grown by the village.

Handguns (pistols & revolvers) were designed solely for the purpose of shooting people. They are absolutely no use for anything else. They may be used for target practice, but even then, they're a bit pants (excluding the purpose built, counterweighted, long barreled olympic target pistols, but people never buy them for personal use). The only reason a hangun exists is to be used on other people. That's what they were designed for. I think that whether or not they are used to 'indiscriminately' kill is more a feature of the owner than of the design of the weapon. I know what you mean, but then people with epilepsy, narcolepsy or schizophrenia aren't allowed driving licences. Problem is, if you can buy a weapon at 21, that leaves an awful lot of time. The majority of people don't develop severe psych. disorders (e.g. schizophrenia) until their mid-late 30s/early 40s. Same with severe depression (tends to occur in middle age), and severe stress related conditions. I've had the opportunity to have a play with several kinds of gun; pistols and SMGs (blowing little holes in things from 50 meters); rifles (SLR), LMGs and GPMGs (blowing little holes in things from 300 meters); and 'proper' guns, (blowing things to oblivion from several miles away). It was a blast at the time, but I wouldn't want to own any of them. I do believe that anything other than a shotgun or a purpose built hunting rifle, is simply a weapon, the sole purpose of which is to blow little holes in other people. I think that people who consider hunting a sport, but who feel they need fully automatic weapons to engage in it, need to put in some serious range-time. Otherwisy they might just as well set some claymores and go and drink beer in their tents for the day.

Hehehe...perhaps not the most brilliant move, no.

Aha! I see what you mean. Tricky. To consider the brain a 'receiver' of consciousness raises a whole bunch of even trickier questions; where is it receiving it from? what is the mechanism of transfer? why can't we detect the signals? and so-on and so-on. To consider the brain the 'generator' of consciousness is somewhat simpler, but still presents questions. Consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon that a result of the complexity of the brain; a kind of synergistic feedback where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, therefore consciousness is not a function of any one part of the brain, but rather the result of the complex circuitry of all of it. Not least among the problems is that people still can't provide a specific and universal definition of consciousness. We can't even directly observe it. We know it in ourselves, but we can only infer its existance in others.

Fair enough. He did seem to wield his qualifications like weapons I guess. I must have missed it though...that's what happens when I don't pay attention!...:zzz:

...to DocBill. Did he leave?

Well...I dunno. If you remove a person's brain, they tend to lose consciousness. Wouldn't that suggest that the brain has something to do with it?

MS Word really bites. I just can't get into it...and that damned paperclip!...Oh...to be patronised by one's own wordprocessor!...the ignominy! WordPerfect rocks!:bravo:

This is true. Behaviour has become extremely complex, and I doubt many particular behaviours could be well explained through evolution. However, I do believe the underlying drives to all behaviours can be explained through evolution. The development of 'civilisation' and the adaptation of our behaviour to urban society is a comparatively recent event. I don't think events of the last 5-7,000 years can wipe out millions of years of evolutionary programming. That's true. Some people are still a bit alarmed about it. They don't want to find real bases for racism, sexism or any of the nasty 'isms'. However, those people should remember two things: 1) Validation of a thing does not mean to excuse it or condone it or to find it acceptable. Validation is an observation, not a value judgment. 2) You can only solve a 'real' problem. In medicine, you can only treat a disease if the underlying pathology is understood. If you treat it as "something that just happens; we don't know why", then you are left treating the symptoms only, not the underlying cause. Tree hugging hippy crap "political correctness" is an attempt to treat the symptoms only. All it means is that it is no longer acceptable for people to say what they feel. The only effect this has is to stop people saying it. It doesn't stop them feeling it. It makes it harder to deal with the underlying causes, because it's driven underground and hidden, where it festers like an abscess, thriving in infected pools of pus in the form of neo-nazi groups and suchlike.

