Author: hearseeno

adaav:

The drama of the gifted child

Huh.  Been a while since I read that book, but here’s a quick summary of the Alice Miller’s thesis from Wikipedia.  The emphasis is mine.

The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarizes her core views.  

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.[25]

…

In her writings, Miller is careful to clarify that by “abuse” she does not only mean physical violence or sexual abuse, she is also concerned with psychological abuse perpetrated by one or both parents on their child; this is difficult to identify and deal with because the abused person is likely to conceal it from themselves and may not be aware of it until some event, or the onset of depression, requires it to be treated. Miller blamed psychologically abusive parents for the majority of neuroses and psychoses. She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an “enlightened witness.” In all cultures, “sparing the parents is our supreme law,” wrote Miller.

Seems appropriate for Supernatural, eh?

Source: adaav

thats-what-sidhe-said:

Misogyny and ageism aside, the message that older women should leave fandom and stick to conservative activities like “knitting and taxes” reveals a major ignorance of the nature of knitters.

I carry two stainless steel rods with sharpened points on them everywhere I go.  What do you THINK I do with them?

neurosciencestuff:

Even learning to read in your thirties profoundly transforms brain networks

Reading is such a new ability in human evolutionary history that the
existence of a ‘reading area’ could not be specified in our genes. A
kind of recycling process has to take place in the brain while learning
to read: Areas evolved for the recognition of complex objects, such as
faces, become engaged in translating letters into language. Some regions
of our visual system thereby turn into interfaces between the visual
and language systems.

“Until now it was assumed that these changes are limited to the outer
layer of the brain, the cortex, which is known to adapt quickly to new
challenges”, says project leader Falk Huettig from the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics. The Max Planck researchers together
with Indian scientists from the Centre of Bio-Medical Research (CBMR)
Lucknow and the University of Hyderabad have now discovered what changes
occur in the adult brain when completely illiterate people learn to
read and write. In contrast to previous assumptions, the learning
process leads to a reorganisation that extends to deep brain structures
in the thalamus and the brainstem. The relatively young phenomenon of
human writing, therefore, changes brain regions that are very old in
evolutionary terms and already core parts of mice and other mammalian
brains.

“We observed that the so-called colliculi superiores, a part of the
brainstem, and the pulvinar, located in the thalamus, adapt the timing
of their activity patterns to those of the visual cortex”, says Michael
Skeide, scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human
Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and first author of
the study, which has just been published in the renowned magazine Science Advances.
“These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual
cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input
even before we consciously perceive it.” Interestingly, it seems that
the more the signal timings between the two brain regions are aligned,
the better the reading capabilities. “We, therefore, believe that these
brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners
become more and more proficient in reading”, the neuroscientist explains
further. “This could explain why experienced readers navigate more
efficiently through a text.”

Large-scale study with illiterates in India

The interdisciplinary research team obtained these findings in India,
a country with an illiteracy rate of about 39 percent. Poverty still
limits access to education in some parts of India, especially for women.
Therefore, in this study, nearly all participants were women in their
thirties. At the beginning of the training, the majority of them could
not decipher a single written word of their mother tongue Hindi. Hindi,
one of the official languages of India, is based on Devanagari, a
scripture with complex characters describing whole syllables or words
rather than single letters.

Participants reached a level comparable to a first-grader after only
six months of reading training. “This growth of knowledge is
remarkable”, says project leader Huettig. “While it is quite difficult
for us to learn a new language, it appears to be much easier for us to
learn to read. The adult brain proves to be astonishingly flexible.” In
principle, this study could also have taken place in Europe. Yet
illiteracy is regarded as such a taboo in the West that it would have
been immensely difficult to find volunteers to take part. Nevertheless,
even in India where the ability to read and write is strongly connected
to social class, the project was a tremendous challenge. The scientists
recruited volunteers from the same social class in two villages in
Northern India to make sure that social factors could not influence the
findings. Brain scans were performed in the city of Lucknow, a three
hours taxi ride away from participants’ homes.

