Two quick articles
Dec. 29th, 2011 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyOne on faceblindness
Close your eyes. Picture your closest friend. Maybe you see her blue eyes, long nose, brown hair. Perhaps even her smile.
If you saw her walking down the street it would match your imagined vision. But what if you saw nothing at all?
James Cooke, 66, of Islip, N.Y., can’t recognize other people. When he meets someone on the street, he offers a generic “hello” because he can’t be sure if he’s ever met that person before. “I see eyes, nose, cheekbones, but no face,” he said. “I’ve even passed by my son and daughter without recognizing them.”
He is not the only one. Those with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, can see perfectly well, but their brains are unable to piece together the information needed to understand that a collection of features represents an individual’s face. The condition is a neurological mystery, but new research has shed light on this strange malady.
One of the keys to understanding face recognition, it seems, is understanding how the brain comes to recognize voices. Some scientists had believed that faces and voices, the two main ways people recognize one another, were processed separately by the brain. Indeed, a condition parallel to prosopagnosia, called phonagnosia, similarly leaves a person unable to distinguish a familiar voice from an unfamiliar one.
But by testing for these two conditions simultaneously, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany recently found evidence that face and voice recognition may be linked in a novel person-recognition system.
Using M.R.I., the scientists looked at the brain activity of 19 healthy volunteers as they were led through tasks that tested their ability to recognize both faces and voices. The researchers found that regions of the brain already associated with facial recognition, like the fusiform face area in the occipital lobe, are directly linked to regions responsible for voice recognition, mostly in the temporal lobe.
This research helps explain why a person with prosopagnosia may still have difficulty determining who a person is even after she has begun to speak. “People with prosopagnosia don’t have the benefit of learning voices with faces,” said Katharina von Kriegstein, author of the study, which was published in September in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The challenge for scientists is to find out where this system breaks down. Are these connections in the brain missing entirely, or are people unable to recognize faces and voices simply unable to use these links in some way?
It is unclear how many people have these conditions. Many don’t even realize they have problems with facial or voice recognition. While some develop these difficulties after a brain injury or trauma, others develop it in childhood.
For Mr. Cooke, who lives with his two grown children, face blindness first surfaced after brain surgery for an unrelated condition. Three physicians stood by his bed in the hospital the day after surgery to ask how he was feeling. Mr. Cooke didn’t think he had met the doctors before, so he gave some generic responses. After the doctors left, Mr. Cooke’s mother came in to find out what his surgeon had to say.
Mr. Cooke was shocked to discover he had just been speaking with his own doctor. “I didn’t recognize that I didn’t recognize him,” he said.
He went home, and the face blindness continued. Months later, he still couldn’t recognize his son, let alone his son’s friends when they visited. The cashiers at the grocery store had turned into strangers. Neighbors’ faces were completely foreign.
He went from neurologist to neurologist until one recognized that he had prosopagnosia, most likely a side effect of his surgery.
While there is no treatment or cure for Mr. Cooke, figuring out why he was no longer able to recognize his own children was a relief. “It was good to hear that what I was experiencing was real and not in my imagination,” he said.
Dori Frame, 51, of Brooklyn, is less certain about the cause of her face blindness, as she doesn’t remember having difficulty recalling faces as a child. She did suffer a severe head injury at age 16 while horseback riding, but it is unclear whether that caused her prosopagnosia as an adult.
“My eyes see just fine,” said Ms. Frame. “But when I look away, I can’t recall the picture in my mind.”
Ms. Frame didn’t realize she had a problem until she learned about prosopagnosia in a psychology class. “It’s like colorblindness,” she said. “You don’t realize you see colors differently than anyone else until someone points it out to you.”
Brad Duchaine, who researches face blindness at Dartmouth, says that after giving talks about prosopagnosia, he is often approached by audience members who have just realized that their difficulty keeping movie characters straight or identifying co-workers on the street may be more than just a quirk. “I think there’s a lot of people who have difficulty and just don’t know it,” he said.
With no treatments, those with face blindness have to rely on simple coping strategies. “They use all those other cues that everyone else uses, just to a greater degree,” Dr. Duchaine said.
For example, Ms. Frame can recall a person’s hairstyle and body type and how they move. “But when my husband gets a haircut, it takes me a while to reconcile that,” she said.
Mr. Cooke has his own strategies. He knows that if he sees a tall, blond man in his kitchen, it’s most likely his son. A tall, blonde woman cleaning the house is probably his daughter. “However, I have mistaken my kids’ friends for them,” he said.