This is quite true. People still talk of "psychological reactions" as separate and distinct from "physical reactions". But if you accept that there isn't a thought or a feeling that doesn't have its origins in activity in some region of the brain, then the distinction becomes less clear. In the example of naloxone blocking the (analgesic) placebo effect, as I said yesterday: Among these changes is an increase in 5-HT which is associated with elevated affect (and is thought to be one of the transmitters responsible for the inhibition of spinothalamic projection neurons in the dorsal horn via descending raphespinal projections from the periaqueductal grey). Also, activity of dopaminergic neurons in the 'reward' centres and the release of endogenous opiates (endorphines). The important thing here is the centres that are responsible for bringing about these changes: Of these (and among others), the ACC, the amygdala and the thalamus are rich in opiate receptors(Chen, 2001). The ACC in particular has been implicated in the central control of pain (Jones, 1997), and surgical lesioning of particular areas of the ACC is sometimes used in the treatment of intractable pain conditions. However, the introduction of naloxone into this system would inhibit the activity of the central control mechanism (i.e. inhibit the actions of the action of the ACC and descending fibres to the medial thalamus and the PAG), and so would prevent central inhibition of pain. So it's true, the placebo effect is a 'genuine' effect, and the results of experiments showing inhibition of the placebo effect should really only surprise those who consider "psychological effects" to be synonymous with "imagined effects". References Chen, A. C. N. (2001). New perspectives in EEG/MEG brain mapping and PET/fMRI neuroimaging of human pain. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42 (2), 53-65. Jones, A. K. P. (1997). Pain, its perception, and pain imaging. IASP Newsletter Technical Corner, 1-5.

