What she found was remarkable. Those who got the propranolol alone and those who got the placebo had no improvement in their anxiety. But the arachnophobes who were exposed to the spider and given the drug were able to touch the tarantula within days and, by three months, many felt comfortable holding the spider with their bare hands. Their fear did not return even at the end of one year.
.. These studies suggest that someday, a single dose of a drug, combined with exposure to your fear at the right moment, could free you of that fear forever.
.. To the contrary, you still remember your biography, but your fear would be stripped of its force. The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.
A neuroscientist explains: Trump has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader
What happens when another world leader who is a loose cannon doesn’t give Trump the admiration that he feels he deserves? We can be sure that notoriously anti-American dictators like Kim Jong-un of North Korea or Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei aren’t going to give him any respect, let alone praise. How would a President Trump react when he feels he is being put down or undermined?
.. This change in personality and core values perfectly illustrates how the promise of power can transform narcissists.
.. Donald Trump is very much like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and the presidency is his “one ring to rule them all.” In this case we do not have the option of destroying the ring. The best we can strive for is keeping it out of the possession of those who cannot resist abusing its power.
Animating Autism
A new documentary follows seven children on the autism spectrum as they create their own animated film.
The Mysterious Link Between Autism and Extraordinary Abilities
Once thought to be rare in people with autism, found in no more than 1 out of 10 individuals, research over the past few years suggests savantism may be more common: As many as one in three people with autism may possess exceptional abilities.
.. Exactly how and why savantism happens is unclear. But some evidence suggests that savants may have experienced an undetected injury to the left hemisphere of their brain in utero or in infancy, triggering compensatory recruitment in the right brain that unleashes unusual abilities.
.. Rimland noticed that their savant skills, such as artistic expression or the ability to mentally manipulate three-dimensional (3-D) objects, were most frequently right-hemisphere faculties. Their difficulties, such as trouble communicating, often appeared in functions controlled by the left hemisphere.
.. In many types of brain injury or in dysfunction caused by stroke or neurodegenerative diseases, doctors have noticed that a defect in the left hemisphere may lead to a compensatory improvement in typically right-hemisphere functions. It’s as if the injury is “releasing the brain from the tyranny of the left hemisphere,” in Treffert’s words. No longer held in check, right-hemisphere abilities appear to suddenly blossom.
.. Bruce Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, witnessed this phenomenon firsthand when some of his elderly patients who suffered from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a degenerative brain disorder that primarily affects the front left-side portion of the brain, spontaneously developed an interest in art. As the dementia progressed, these individuals became gripped by the urge to create, and their paintings improved.
.. Miller and his team theorized that the selective brain degeneration essentially ‘released’ dormant abilities in the right brain, which is dominant for some key features of artistic expression, including visual construction — the ability to copy drawings or put puzzles together — and some forms of creative thinking.
.. By the end of 2011, she had discovered that three of the first nine prodigies she investigated had been diagnosed with autism early in life but no longer met the criteria. “They no longer qualified for a spectrum diagnosis,” says Ruthsatz. What’s more, five of the nine had at least one close family member with autism.