The condition has unexpected social consequences. How do you explain to everyone you meet that you may not recognize them later? “I live in fear of making people feel unimportant by not recognizing them,” Ms. Frame said.
Mr. Cooke was once on a date with a brunette who knew about his condition, he said, when he excused himself to use the restroom. Returning, he saw a pretty, brown-haired woman sitting alone, so he slipped into the chair across from hers. “My date came running across the restaurant to tell me I was at the wrong table,” he said.
Ms. Frame isn’t as open about her face blindness. Whenever she is meeting someone, she arrives early, so her friend has to find her. Still, even with prosopagnosia often at the forefront of her mind, Ms. Frame often forgets her difficulties. “It still seems bizarre to me,” she said. “You mistake yourself for someone else in the mirror, and you feel so silly when you realize it’s you.”
And one on "middle childhood"
VIEWED superficially, the part of youth that the psychologist Jean Piaget called middle childhood looks tame and uneventful, a quiet patch of road on the otherwise hairpin highway to adulthood.
Said to begin around 5 or 6, when toddlerhood has ended and even the most protractedly breast-fed children have been weaned, and to end when the teen years commence, middle childhood certainly lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service — on forging, organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
Subsidizing the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche (a-DREN-ar-kee), when the adrenal glands that sit like tricornered hats atop the kidneys begin pumping out powerful hormones known to affect the brain, most notably the androgen dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood every bit as important as the more familiar gonadal reveille that follows a few years later.
Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future.
Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practicing so-called terror management, of accepting one’s inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.
Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analyzed attitudes toward middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognizes middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency and start taking their place in the wider world.
Much of the new work on middle childhood was described in a recent special issue of the journal Human Nature. As a research topic, “middle childhood has been very much overlooked until recently,” said David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State University and a contributor to the special issue. “Which makes it all the more exciting to participate in the field today.”
The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood, and though there is a mild growth spurt at age 6 or 7, as well as a bit of chubbying up during the so-called adiposity rebound of middle childhood, much of the remaining skeletal growth awaits the superspurt of puberty.
“Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,” said Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn’t finish growing until about the age of 18.”
The 18-year time frame of human juvenility far exceeds that seen in any other great ape, Dr. Thompson said. Chimpanzees, for example, are fully formed by age 12. With her colleague Andrew J. Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Thompson analyzed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.
Life for Neanderthals was nasty and short, Dr. Thompson said, and Neanderthal children had to get big fast, which is why they hurtled through adolescence at the equivalent of today’s chapter-book age. Our extreme form of dilated childhood didn’t appear until the advent of modern Homo sapiens roughly 150,000 years ago, Dr. Thompson said, when adults began living long enough to ease pressure on the young to hurry up and breed.
And what an essential luxury item middle childhood has proved to be. “It’s consistent across societies,” Benjamin Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said. “In middle childhood, kids start making sense.”
Parental expectations rise accordingly. “Kids can do something now,” said Dr. Campbell, who edited the special issue. “They can do tasks. They have economic value.”
Boys are given goats to herd and messages to deliver. They hunt and fish. Girls weave, haul water, grind corn, chop firewood, serve as part-time mothers to their younger siblings; a serious share of baby care in the world is performed by girls not yet in their teens.
Workloads and expectations vary substantially from one culture to the next. Karen Kramer and Russell Greaves of Harvard compared the average number of hours that girls in 16 different traditional cultures devoted each day to “subsistence” tasks apart from child care. Girls of the Ariaal pastoralists in northern Kenya worked the hardest, putting in 9.6 hours daily. Agriculturalist girls in Nepal worked 7.5 hours a day.
Then you come to the more laid-back lives of the foragers. The researchers focused on the Pumé, a foraging group in west-central Venezuela, where preadolescent girls do almost nothing. They forage less than an hour a day, significantly less than their brothers, and are very inefficient in what little they do. They prefer hanging out at the campsite. “Pumé girls spend their time socializing, talking and laughing with their friends, beading and resting,” Dr. Kramer said.
But most cultures mark the beginning of middle childhood with some new responsibility. Kwoma children of Papua New Guinea are given their own garden plots to cultivate. Berber girls of northern Africa vie to prove their worth by preparing entire family meals unassisted.
In the Ituri forest of Central Africa, Mbuti boys strive to kill their first “real animal,” for which they will be honored through ritualized facial scarring. And in the United States, children enter elementary school, for which they will be honored through ritualized gold starring.
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practicing their fine motor skills. And because they are still smaller than adults, they can grow adept at a skill like, say, spear-tossing, without fear of threatening the resident men.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
The mental and kinesthetic pliancy of middle childhood can be traced at least in part to adrenarche, researchers said, when signals from the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain prod the adrenal glands to unleash their hormonal largess. Adrenal hormones like DHEA are potent antioxidants and neuroprotectants, Dr. Campbell said, and may well be critical to keeping neurons and their dendritic connections youthfully spry.
Evidence also suggests that the adrenal hormones divert glucose in the brain to foster the maturation of the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, brain regions vital to interpreting social and emotional cues.
In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski. Or you could go outside and play with your friends. If you learn to play fair, friends will always be there.
Finally, one on leash-training your cat
THERE are outdoor cats and there are indoor cats. When I brought home Mac, a 4-year-old orange tabby, from a shelter last year, I realized I had acquired a demanding combination of the two.
While he liked a cozy bed and two squares a day, Mac had a style that was apparently cramped by my one-bedroom apartment, and he dashed outside whenever I opened the door to my deck, returning hours later.
The idea of walking him on a leash came after a series of unleashed mishaps. He killed a mourning dove, wounded a pigeon, tore a drumstick off a turkey that a neighbor had left cooling in his window and hung from another neighbor’s screen door close to midnight so that she awoke in terror.
Mac wasn’t winning any friends in the apartment building. And I realized that letting a cat get into trouble seven stories above Brooklyn’s streets was dangerous.
But when I cut off his access to the great outdoors, my cat, usually spunky and friendly, threw himself against the door, yowled and attacked my legs with frustration and sharp claws. I’d heard about cat walking on an Animal Planet show, “My Cat From Hell,” (its second season starts Jan. 7), starring a cat behaviorist named Jackson Galaxy. In one episode, he advised an owner to leash-walk his cat as a way to burn off extra feline energy. So I bought a Chihuahua harness and fastened it onto a writhing Mac. He keeled over and refused to budge until I removed it.
Clearly, we both needed professional help.
Mr. Galaxy is one of a growing number of animal behaviorists who believe that training and walking cats is not only possible, but good for the cat. They say that cats need lots of human attention, and are not the solitary, selfish creatures they’re often thought to be: less Mr. Bigglesworth and more Bustopher Jones, the cat about town.
Because cats don’t learn by discipline, owners have only recently begun to see them respond to training as positive reinforcement has become popular, said Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The antecedent is old, he said: Edward Thorndike’s circa-1900 puzzle-box experiments, proving animals could learn behaviors, were performed on cats. “People are developing a broader, more deep bond with their pets, and want to do things with them,” Dr. Zawistowski said.
Walking a cat on a leash strikes a good balance between having an indoor cat that lives to old age but in an unstimulating environment and an outdoor cat that can kill birds or get killed itself. “Here’s a way for your cat to go outside and enjoy the outdoors, but under a protective umbrella,” he said. I scheduled a visit with Mr. Galaxy and set out to make Mac into a pedicat.
With his bandanna, long goatee and many tattoos, Mr. Galaxy looked more like a Harley person than a cat person. He worked at cat shelters for nine years before becoming a professional animal behaviorist (he charges $375 for a two-hour in-home consultation), and believes that almost all cat problems can be solved.
But Mr. Galaxy said cat owners also need some behavior modification. “We don’t say, ‘It’s O.K. to leave a cat for 14 hours at a stretch with an automatic feeder and an automatic litter box,’ ” he said. “That doesn’t work. My advice to people like that is, get fish.”
We started by settling on Mac’s reward: his favorite treats, meat-flavored biscuits called Greenies. From now on, “the only time you’re ever going to give that treat is when you’re working the harness,” he said.
I also had to make sure Mac was hungry when we started each session, so he would respond to the treats. Cats will not do what you want just to please you, unlike dogs, Mr. Galaxy said. “As soon as he’s full, it’s over.”
I fastened the harness on Mac, and Mr. Galaxy told me to give him a treat immediately. “He’s got to know this action equals reward, and he has an attention span of about two seconds,” he said.
Then, he had me move a few steps away, shake the bag of food at Mac and call him. I’d move back, give him a treat when he approached, and repeat. After about 15 minutes in the harness, Mac’s tail was swishing and he had dropped to the ground.
End it here, Mr. Galaxy said — you want to leave the cat feeling confident. During harness time, Mr. Galaxy was also constantly praising the cat with head pats and lots of “Good boys.” The cat nestled at his feet as soon as the harness was off.
Mr. Galaxy left me with directions to break the walking-outside goal into small steps before finally going out on the street. “For every cat, this side of the line is comfort and on this side of the line is challenge,” he said. “Every day, your job is to keep him at that line and then put one paw over it.” By the next day, Mac started purring when I took out the harness and the treats.
We did take it slow, though. Day 4, out on the deck, Mac would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Day 14, he would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Day 30, we had made it to the lobby, where he would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Or, for variation, he would run up the lobby stairs and hide. How to feel like a chump: standing in an apartment lobby with a clearly terrified cat, one that is wearing a leash.
Mr. Galaxy advised that I make Mac walk a little longer between treats. And if he freaked out, I was to return to the previous setting until he was confident there again. Finally, Mr. Galaxy said, I needed to stop picking up the cat when he seemed nervous, an act that would undermine the cat and teach him to be too dependent on me.
Residents in my building were starting to greet Mac by name, offer him a hand to sniff and ask me about walking techniques or whether they could walk their rabbit. And when we returned to the apartment, Mac would still attack my legs occasionally, but more often he’d rub against my legs then take a nap on top of the television.
On the street, he was still timid. He would flatten himself when he saw a skateboarder, a cement truck or a dog.
I figured that if Mac couldn’t relax on city streets, he might in a park. So I put Mac into his carrier, took the subway and, inside Prospect Park, attached his leash before letting him out of his carrier.
The cat was black-eyed with fear and climbed up my jeans. I tried again, in a no-dogs-allowed area that was wooded and hilly. There, Mac pushed his head out of his carrier, looked around and took a few tentative steps. Then he was off. Tail up, head up, he ran along trails, stepped on logs and crashed through twigs. That cat was walking.
He was moving in a way I’d never seen him move in the apartment, reacting to bird calls with ear twitches, walking leopard-like along fallen trees, burrowing his nose into holes and testing trunks with his paws. He wandered, turned and tangled himself in his leash, and he looked back at me every now and then to make sure I was still with him. Back home, he purred, curled up and slept for most of the day; this is your cat on exercise.
Mr. Galaxy met me and Mac in the park on a cold December day to watch us walk. He was jubilant about the cat’s progress, but had some more advice. When Mac froze at the sight of a dog or a jogger, I shouldn’t freeze, but should calmly redirect his attention by calling him toward a different spot.
Six months after I started, I have a relaxed cat, a new admiration for his pluck and agility and, probably, a growing reputation as the weird cat lady. Taking my cat to the park is a great outing, and if Mac is never going to trot alongside me as I walk to brunch, that’s O.K. He is a cat, after all, and I’ve learned that means he’ll only do what he wants to do.
He’s trained me pretty well, I’d say.
Steps in the Right Direction
WISHING for a pedicat of your own? Here are tips from Jackson Galaxy for training your cat on a leash.
1. Know your cat. If it doesn’t mind being handled, is pretty confident and not easily spooked, it’s probably a good candidate for leash training.
2. Get the right gear. It is not safe to walk cats on a traditional collars; if they escape up a tree, a breakaway collar will detach, while a standard collar can strangle them. Mr. Galaxy prefers two styles of walking jackets, though a harness made for a cat is also fine.
3. Hungry is good. Many cats respond to food treats, so start with a hungry cat. Cut treats into tiny pieces, because when a cat gets full, it will stop working. Only give the cat treats when you’re doing the training, and limit the overall amount.
4. Start small. In the first session, place the harness on the cat with confidence, and fit it snugly but not tightly. The moment you’ve finished putting it on, give your cat a treat. If the cat then falls to the ground and plays dead, give it a treat if it moves at all. If it is willing to try walking in the harness, give it a treat when it takes a step. The moment the cat starts seeming overwhelmed, remove the harness and give a treat to end on a high note. Throughout the process, give lots of praise and head pats.
5. Set goals. Push the cat a little farther each day, by breaking up leash walking into small steps. When it walks around each new area with its tail up, it’s ready for the next step.
6. Expect some setbacks. If the cat is afraid of something, try to redirect its attention to another area. If the cat completely freaks out, retreat to the previous area you were walking until it is confident again. Try not to pick up the cat, which erases its confidence.
7. Be careful if your neighborhood has lots of off-leash dogs; consider taking the cat to an area that’s more protected. Don’t let the cat chew on or lick anything. Substances that are common on streets, like ethylene glycol in radiator coolant, taste sweet to cats but are potentially lethal, says Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the A.S.P.C.A.
And prevent your cat from climbing trees on a leash. It’s not safe.
Close your eyes. Picture your closest friend. Maybe you see her blue eyes, long nose, brown hair. Perhaps even her smile.
If you saw her walking down the street it would match your imagined vision. But what if you saw nothing at all?