1) In what way is that a bad thing? 2) What exactly is the difference? Blike is absolutely right. Placebos depend on individual expectancies. First of all, placebos don't work on everything. For example, somebody suffering a bacterial infection will show very little improvement if given a placebo rather than an antibiotic (although they might 'feel' better for a little while), and you couldn't expect to prevent a diabetic from entering a hypoglycemic coma by giving them a placebo. Placebos exert their influence on symptoms that depend on the psychology of an individual, e.g. conditions such as pain, stress, mild depression, anxiety, insomnia etc.. HOW The repeated laying down of associations between action and outcome or stimulus and response produces long term neural changes (learning, in essence). For example, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov noticed that his dogs began to salivate (unconditioned response) before they were given food (unconditioned stimulus). He paired the unconditioned stimulus (food) with a non-related stimulus (bell) in order to elicit the unconditioned response (salivation). After a while the dogs learned that the bell meant food and Pavlov found that the conditioned stimulus (bell) on its own would elicit (what had become) the conditioned response (salivation). This is simple classical conditioning. Related to this is 'Skinnerian', or operant conditioning. This is where an organism forms a long-term association between its actions and the outcome. Skinner placed a cat in (what is now known as ) a Skinner box. This is a box which locks and only opens if a lever is pressed from the inside. The cat made random attempts to escape and eventually pressed the lever. The box opened. On subsequent trial, the cat took less and less time to press the lever as the association between its action and the result was reinforced. Humans are subject to both forms of learning. If you are hungry and you smell food, you will begin to salivate and produce gastric acids (a classically conditioned physiological response to psychological associations between the smell and the reality of food). If we have a headache, we take a paracetomol tablet, the pain goes away. We do this often throughout our lives, and so we build an association between taking the tablet and the removal of a negative state (pain). This is operant conditioning: negative reinforcement. If we are in pain, and we are given a tablet which we are told is paracetomol (or some other effective analgesic), its presence, and the action of taking it will induce physiological changes that we have been conditioned to expect. Our expectancies and short-term hypotheses concerning the situation and probable outcomes will be dependent upon these conditioned associations. Pain is a psychological experience and significant componants of pain are anxiety, frustration and general negative affect (a negative emotional state). These are responsible for the 'suffering' associated with a pain state. The belief that we have taken an effective analgesic will result in a reduction in anxiety and frustration, and an elevation of affect. In essence, although the placebo has no effect on the cause of the pain, it still significantly reduces the suffering associated with it. Moreover, a large proportion of headaches (for example) are caused by muscular tension in the neck and shoulder regions, caused by stress, or simply bad posture. The above effects of taking the placebo (reduction in pain-related anxiety, frustration and elevation of affect) will result in our relaxing. In this case, the headache will probably go as we will have reduced the underlying cause. WHERE Broadly, for pain there are the lateral and medial pain systems. The lateral involves the ascending spinothalamic tract (extralemniscal system) > lateral thalamus > somatosensory cortex. This is responsible for the sensory-discriminatory component of pain, allowing us to localise pain (where it is) and evaluate its intensity and qualities (how bad and is it burning, shooting. dull, stabbing etc.?). The parts affected by the placebo are in the medial pain system, which is involved in the affective-motivational component of pain. This includes the spinothalamic tract, the medial thalamus, the anterior cingulate gyrus, the frontal cortex, the insula and the periaqueductal grey area of the brainstem. Many of these structures are also included in the circuit of Papez, which is involved in emotional processing. This consists of: The hippocampal formation, mamilliary body, anterior thalamic nuclei, the cingulate cortex, the pre-frontal and association cortices, the hippocampus and underlying gyri and the amygdalae. Several of these structures are responsible for the detection and pre-conscious processing of salient, valenced environmental information, i.e. they respond particularly to novel stimuli and assess it for safety or danger. In other words, they check all incoming information to see whether it is good (food, sex, etc.) or bad (constitutes the possibility of harm). Many of the schema (the things which incoming stimuli are compared to) are hard wired (e.g. primates react the same to a length of hosepipe in the grass, as they do to a snake). However, many are learned. The amygdala has been shown to be an area of neural plasticity, and forms the associations between stimulus and outcome (labels stimuli for valence (good or bad) depending on what results on exposure to it). The hippocampus is also associated with memory. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is responsible for assessing valenced information and selecting our response (basic motivation to approach or avoid the stimulus) to it. So, if we are in pain, we become particularly sensitive to pain related environmental stimuli. If we perceive a possble means of alleviating the pain (an analgesic), this is flagged by the amygdala and the ACC. The ACC and reticular activating system makes us orient towards the stimulus, and the ACC and pre-frontal and frontal cortices match up the stimulus with previously learned outcomes (with help of previous labelling from the amygdala), and the basic motivation to approach that stimulus is engaged by the ACC. When we do approach (and take) that stimulus, we are rewarded (by the activity of dopaminergic neurones in the 'reward centres' or the brain). The successful fulfillment of the approach motivation results in an elevation of affect. The change in our emotional state to a more positive one, results in a change in the activity of the medial pain system, and greater feedback to the periaqueductal grey area (PAG), which is a significant componant of central pain control. This projects ventrally to the Raphe nuclei (particularly the Nucleus Locus Coeruleus). The descending raphespinal pathways terminate in the laminae of the dorsal horn of the spinal cord (the substansia gelatinosa) where it provides inhibitory feedback to the ascending spinothalamic projection neurons. So, the effect of a placebo with respect to pain at least, is an elevation of affective state which is generated mainly in limbic structures, and has a positive psychological effect on the 'suffering' associated with pain, but also increased inhibitory feedback via central pain control systems (PAG & locus coeruleus) resulting from changes in the acitivity of the same limbic structures. WHEN Whenever we take a placebo. WHY Why not? Three points to remember: 1) Placebos can only work if the original association between the stimulus and its effect has been laid down, i.e. a placebo analgesic wouldn't have any effect on somebody who has never seen a painkiller before, unless you could convince them absolutley that what you were giving them will kill the pain. Like Blike said, the effect depends on the expectancies of the individual. 2) Although this example focusses on the placebo effect on pain, the underlying principles of the placebo effect remain the same. 3) I ain't no psychiatrist. :psi: