Various short-essays, long email posts. 

ADD and definitions.
Clinical versus theory definitions.
Medical semiotics.
Diagnostic definitional boundaries
   Posted to Mensa BK list around Aug '06
Expertise and memory, long post. 
   Posted to Mensa BK list around Aug. '06. 
RE Late-Talkers, visual-spatial abilities, 
chess, and definitions of intelligence.
   Posted to Mensa BK list around August 2006
RE ADD and caffeine
   Posted to the Mensa BK list Aug 10th 2006.
 
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ADD and definitions.
Clinical versus theory definitions.
Medical semiotics.
Diagnostic definitional boundaries
Posted to Mensa BK list around Aug '06
 
Lessa, I have learned that true ADD is rather
> rare.  One example Dr. Camarata of Vanderbilt
> University uses is exactly that - if a child
> can play video game or watch TV or read the
> whole Harry Potter in one sitting, does this
> child have ADD?  I have seen him diagnosed kids
> with ADD but specifically, it's not *selective
> attention* but NO attention at all to learn
> anything.  
Richard: This gets at the nub of one of the major
areas of never-ending contention within
psychology generally- How to define the
boundaries of classifying clinical cases. The
issues are of course complex. i.e. What is "true"
ADD. There is now an extremely solid neurological
foundation (fMRIs, performance tests, etc^99) for
the "paradoxical" effect of stimulants resulting
in a calming effect on the brains of many if not
nearly all persons diagnosed with ADD. (I
personally think of that as the single most
"useful" way of defining ADD, based on my sense
of the hierarchy of criteria.) 
  Some clinicians want to define the limits for
diagnoses so that only the most severe cases
qualify and get the help they need. But others
want to define it more broadly, extending the
definition to those who respond to qualitatively
different needs-treatments. (Full-time care,
versus a few pills occasionally at the other end
of the spectrum.) Academicians, speaking very
generally here, tend to focus on more of a big
theoretical picture and tend to construe
syndromes very broadly. 
  On the one hand people want to expand the
definition so that more people get helped, but
others want to narrow the definition to make sure
there is adequate funding for those that need
help the most...that's one way of looking at it.
  Addressing the (...reading Potter book in one
sitting...) kind of attentional issues- The way I
think of this and sometimes read about this is
ADD persons don't have much control over where
they choose to place their attention, but rather
stimuli tend to move their attention around. So
the ADD person, if they find the novel
stimulating, can read it straight through...but
not if there are any distractions. 
 "interference control" is the phrase used in the
following abstract I just happened to be looking
at a few minutes ago. (I was looking for
information about high-functioning aspberger's
(HFA) comorbity with ADHD.) (I don't particularly
like this research- not grounded in theory or the
context of other studies anywhere near enough,
but here is the link anyway...) (By the way- I'm
having a terrible time finding good information
about that comorbity...but I still have one set
of resources to go through.)  
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15056314&dopt=Abstract
  Again as mentioned in other posts, I have no
credentials in this area. 
  Another by-the-wayside... 
  If anyone is interested.. An interesting site I
ran across today giving more information than
usual, mostly about ADD. If you go through the
ADD test (almost boiler-plate it's so standard)
it is followed by a sub-type test that is much
more interesting- and then it spits out some
entertaining interpretations about what the
answers indicated about activity levels in
different parts of the brain. From what little I
know, it's sound pretty accurate- including the
dietary suggestions. 
http://amenclinics.com/ac/tests/add_test1.php
  Richard  
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Expertise and memory, long post. 
Posted to Mensa BK list around Aug. '06. 
--- [email protected] wrote:
> Richard,
> Can you elaborate or clarify?  *Long term*
> memory (not working memory) has a lot to do
> with the development of expertise (as in
> Chess), is that what you are getting at?  
> Monica
  Basically yes- long term memory abilities has
more to do with development of expertise than
short term memory, ~generally~... 
  Of course, there are certain areas of expertise
which require using working memory (generally the
parietal lobes) up to their maximum capacity as a
regular occurrence. One way this happens- one way
of expressing this idea- is if the area of
expertise requires a lot of what is sometimes
called "multi-tasking" where the person has to
keep track of several things at once. 
   Memory has been studied for a long time at
many levels, going back to extensive animal
learning and brain dissection experiments back
all the way to the 19th century I think. (They
called it the search for the memory engram or
some such thing.) Biopsychologists have studied
the formation of long term memory, both storage
of memories as in the consolidation of
intermediate term memory into long term, and
studied the accessing of long term memory. 
  (Must..resist..tendency to write way too much.)
  The general finding across species is something
like 17 days is the typical neurological process
of memory consolidation from what has sometimes
been called intermediate term memory into "long