James Cooke, 66, of Islip, N.Y., can’t recognize other people. When he meets someone on the street, he offers a generic “hello” because he can’t be sure if he’s ever met that person before. “I see eyes, nose, cheekbones, but no face,” he said. “I’ve even passed by my son and daughter without recognizing them.”
He is not the only one. Those with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, can see perfectly well, but their brains are unable to piece together the information needed to understand that a collection of features represents an individual’s face. The condition is a neurological mystery, but new research has shed light on this strange malady.
One of the keys to understanding face recognition, it seems, is understanding how the brain comes to recognize voices. Some scientists had believed that faces and voices, the two main ways people recognize one another, were processed separately by the brain. Indeed, a condition parallel to prosopagnosia, called phonagnosia, similarly leaves a person unable to distinguish a familiar voice from an unfamiliar one.
But by testing for these two conditions simultaneously, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany recently found evidence that face and voice recognition may be linked in a novel person-recognition system.
Using M.R.I., the scientists looked at the brain activity of 19 healthy volunteers as they were led through tasks that tested their ability to recognize both faces and voices. The researchers found that regions of the brain already associated with facial recognition, like the fusiform face area in the occipital lobe, are directly linked to regions responsible for voice recognition, mostly in the temporal lobe.
This research helps explain why a person with prosopagnosia may still have difficulty determining who a person is even after she has begun to speak. “People with prosopagnosia don’t have the benefit of learning voices with faces,” said Katharina von Kriegstein, author of the study, which was published in September in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The challenge for scientists is to find out where this system breaks down. Are these connections in the brain missing entirely, or are people unable to recognize faces and voices simply unable to use these links in some way?
It is unclear how many people have these conditions. Many don’t even realize they have problems with facial or voice recognition. While some develop these difficulties after a brain injury or trauma, others develop it in childhood.
For Mr. Cooke, who lives with his two grown children, face blindness first surfaced after brain surgery for an unrelated condition. Three physicians stood by his bed in the hospital the day after surgery to ask how he was feeling. Mr. Cooke didn’t think he had met the doctors before, so he gave some generic responses. After the doctors left, Mr. Cooke’s mother came in to find out what his surgeon had to say.
Mr. Cooke was shocked to discover he had just been speaking with his own doctor. “I didn’t recognize that I didn’t recognize him,” he said.
He went home, and the face blindness continued. Months later, he still couldn’t recognize his son, let alone his son’s friends when they visited. The cashiers at the grocery store had turned into strangers. Neighbors’ faces were completely foreign.
He went from neurologist to neurologist until one recognized that he had prosopagnosia, most likely a side effect of his surgery.
While there is no treatment or cure for Mr. Cooke, figuring out why he was no longer able to recognize his own children was a relief. “It was good to hear that what I was experiencing was real and not in my imagination,” he said.
Dori Frame, 51, of Brooklyn, is less certain about the cause of her face blindness, as she doesn’t remember having difficulty recalling faces as a child. She did suffer a severe head injury at age 16 while horseback riding, but it is unclear whether that caused her prosopagnosia as an adult.
“My eyes see just fine,” said Ms. Frame. “But when I look away, I can’t recall the picture in my mind.”
Ms. Frame didn’t realize she had a problem until she learned about prosopagnosia in a psychology class. “It’s like colorblindness,” she said. “You don’t realize you see colors differently than anyone else until someone points it out to you.”
Brad Duchaine, who researches face blindness at Dartmouth, says that after giving talks about prosopagnosia, he is often approached by audience members who have just realized that their difficulty keeping movie characters straight or identifying co-workers on the street may be more than just a quirk. “I think there’s a lot of people who have difficulty and just don’t know it,” he said.
With no treatments, those with face blindness have to rely on simple coping strategies. “They use all those other cues that everyone else uses, just to a greater degree,” Dr. Duchaine said.
For example, Ms. Frame can recall a person’s hairstyle and body type and how they move. “But when my husband gets a haircut, it takes me a while to reconcile that,” she said.
Mr. Cooke has his own strategies. He knows that if he sees a tall, blond man in his kitchen, it’s most likely his son. A tall, blonde woman cleaning the house is probably his daughter. “However, I have mistaken my kids’ friends for them,” he said.
The condition has unexpected social consequences. How do you explain to everyone you meet that you may not recognize them later? “I live in fear of making people feel unimportant by not recognizing them,” Ms. Frame said.
Mr. Cooke was once on a date with a brunette who knew about his condition, he said, when he excused himself to use the restroom. Returning, he saw a pretty, brown-haired woman sitting alone, so he slipped into the chair across from hers. “My date came running across the restaurant to tell me I was at the wrong table,” he said.
