Both horrifying and delightful (read the whole thing):

The brain on the right has so much CSF (brain fluid) that there's almost no brain tissue left (in at least one cross section) - the center is hollow; at it's thickest, it's 2 inches thick. It belongs to a 126 IQ, socially normal university student (circa 1980 - I'd like to see how he's doing now).

So, we can be pleased to find such resiliency, but my emotional glass is more empty: I may be accumulating all sorts of brain damage (environmental toxins, alcohol, fever, high-altitude hiking, heading soccer balls, colliding in beach volleyball, cancer, prions, alzheimers lesions) yet feel and act apparently fine, as long as the damage happens gradually enough.

You know about 26,000 word families!

How accurate is this test?

This test was originally designed to test up to a maximum of 14,000 word families. Native English speakers and highly proficient non-native speakers of English, however, know far more word families than that. Therefore, the number of word families reported above is an estimate based on the performance of several hundred previous results. Your performance on this test ranks higher than 90% of all native English speakers who have taken this test without regard to age.

(according to vocabularysize.com - the distracting choices are intentionally quite attractive; you have to know the words well, and some of the items aren't well designed - consider it noise; the result is still valid)

Left: biological children; Right: adopted

X axis: wealth (socio-economic status). Y axis: child IQ.

White adoptive and biological-child families, mix of asian and white adopted babies (4 mo. old) - I assume from outside the U.S. I also assume that the poorest families are actually not terribly poor (they're rich enough to be qualified for this adoption agency).

It's tempting to say, under the assumption that people treat their adopted children the same as biological children, "IQ is mainly genetic, and good (bad) genes cause (after a few generations) high (low) wealth", but I'm sure the prenatal (and first 4 months') environment is an important cause as well, and you can imagine selection effects involving mothers who neither abort nor keep their child. The low-wealth families adopting children end up with smarter offspring than their non-adopting low-wealth counterparts and inversely for high-wealth (for the middle of the pack, there's not much difference).

I believe that nearly all the families (even the poorest) were sufficiently rich and nurturing after childbirth that the differences are due mostly to the quality of the baby. It could be that the poorest (wealthiest) non-adopting parents somehow provide an exceptionally poor (good) prenatal and first-4-months environment, but that's odd considering the quality of post-4-months-care is identically sufficient. You would have to believe that prenatal sufficiency is a much higher bar - which is credible; fetal development is probably a delicate thing. If it's not in the prenatal or first-4-months environment, it's in the genes. That sucks (in terms of being able to hope for technological improvements allowing all to enjoy the priveleges of the rich, that aren't eugenic), but appears to be true.

I can't say whether the genetic or prenatal quality of the adopted children is better or worse, but their combination seems similar to U.S. middle-class.

You can also consider adopted child trying hard enough to get Bs or As in school (harder than a biological child), or sibling competition effects.

(HT)

People sometimes intentionally deaden their facial expressions when they're lying. They think they've completely eliminated them, but they've just reduced them. The mouth area is more easily controlled than the brow area (compare to fake smiles lacking the crinkling around the outside of the eyes). Also, the suppression may be non-specific - the liars will smile less in friendly interaction.

But the extra cognitive load in protecting a lie can be more detectible than physical signs. (liars use less details, or produce them less rapidly).

source

In low carb diets, the protein->glucose pathway is mostly utilized to fill the liver with glycogen (a long-lasting store of glucose, to feed the brain, and if any is left over, to refill muscle glycogen or store in fat). So it's hard to do anything other than lose fat (although with enough dietary fat you may be able to gain).

For athletes, eating carbs on workout day, or to near-bursting once or twice a week (following a muscle glycogen depleting workout, possibly), is thought to help maintain or build muscle while losing fat (just cutting calories while maintaining enough protein in diet, you'll still lose plenty of muscle mass along with fat mass). I first heard of this from Lyle McDonald (look for "depletion workout" and "refeed"). I'm not sure how strong the evidence is, but there are several plausible mechanisms beyond the claim below that alternating carb-loading and carb-avoiding will increase glycogen storage capacity, which would make for a better low-carb diet experience (more energy available, especially compared to the Atkins-type 50g/day or less of carbs and the accompanying ketosis-only malaise - although I guess burned proteins contribute less to cancer than burned glucose or fat).

