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Comment by Dallas the Phallus on June 4, 2012 at 10:52pm

Autism study strengthens idea that we read God's mind

People with autism appear less likely to believe in God – a discovery that has strengthened theories that religious belief relies on being able to imagine what God is thinking, a capacity known as "mentalising".

One of the hallmarks of autism is an impaired ability to infer and respond to what other people are thinking, so the investigators wondered whether this would affect their likelihood of believing in God.

In a study of adolescents questioned on their beliefs, those with autism were almost 90 per cent less likely than non-autistic peers to express a strong belief in God.

The study – along with three others that questioned hundreds of people about religious belief and mentalisation abilities – also showed that men are worse than women at mentalising. This correlated with them being less likely than women to believe in God.

"We reasoned that if thinking about a personal god engages mentalising abilities, then mentalising deficits would be expected to make belief in a personal god less intuitive, and therefore less believable," says Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and joint head of the investigation. "We found support for this in four different studies." [continue]

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on December 21, 2011 at 1:21pm

I've added a new video to the homepage. Check it out.

Comment by Jazz on August 31, 2011 at 6:39pm

A piece of my thoughts i got from looking outside one starry night.

 

 

 

What about the unseen stars? I'm sure they try just as hard, to shine as bright as they can. For me to stop living my ignorant life and admire them. So bright they are. So far yet so close to touching them as if you could lift your hand and leave this life behind, to explore something totally different, but the only place i leave is my mind. The stars give us the honor of gazing upon them while they are still here. Almost gone forever, they are our creators.  They teach us and show us the inevitability of death. For the lessons and beauty i thank the stars, universe, cosmos, my creators. My destroyers, bringers of death to my insignificant life.

 

hmm this sounded way better in my head...

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on July 3, 2011 at 9:09pm

Why Did the Absence of the Corpus Callosum in Kim Peek's Brain Increase His Memory Capacity?

 

Read the brief excerpt here.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on July 3, 2011 at 9:01pm

Brain in a Dish Comes Alive
A computer chip marinated in neurons and stem cells creates super bursts of activity and could someday help stroke victims' brains heal.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on March 11, 2011 at 6:57pm

Welcome to the new members who've joined recently. Old members, we miss your contributions.

 

As a reminder, I would like to encourage people to follow these ongoing threads if they are interested:

Blurbs & Tidbits – post short, interesting links here if it doesn’t merit its own thread
Get Mental: The Thinking Ape Repository - for links, publications, and misc. info
Quotes – post interesting quotes here
The Reading List – if you don’t wish to write a book review, post your books here
Video Thread – post your videos here

Comment by Pope OoO (Out of Order) on March 1, 2011 at 2:20am

(Sorry for delete/repost.)

 

Amanda Baggs

(see full article from WIRED MAGAZINE, Feb 2008)

As disabled as Amanda is in some ways (e.g. she can't speak), she produced and edited this video herself.

Like many people with autism, Baggs doesn't like to look you in the eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British schoolteacher.

The YouTube post, she says, was a political statement, designed to call attention to people's tendency to underestimate autistics. It wasn't her first video post, but this one took off. "When the number of viewers began to climb, I got scared out of my mind," Baggs says. As the hit count neared 100,000, her blog was flooded. At 200,000, scientists were inviting her to visit their labs. By 300,000, the TV people came calling, hearts warmed by the story of a young woman's fiery spirit and the rare glimpse into what has long been regarded as the solitary imprisonment of the autistic mind. "I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."

 

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on February 10, 2011 at 12:30pm

If learning new things is dependent upon our ability to remember, I'd be curious to know if mental retardation is ultimately a problem with the most basic forms of human memory. Certainly, people can be intelligent but still forgetful about certain things, like the date of their anniversary, etc., but I wonder if MR is a problem with most basic memory systems of the brain.

 

Opinions?

Comment by T A A on February 4, 2011 at 6:38pm

Adriana said there is something wrong in their head

I don't know about wrong... but I do think they have a have a mental illness, and that mental illness predisposes them to seeing/hearing/believing in that which does not exist.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on January 15, 2011 at 8:58pm

The Whole Brain Atlas 

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