Ms. Frame isn’t as open about her face blindness. Whenever she is meeting someone, she arrives early, so her friend has to find her. Still, even with prosopagnosia often at the forefront of her mind, Ms. Frame often forgets her difficulties. “It still seems bizarre to me,” she said. “You mistake yourself for someone else in the mirror, and you feel so silly when you realize it’s you.”
And one on "middle childhood"
VIEWED superficially, the part of youth that the psychologist Jean Piaget called middle childhood looks tame and uneventful, a quiet patch of road on the otherwise hairpin highway to adulthood.
Said to begin around 5 or 6, when toddlerhood has ended and even the most protractedly breast-fed children have been weaned, and to end when the teen years commence, middle childhood certainly lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service — on forging, organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
Subsidizing the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche (a-DREN-ar-kee), when the adrenal glands that sit like tricornered hats atop the kidneys begin pumping out powerful hormones known to affect the brain, most notably the androgen dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood every bit as important as the more familiar gonadal reveille that follows a few years later.
Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future.
Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practicing so-called terror management, of accepting one’s inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.
Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analyzed attitudes toward middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognizes middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency and start taking their place in the wider world.
Much of the new work on middle childhood was described in a recent special issue of the journal Human Nature. As a research topic, “middle childhood has been very much overlooked until recently,” said David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State University and a contributor to the special issue. “Which makes it all the more exciting to participate in the field today.”
The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood, and though there is a mild growth spurt at age 6 or 7, as well as a bit of chubbying up during the so-called adiposity rebound of middle childhood, much of the remaining skeletal growth awaits the superspurt of puberty.
“Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,” said Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn’t finish growing until about the age of 18.”
The 18-year time frame of human juvenility far exceeds that seen in any other great ape, Dr. Thompson said. Chimpanzees, for example, are fully formed by age 12. With her colleague Andrew J. Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Thompson analyzed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.
Life for Neanderthals was nasty and short, Dr. Thompson said, and Neanderthal children had to get big fast, which is why they hurtled through adolescence at the equivalent of today’s chapter-book age. Our extreme form of dilated childhood didn’t appear until the advent of modern Homo sapiens roughly 150,000 years ago, Dr. Thompson said, when adults began living long enough to ease pressure on the young to hurry up and breed.
And what an essential luxury item middle childhood has proved to be. “It’s consistent across societies,” Benjamin Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said. “In middle childhood, kids start making sense.”
Parental expectations rise accordingly. “Kids can do something now,” said Dr. Campbell, who edited the special issue. “They can do tasks. They have economic value.”
Boys are given goats to herd and messages to deliver. They hunt and fish. Girls weave, haul water, grind corn, chop firewood, serve as part-time mothers to their younger siblings; a serious share of baby care in the world is performed by girls not yet in their teens.
Workloads and expectations vary substantially from one culture to the next. Karen Kramer and Russell Greaves of Harvard compared the average number of hours that girls in 16 different traditional cultures devoted each day to “subsistence” tasks apart from child care. Girls of the Ariaal pastoralists in northern Kenya worked the hardest, putting in 9.6 hours daily. Agriculturalist girls in Nepal worked 7.5 hours a day.
Then you come to the more laid-back lives of the foragers. The researchers focused on the Pumé, a foraging group in west-central Venezuela, where preadolescent girls do almost nothing. They forage less than an hour a day, significantly less than their brothers, and are very inefficient in what little they do. They prefer hanging out at the campsite. “Pumé girls spend their time socializing, talking and laughing with their friends, beading and resting,” Dr. Kramer said.
But most cultures mark the beginning of middle childhood with some new responsibility. Kwoma children of Papua New Guinea are given their own garden plots to cultivate. Berber girls of northern Africa vie to prove their worth by preparing entire family meals unassisted.
In the Ituri forest of Central Africa, Mbuti boys strive to kill their first “real animal,” for which they will be honored through ritualized facial scarring. And in the United States, children enter elementary school, for which they will be honored through ritualized gold starring.
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practicing their fine motor skills. And because they are still smaller than adults, they can grow adept at a skill like, say, spear-tossing, without fear of threatening the resident men.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
The mental and kinesthetic pliancy of middle childhood can be traced at least in part to adrenarche, researchers said, when signals from the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain prod the adrenal glands to unleash their hormonal largess. Adrenal hormones like DHEA are potent antioxidants and neuroprotectants, Dr. Campbell said, and may well be critical to keeping neurons and their dendritic connections youthfully spry.
