[转贴]质疑有关孤独症的常见误识

overgame

顶一下，关于大脑发育和后天教育，也有七大认识上的误区，原文是英文（见于多伦多星报，这几天的头版系列文章），简略翻译一下。



1. The human brain is fixed by the age of 3 （人脑3岁前基本定型，所以早教被商家力捧上天）

While it is true that babies' brains make connections – called synapses – among neurons at a furious pace until about 10 months, the brain actually grows and changes throughout life. Even your 80-year-old mother's brain is still growing new synaptic connections and replacing lost neurons. As well, a crucial part of learning is the process of pruning those synapses to make them work faster. That happens a lot in the teen years and early 20s when humans begin to think in high-level abstractions and systems.

2. The more you enrich a baby's environment, the smarter the baby （婴儿要给予越多刺激越聪明）

This is a misreading of the famous "enriched rats" experiment. The rats were divided into two groups: some in a complex social environment and some isolated in a simple environment. The enriched rats were able to learn better than the isolated rats. That has led over-eager parents and others to insist that infants ought to be stimulated as much as possible so they build better brains. Commercial enterprises have cashed in on this as a result. Actually, over-stimulating babies has the opposite effect; the children shut down and don't learn. The real finding of the rat study was that deprivation – intellectual, social and environmental – is bad for baby mammals. The so-called "enriched" environment was not really enriched at all. It was akin to what a rat living in the wild would normally encounter. The lesson for parents is not to isolate babies but to expose them to normal life – talk with them, let them play with other children and encourage them to explore on their own.

3. We only use 10 per cent of the brain （人脑只使用了其中10％）

Actually, new functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) of the brain shows that 100 per cent of the brain is active, even when you are asleep or anesthetized. No part of the brain is inactive or superfluous.

4. Boys' brains and girls' brains are different （男孩和女孩的大脑没有太多区别）

Apart from average size – which follows the proportions of body size – this is not true. Just as a boy's foot and a girl's foot work the same way, so do their brains. As the OECD report Understanding the Brain points out: "No study to date has shown gender-specific processes involved in building up neuronal networks during learning." So the way boys and girls create synaptic pathways – and therefore learn – is the same. When we see differences in the behaviour of boys and girls, that's because those differences are taught. They are social, not biological.

5. You are either a left-brain person or a right-brain person （人可划成左脑人或者右脑人）

This enduring myth pops up frequently in conversation and goes back to primitive experiments from the 1800s. The idea was that the left-brain thinker was more logical, analytical and rational, while the right-brain thinker was more creative, emotional and intuitive. Actually, it's bunk. While the brain does have two hemispheres – right and left – joined by a wide band of nervous tissue called the corpus callosum, the brain is in fact an exquisitely integrated organ. For a few tasks, a single side may dominate, but both sides must work together for any important tasks. Functional MRIs show that neither side of the brain can work independently.

6. If we could eliminate emotions, we'd make better decisions （假如去掉情绪，人会作出更好的决策）

There have been studies of people who have lost the ability to feel emotion because of brain damage. It turns out they can't make decisions at all without emotion. Emotion is an integrated, critical part of each decision and of learning.

7. An adult's brain is bigger than a baby's because it has more brain nerve cells （成人脑因为脑细胞多而比婴儿脑大）

A newborn's brain has roughly the same number of nerve cells, or neurons, as an adult's – about 100 billion. That number remains roughly constant throughout life. The size difference between a baby's brain and an adult's is mainly the synaptic connections that grow between neurons and the fatty insulating material that wraps around them, called myelin. Myelin keeps the electrical connections among neurons moving quickly and efficiently.


俺基本同意以上基于大脑扫描技术作出的阶段性判断，但对第4点男孩女孩大脑的观点保持不同意见，因为这个观点很难解释自闭症在男孩和女孩之间重男轻女的概论现象，说得再通俗一点，男女还是有别的，这是任何一个物种内部的最大差别。原文中的观点还说最新的研究表明后天大脑发展占80％，先天基因只占20％，这个我基本同意，但前提是孩子长大以后也要坚信这个观点，否则基因还是会在时间的触发程序下表现出先天的威力，所以信仰很重要，正如过去所言，没有做不到，只有想不到。我们的孩子只要相信了这个人定胜天的BELIEF就好办了。