Excess amino acids are oxidized for energy. This may be why many people feel a slight surge of energy after a high-protein meal. (A related effect is associated with alcohol consumption, which is often masked by the relaxing effect also associated with alcohol consumption.) Amino acid oxidation is not associated with cancer. Neither is fat oxidation. But glucose oxidation is; this is known as the Warburg effect.

A high-protein LC approach will not work very well for athletes who deplete major amounts of muscle glycogen as part of their daily training regimens. These folks will invariably need more carbohydrates to keep their performance levels up. Ultimately this is a numbers game. The protein-to-glucose conversion rate is about 2-to-1. If an athlete depletes 300 g of muscle glycogen per day, he or she will need about 600 g of protein to replenish that based only on protein. This is too high an intake of protein by any standard.

A recreational exerciser who depletes 60 g of glycogen 3 times per week can easily replenish that muscle glycogen with dietary protein. Someone who exercises with weights for 40 minutes 3 times per week will deplete about that much glycogen each time. Contrary to popular belief, muscle glycogen is only minimally replenished postprandially (i.e., after meals) based on dietary sources. Liver glycogen replenishment is prioritized postprandially. Muscle glycogen is replenished over several days, primarily based on liver glycogen. It is one fast-filling tank replenishing another slow-filling one.

Recreational exercisers who are normoglycemic and who do LC intermittently tend to increase the size of their liver glycogen tank over time, viacompensatory adaptation, and also use more fat (and ketones, which are byproducts of fat metabolism) as sources of energy. Somewhat paradoxically, these folks benefit from regular high carbohydrate intake days (e.g., once a week, or on exercise days), since their liver glycogen tanks will typically store more glycogen. If they keep their liver and muscle glycogen tanks half empty all the time, compensatory adaptation suggests that both their liver and muscle glycogen tanks will over time become smaller, and that their muscles will store more fat.

Clinton's achievements were a problem. In strategy meetings, he often complained that he had created seven million jobs and cut the deficit but no one seemed to notice. In speeches, he referred to the achievements awkwardly. Our polls showed audiences already knew about them or didn't believe they were true.

The solution, apparently, was a re-jiggering of language. Morris relates that communications strategist Bob Squier had the following bright idea:

The key…was to cite the achievement while talking about something he was going to do. For example: "The hundred thousand extra police we put on the street can't solve the crime problem by themselves; we need to keep anti-drug funding in the budget and stop Republicans from cutting it." Or: "The seven million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find education people to fill them. That's why I want a tax deduction for college tuition to help kids go on to college to take those jobs."

Linguists of course will recognize that this language is infested with presuppositions—those fascinating linguistic organisms, which because of theirpresumption

of truth, head deniability off at the pass. There are no fewer than six distinct, politically-relevant presuppositions in the above brief excerpt.

Once you know about the linguistic properties of presuppositions, it seems intuitively natural that they should act as performance-enhancing aids for claims, particularly when it comes to believability. After all, their entire reason for living is to allow the speaker to signal that certain information is already taken for granted as shared knowledge—and if it's not, then the hearer should accommodate it post-haste into his set of background assumptions.

In fact, psychological studies as far back as the seventies have shown that people can be so eager to accommodate presupposed information that they might even tweak their own memories accordingly. In a study led by memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus, people who'd witnessed simulated car crashes were more likely to mistakenly remember a stop sign when asked "Do you remember seeing the stop sign?" 

as opposed to "Do you remember seeing a stop sign?"

from an unusually useful Language Log post

I've already observed this in myself. Imprudent action feels like an unwillingness to help future-me at now-me's expense.

The researchers asked a group of college seniors — three weeks before graduation — to read a passage that described college graduation either as an event that would prompt a major change in their identities or as an event that would prompt only a relatively trivial change. Compared to students who read the passage describing graduation as a small change, those who read a description of the event as a major change were much more likely to make more impatient choices, choosing to receive a gift certificate worth $120 in the next week rather than wait a year for up to $240.