Evidence also suggests that the adrenal hormones divert glucose in the brain to foster the maturation of the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, brain regions vital to interpreting social and emotional cues.
In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski. Or you could go outside and play with your friends. If you learn to play fair, friends will always be there.
Finally, one on leash-training your cat
THERE are outdoor cats and there are indoor cats. When I brought home Mac, a 4-year-old orange tabby, from a shelter last year, I realized I had acquired a demanding combination of the two.
While he liked a cozy bed and two squares a day, Mac had a style that was apparently cramped by my one-bedroom apartment, and he dashed outside whenever I opened the door to my deck, returning hours later.
The idea of walking him on a leash came after a series of unleashed mishaps. He killed a mourning dove, wounded a pigeon, tore a drumstick off a turkey that a neighbor had left cooling in his window and hung from another neighbor’s screen door close to midnight so that she awoke in terror.
Mac wasn’t winning any friends in the apartment building. And I realized that letting a cat get into trouble seven stories above Brooklyn’s streets was dangerous.
But when I cut off his access to the great outdoors, my cat, usually spunky and friendly, threw himself against the door, yowled and attacked my legs with frustration and sharp claws. I’d heard about cat walking on an Animal Planet show, “My Cat From Hell,” (its second season starts Jan. 7), starring a cat behaviorist named Jackson Galaxy. In one episode, he advised an owner to leash-walk his cat as a way to burn off extra feline energy. So I bought a Chihuahua harness and fastened it onto a writhing Mac. He keeled over and refused to budge until I removed it.
Clearly, we both needed professional help.
Mr. Galaxy is one of a growing number of animal behaviorists who believe that training and walking cats is not only possible, but good for the cat. They say that cats need lots of human attention, and are not the solitary, selfish creatures they’re often thought to be: less Mr. Bigglesworth and more Bustopher Jones, the cat about town.
Because cats don’t learn by discipline, owners have only recently begun to see them respond to training as positive reinforcement has become popular, said Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The antecedent is old, he said: Edward Thorndike’s circa-1900 puzzle-box experiments, proving animals could learn behaviors, were performed on cats. “People are developing a broader, more deep bond with their pets, and want to do things with them,” Dr. Zawistowski said.
Walking a cat on a leash strikes a good balance between having an indoor cat that lives to old age but in an unstimulating environment and an outdoor cat that can kill birds or get killed itself. “Here’s a way for your cat to go outside and enjoy the outdoors, but under a protective umbrella,” he said. I scheduled a visit with Mr. Galaxy and set out to make Mac into a pedicat.
With his bandanna, long goatee and many tattoos, Mr. Galaxy looked more like a Harley person than a cat person. He worked at cat shelters for nine years before becoming a professional animal behaviorist (he charges $375 for a two-hour in-home consultation), and believes that almost all cat problems can be solved.
But Mr. Galaxy said cat owners also need some behavior modification. “We don’t say, ‘It’s O.K. to leave a cat for 14 hours at a stretch with an automatic feeder and an automatic litter box,’ ” he said. “That doesn’t work. My advice to people like that is, get fish.”
We started by settling on Mac’s reward: his favorite treats, meat-flavored biscuits called Greenies. From now on, “the only time you’re ever going to give that treat is when you’re working the harness,” he said.
I also had to make sure Mac was hungry when we started each session, so he would respond to the treats. Cats will not do what you want just to please you, unlike dogs, Mr. Galaxy said. “As soon as he’s full, it’s over.”
I fastened the harness on Mac, and Mr. Galaxy told me to give him a treat immediately. “He’s got to know this action equals reward, and he has an attention span of about two seconds,” he said.
Then, he had me move a few steps away, shake the bag of food at Mac and call him. I’d move back, give him a treat when he approached, and repeat. After about 15 minutes in the harness, Mac’s tail was swishing and he had dropped to the ground.
End it here, Mr. Galaxy said — you want to leave the cat feeling confident. During harness time, Mr. Galaxy was also constantly praising the cat with head pats and lots of “Good boys.” The cat nestled at his feet as soon as the harness was off.
Mr. Galaxy left me with directions to break the walking-outside goal into small steps before finally going out on the street. “For every cat, this side of the line is comfort and on this side of the line is challenge,” he said. “Every day, your job is to keep him at that line and then put one paw over it.” By the next day, Mac started purring when I took out the harness and the treats.
We did take it slow, though. Day 4, out on the deck, Mac would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Day 14, he would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Day 30, we had made it to the lobby, where he would walk a few feet, then sink to the ground. Or, for variation, he would run up the lobby stairs and hide. How to feel like a chump: standing in an apartment lobby with a clearly terrified cat, one that is wearing a leash.
