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[Psychiatry On] big changes coming
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Rates of neurogenesis and synaptic pruning.
Yes, but I was talking about the oft-repeated canard that adults find it harder to learn a second language than a child. Going by time taken, adults have it significantly easier.
I don't think you can generalize "the linguistic environment that children encounter" that way— and although it's not quantifiable evidence, I think it's telling that children everywhere grow up to speak a perfect copy of the dialect that their peers speak, regardless of how much personal attention they get in learning their first language.
If they don't have access to peers and their parents neglect them seriously, they don't learn it at all, even though they do hear SOME language from their parents.
Unless the parents are completely neglectful, kids get hours and hours every day for many years of exposure to people talking and parents ALWAYS use simplified language to respond and correct their children's errors so yes, you can generalise the environment they encounter because it's bloody similar between families and across cultures.
Young children usually don't receive the second, they do often receive the first. But children will extrapolate from the rote learning baby talk and learn the grammatical rules underlying what they are learning. Hence they come up with new sentences that they were not taught how to say.
Either children are absolute geniuses or there's something unique going on at a certain period of development that enables them to do this. They certainly can't tell you how they know to say it correctly. If they were doing focused, explicit study behind the scenes, they'd be able to tell you why.
All I meant by hard is the difference in focused cognition involved. Cognition is effortful. Focusing on something takes effort. Directed study takes effort and a level of cognitive ability children do not have.
Time taken, speed of acquisition, all of that isn't what I meant by hard. I simply meant they can pick it up in a manner that is not entirely correlated with their ability to apply effortful cognition to a task. If I meant speed I would have said speed.
If it makes anyone happier, I'll say it: Adults are faster if they apply the appropriate level of effort to the task.
The recent events at UA-B got me thinking on that, and with as many people with personality disorders I see in my work, I'm kind of leaning toward treating and diagnosing these disorders much more stronger than we have in the past.
Typically, society's default attitude toward anti-social types was to give them space and let them express themselves. Yet now we see that being given space is often misconstrued by them as abandonment and ostracization, and their forms of self-expression often take the shape of violent outbursts.
There's so much projection and reflection and self-loathing associated with anti-socials, it seems like it's in society's best interest to get them some real help.
What happened to you then, if you don't mind my asking?
Only i'm on antidepressants right now, prescribed by a GP, and I'm wondering if your situation has any relevance to mine.
And that studies of "Venting therapy" have shown they don't decrease aggressive behaviour - they increase it. Bottling up your anger actually results in less aggression, even in the long run!
It seems that encouraging "venting" condones releasing negative expressions of energy. I've always been skeptical of those against "bottling things up." "Bottling things up" usually is just a stupid way of saying "internalizing conflict," which is something we all should try to do. Then, cooler heads prevail and civil discourse happens.
However, it should be noted that I have an extremely low tolerance for people with a low threshold on the restraint of their own emotions.
When people get angry in front of me I just find it embarassing, like they've suddenly started crying for a bottle. The most pathetic sight in the world is a grown adult losing their temper.
For me, it's not just when people get angry. I find people more often are quite eager to display wholly unaware expressions of sentimentalism or perceived emotional depth with little regard to their own self or those around them. Even more so, when this occurs, those in question seem to think this singles them out as being especially superior people.
Just look for anyone who thinks Evanescence makes profoundly inspirational music, or has any article of clothing with Biblical scripture on it.
By and large, unchecked emotional responses are the harbinger of bad personal choices to come.
It basically says that they are untreatable. Personality disorders are nearly untreatable, period. It is just SO difficult to change someone's personality outright.
If I recall correctly there's no direct evidence for a critical period of language development - no-one has been able to find anything specific in the brain that matures and directly causes the ability to pick up language. As mentioned however severe neglect (as is the case in feral children) will cause a general lack of development in the brain, which will affect overall cognitive development and also how we pick up language.
Timetables for neural developmental events cannot be mapped onto how we acquire and produce language. However you might talk about sensitive periods for language learning - simply because of the overall maturation of neural systems that children go through (paraphrased from a chapter in a book on language development).
Some psychologists (most notably Michael Tomasello) argue that there are several milestones in language learning - mostly from around 8-10 months - because children go through a so-called 'cognitive revolution' in that they are now able to understand others as intentional beings, thus making them able to share attention with others, which is the first step of acquiring language.
Hope this helped somewhat.
Just to play the devil's advocate on this, isn't most of the evidence of children's understanding of cause-and-effect et al. mainly based on a rather weak research paradigm? Preferential looking task has its strengths, but certainly also its weaknesses. When it comes to physical laws, how are you even to say that our innate understanding of it doesn't come from the general maturation of the brain on its own (this isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely interested!).
Understanding of physical laws certainly comes with development and increased cognitive abilities, but I don't think that there is a particular mechanism designed for learning them, the way some people claim there is a genetically-coded universal grammar or at least a grammar-learning mechanism. It just isn't needed. Pattern recognition and years of exposure are a sufficient explanation.
I think it would at least be better to get a head start on either getting these people the therapy they need or to usher them into a place where their behavior could be monitored. At the very least, more thorough diagnostic work could keep these people disqualified from holding certain jobs or buying firearms.
That's a pretty big generalization.
The personality disorder I know the most about is borderline, and that certainly is treatable. There's a subset of cognitive therapy called dialectical behavior therapy that, in combination with antidepressants, is effective at treating borderline.
Personality disorders are hard to treat because they encompass so much about the person and how the interact with the world. You don't just need to alter one behaviour or one thought pattern, you need to alter everything.
I hope I got that first term right. It's the opposite of dystonic.
Anyway the point is people treat their personality as a part of themselves and attempt to change it as attacks that they get defensive about.
That is the major roadblock to personality change. Most people could change their personality quite a lot were they willing to put in the effort. There's nothing truly set about a personality. You could probably conceivably overcome genetic influences if you worked hard enough and consistently enough at it. Plasticity is an amazing thing.
Also I wanted to say I appreciate the input by people more knowledgeable about the specifics of language than I. It prompted me to look more deeply into what I was talking about and I learnt some new stuff I didn't know. It seems what I knew was out of date since I haven't done any more specialised study of language yet.