Their work suggests that people can be motivated to hold onto their money, or make more prudent decisions by increasing their sense of connectedness to their future selves, the researchers said.

HT

Project Bright Idea: http://today.duke.edu/2011/03/darity.html

cool idea: get teachers to treat students as if they're "gifted", and everyone involved tries harder. hard to see a loss there (except to the actual gifted students, who should really get their own "really gifted - but don't tell anyone!" secret super-gifted program, in fairness).

Darity's research showing black and Latino students to be underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes ...

 

Its primary author calculates "on the safe side" that 15-20 percent of students taught with techniques usually reserved for gifted classrooms are identified within three years by their districts as being academically and intellectually gifted. Only 10 percent of a control group of similar students taught in regular classrooms met their district's "gifted" criteria during the same period.

energizing their profession and their classrooms by weaving together teaching strategies based on the work of national education experts, including Art Costa and Bena Kallick's work on "habits of mind," Mary Frasier's on "traits, attributes and behaviors" and Howard Gardner's on "multiple intelligences."

 

"We are literally changing the knowledge, skills and dispositions of teachers so they believe children can learn. It is a lot about teacher expectation and belief,"

teachers' fault, as the usual hopeful story goes.

"We are teaching students how to think, not what to think," Gayle said.

why did no one try this before? it's brilliant!

"In college we learned about the multiple intelligences theory; it's nothing new. But Bright Idea had the research that provided a model to incorporate all the things we know that are right for kids," Miller said.

By using some components of Bright Idea, McFarland watched the achievement gap at Fuquay Varina decrease by 4-6 percent from 2006 to 2010.

4-6% relative? so the gap went from e.g. 20% to 19%? or absolute? (from 20% to 15%)?

"But with high expectations, there is a change in teacher practices and more willingness and interest on their part. Teachers are saying they want more."

all we need are high expectations.

i wish them all sustained exuberance and effort.

Eagleman in Incognito, with Mrs. G., recovering from a severe stroke:

When I asked her to close her eyes, she said "Okay," and closed one eye, as in a permanent wink.
"Are your eyes closed?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Both eyes?"
"Yes."
I held up three fingers. "how many fingers am I holding up, Mrs. G.?"
"Three," she said.
"And your eyes are closed?"
"Yes."
"Then how did you know how many fingers I was holding up?"
An interesting silence followed

...
I wheeled Mrs. G in front [of a mirror] and asked if she could see her own face. She said yes. I then asked her to close both her eyes. Again she closed one eye and not the other.
"Are both your eyes closed?"
"Yes."
"Can you see yourself?"
"Yes."
"Does it seem possible to see yourself in the mirror if both your eyes are closed?"
Pause. No conclusion.
"Does it look to you like one eye is closed or that both are closed?"
Pause. No conclusion.

Well, duh. How can she answer that question when both her eyes are closed? :)

...

Even though it's profitable to model our brains as collections of autonomous semi-intelligent programs, there's still coordination. In healthy people, only one motor program runs at once. Half of your body doesn't try to eat the cake while the other half tries to restrain it. Half of you doesn't run away while the other half fights. Something mediates.

It's thought that the left hemisphere constantly produces explanations (confabulations) for what we're feeling, doing, and seeing. In severely damaged brains (e.g. communication between hemispheres severed completely - always interesting), the explanations (of what the non-connected half of the body is seeing/doing) seem like lies, but really the explaining part has no awareness of the truth, and apparently no shame - always producing the best explanation it can, without admitting failure.

Lyte lists these neurochemicals produced by various microbial species:

Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium	GABA
Escherichia, Bacillus, Saccharomyces	Norepinephrine
Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, Enterococcus	Serotonin
Bacillus, Serratia	Dopamine
Lactobacillus	Acetylcholine

All of the above are neurotransmitters/hormones already normally employed. Also, more is not necessarily better. I think they're all somewhat common in our guts (I didn't verify all of them). I don't know whether a course of antibiotics completely eradicates gut bacteria (I'm guessing not), but presumably you'll end up hosting some population or another absorbed from ingestion or respiration, even if your gut is briefly sterilized.

(not all streptococcus species are "strep throat"-harmful)

HT