Mr. Galaxy advised that I make Mac walk a little longer between treats. And if he freaked out, I was to return to the previous setting until he was confident there again. Finally, Mr. Galaxy said, I needed to stop picking up the cat when he seemed nervous, an act that would undermine the cat and teach him to be too dependent on me.
Residents in my building were starting to greet Mac by name, offer him a hand to sniff and ask me about walking techniques or whether they could walk their rabbit. And when we returned to the apartment, Mac would still attack my legs occasionally, but more often he’d rub against my legs then take a nap on top of the television.
On the street, he was still timid. He would flatten himself when he saw a skateboarder, a cement truck or a dog.
I figured that if Mac couldn’t relax on city streets, he might in a park. So I put Mac into his carrier, took the subway and, inside Prospect Park, attached his leash before letting him out of his carrier.
The cat was black-eyed with fear and climbed up my jeans. I tried again, in a no-dogs-allowed area that was wooded and hilly. There, Mac pushed his head out of his carrier, looked around and took a few tentative steps. Then he was off. Tail up, head up, he ran along trails, stepped on logs and crashed through twigs. That cat was walking.
He was moving in a way I’d never seen him move in the apartment, reacting to bird calls with ear twitches, walking leopard-like along fallen trees, burrowing his nose into holes and testing trunks with his paws. He wandered, turned and tangled himself in his leash, and he looked back at me every now and then to make sure I was still with him. Back home, he purred, curled up and slept for most of the day; this is your cat on exercise.
Mr. Galaxy met me and Mac in the park on a cold December day to watch us walk. He was jubilant about the cat’s progress, but had some more advice. When Mac froze at the sight of a dog or a jogger, I shouldn’t freeze, but should calmly redirect his attention by calling him toward a different spot.
Six months after I started, I have a relaxed cat, a new admiration for his pluck and agility and, probably, a growing reputation as the weird cat lady. Taking my cat to the park is a great outing, and if Mac is never going to trot alongside me as I walk to brunch, that’s O.K. He is a cat, after all, and I’ve learned that means he’ll only do what he wants to do.
He’s trained me pretty well, I’d say.
Steps in the Right Direction
WISHING for a pedicat of your own? Here are tips from Jackson Galaxy for training your cat on a leash.
1. Know your cat. If it doesn’t mind being handled, is pretty confident and not easily spooked, it’s probably a good candidate for leash training.
2. Get the right gear. It is not safe to walk cats on a traditional collars; if they escape up a tree, a breakaway collar will detach, while a standard collar can strangle them. Mr. Galaxy prefers two styles of walking jackets, though a harness made for a cat is also fine.
3. Hungry is good. Many cats respond to food treats, so start with a hungry cat. Cut treats into tiny pieces, because when a cat gets full, it will stop working. Only give the cat treats when you’re doing the training, and limit the overall amount.
4. Start small. In the first session, place the harness on the cat with confidence, and fit it snugly but not tightly. The moment you’ve finished putting it on, give your cat a treat. If the cat then falls to the ground and plays dead, give it a treat if it moves at all. If it is willing to try walking in the harness, give it a treat when it takes a step. The moment the cat starts seeming overwhelmed, remove the harness and give a treat to end on a high note. Throughout the process, give lots of praise and head pats.
5. Set goals. Push the cat a little farther each day, by breaking up leash walking into small steps. When it walks around each new area with its tail up, it’s ready for the next step.
6. Expect some setbacks. If the cat is afraid of something, try to redirect its attention to another area. If the cat completely freaks out, retreat to the previous area you were walking until it is confident again. Try not to pick up the cat, which erases its confidence.
7. Be careful if your neighborhood has lots of off-leash dogs; consider taking the cat to an area that’s more protected. Don’t let the cat chew on or lick anything. Substances that are common on streets, like ethylene glycol in radiator coolant, taste sweet to cats but are potentially lethal, says Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the A.S.P.C.A.
And prevent your cat from climbing trees on a leash. It’s not safe.
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Date: 2011-12-30 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-30 04:29 am (UTC)He also did not "do" laser pointers. I pointed it at the carpet in front of him and he looked at it and then looked at me, as if to say "Yeah? It's a red light, so what?"
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Date: 2012-01-03 04:30 am (UTC)And for years we had people coming on the boat wearing cats tucked into their shirts or on their shoulders. Those cats didn't need much training either as near as I could tell, although I think most of them had leashes as backup.