A new view on dyslexia

The impressive learning achievements of the volunteers do not only
provide hope for adult illiterates, they also shed new light on the
possible cause of reading disorders such as dyslexia. One possible cause
for the basic deficits observed in people with dyslexia has previously
been attributed to dysfunctions of the thalamus. “Since we found out
that only a few months of reading training can modify the thalamus
fundamentally, we have to scrutinise this hypothesis”, neuroscientist
Skeide explains. It could also be that affected people show different
brain activity in the thalamus just because their visual system is less
well trained than that of experienced readers. This means that these
abnormalities can only be considered an innate cause of dyslexia if they
show up prior to schooling. “That’s why only studies that assess
children before they start to learn to read and follow them up for
several years can bring clarity about the origins of reading disorders”,
Huettig adds.

DeVos rescinds 72 guidance documents outlining rights for disabled students

Lindsay E. Jones, the chief policy and advocacy officer for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said she was particularly concerned to see guidance documents outlining how schools could use federal money for special education removed.

“All of these are meant to be very useful … in helping schools and parents understand and fill in with concrete examples the way the law is meant to work when it’s being implemented in various situations,” said Jones.

…

“Much of the guidance around [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] focused on critical clarifications of the regulations required to meet the needs of students with disabilities and provide them a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment,” Scott said in a statement. “Notwithstanding the actions taken by the Department today, the regulations still remained enforced; however they lack the clarification the guidance provided.”

…

“If the documents that are on this list are all covered in newer documents that were released — which sometimes does happen — that would be fine,” said Jones.” Our goal is to make sure that parents and schools and educators understand how these laws work, and the department plays a critical role in that.”

In between this, 

the current bill in Congress weakening the ADA that pits an individual against business in compliance with accessibility regulations – as if individuals have the same resources and power as businesses, 

and the repeated threats of cuts to Medicaid and Medicare seen in any version of repeal and replace of the ACA out there, and now the House’s tax cut plan that includes privatizing Medicare and, yet again, block-granting Medicaid, 

The republicans in this administration and Congress are really gunning for people with disabilities. 

DeVos rescinds 72 guidance documents outlining rights for disabled students

drst:

darthmelyanna:

jackabelle73:

socialanxietyandotherthings:

leni-ba:

jackabelle73:

Were you taught to say any sort of prayer or blessing before meals, when you were a child? If so, what was it? All the kids in my family learned this: 

God is great, God is good. 

Let us thank him for our food. 

By his hand we are fed. 

Give us, Lord, our daily bread. 

Amen. 

When I lived at my aunt’s, we used to do the Lord’s Prayer (I think that’s the name in English. The ‘Our Father…’ one). We stopped doing it sometime in the late nineties’, no idea why. Maybe because I wasn’t a little kid anymore? *shrug* Nowadays we make a short silence when we have lunch at my other aunt’s, because she does believe in blessing the mealtime out loud.

Personally, I do a silent blessing. I’ve spent too long being a nominal Catholic, and then too long working with Southern Baptists not to believe that starting a meal with positive vibes can only be good.

😉

My grandparents did a mealtime prayer with my dad, and he just did it with us. I think my mum learned the same one when she was a kid too. It went like this, 

Come Lord Jesus, 

be our guest.

Let these gifts,

to us be blessed.

Amen.

Now my mom’s dad, he was the best. His prayer’s before meals were always something along the lines of:

 ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost- first one here, gets the most!’

Sounds similar to my Daddy’s version of a mealtime prayer –

Good bread, good meat. Good God, let’s eat!!

The prayers among my family and friends tend to be improvised, but many years ago I was at a dinner hosted by a family who were Episcopalian (if memory serves). There was a brief prayer, and then we all sang the doxology, which I thought was kind of neat.

Catholics:

*sign of the Cross*
“Bless us, O Lord,
And these, Thy gifts,
Which we are about to receive from Thy bounty,
Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
*sign of the Cross*

Catholics:

*sign of the Cross*
“Bless us, O Lord,
And these, Thy gifts,
Which we are about to receive from Thy bounty,
Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
*sign of the Cross*


ahahaha.. I can confirm.  I can still hear this in my father’s voice. 

 And then there were the Thanksgivings with the evangelical side of the family with my pastor uncle with his Texas twang who would go off on freeform riffs of thankfulness, family, and food.  

waterbird13:

“But if my character doesn’t have four PhDs by the time they’re twenty and have three Nobel Prizes and revolutionize three different branches of science and have the world fawning over how gifted they are, how will my readers know they’re smart?”

*Rolls eyes*

“But if my character doesn’t have four PhDs by the time they’re twenty and have three Nobel Prizes and revolutionize three different branches of science and have the world fawning over how gifted they are, how will my readers know they’re smart they be able to immigrate to the United States?”