term memory". Some of the biological foundations
for that had been found last I was reading in
that area, but most of the process is still
poorly understood.  
 (I'm going to skip over tons of details about
memory that have been studied in detail since the
early days of the cognitive revolution in
psychology back in the 1970s...things like
sensory-modality associated memories, and memory
source-tagging, REM-sleep consolidation of
memories that have a large emotional component,
and so on.) 
   "Here's the way I think of it..." (My usual
phrase for trying to write briefly.) As the brain
is developing, gene-gene and gene-environment
interactions lead to the development of different
connectional strengths/tendencies between
different parts of the brain. i.e. People develop
certain habits of thinking. (Violinists have a
larger area of their brain associated with
certain fingers, ... similar things for piano
players, frontal cortex in the case of very long
metitators according to one Harvard study, and on
and on. Those are developmental neuronal
plasticity effects, but there are also very
significant hereditary effects, parent-child
correlations, coming out in extensive fMRI
studies now. It's a big messy interactive stew of
variables making prediction in individual cases
very dicey, though overall patterns have
definitely emerged at the larger population size
statistical levels.) 
  Again, here's how I think of it- As people grow
there are many interactions leading to tendencies
to use one side of the body more than the other,
to use one side of the brain more than the other
("lateralization" in neurology)... and so on.
Similarly, people develops habits of thought
(conscious and unconscious) relating to eventual
development of how much white
matter/axonal/communcication is going on between
particular parts of the brain. Often people
acquire a habit of relying on early strengths to
the detriment of developing more than just a few
areas... 
  It is my strong suspicion that modern mass
public schooling, in it's reliance on a one
cookie-cutter mold shapes all approach, has wound
up emphasizing short-term memory and working
memory at the expense of helping to develop
long-term memory habits and abilities. (Some
people prefer the semester system at college over
the quarter system- that may be related...I think
I would have preferred some kind of two-year
system!) 
  Regarding chess- It is an area that has been
studied to death (so to speak) up from the early
days of the academic revolution of cognitive
psychology in the 1970s up through the mid-1980s
when people seemed to have tired of it-- have
tired of trying to squeeze more interesting
publishable papers out of a diminishing marginal
returns of research prestige for each additional
unit of research resources invested. Chess fit
the cognitive psychology paradigm almost
perfectly- easy to quantify objective
measurements and so on. 
  The one thing they found, and I emphasize
strongly here "using that paradigm only!"... is
that master level players had a very large
repetoire of positions (think long term memory
here) which gave them the advantage over
less-able players. The working memories were not
statistically different, such as amount in W/M or
scanning speed to get information into W/M... and
so on for all the particulars. Also, based on the
paradigm then, the emphasis was (and still is for
many who are agonizingly seemingly unaware they
are even trapped in a paradigm!..) the
paradigmatic simplification was that all
information processing in the brain started with
the senses (a very blank slate-ish very implicit
assumption/blindness...very David Hume-ian and so
on) That everything in the mind came in through
the senses and everything in the mind was then
built up through the senses. Thats why the last
message or so I wrote about Pinker and the
born-deaf persons who still use the same portions
of the brain for processing verbal through
non-auditory information. The brain develops on
many information-processing levels and though
some development is clearly tied to sensory data
input, mostly as calibration (...mutational noise
is always entering genetic systems through
mutations so calibrations using environmental
regularities is a frequent characteristic in
biological information processing
systems...)...mmm... well...  (I'm running out of
time here.) 
  Because of the simplifications in the almost
old cognitive paradigm they looked only looked at
chess expertise in terms of visual-spatial
information processing, (and only with the
limited tools of the 1980s- I suspect there
hasn't been a half0-way decent fMRI study of
chess players yet!) and completely skipped over
issues about more (abstract?) associationist
centers in the brain. 
  (Their intuitions were that computations of
chess tactics would heavily involve visualizating
or imagining of physical movements of the pieces
around the board, using working memory. I think
those happen, but only as a kind of very
rudimentary platform for the much more complex
abstract cognition that is going on at a more
abstract level, for want of a better term.) 
  I should emphasize here a big caveat that most
of my knowledge about memory studies is mostly
more than ten years old- so I probably should not
have even written the previous posts. But
sometimes I wonder why more people who do know a
lot about these things don't communicate about
them more. 
  Hmmm...if you haven't seen the diagram on page
11 of the following, it's kind of interesting.
The article itself is rather technical, but if
you can skip over the more technical parts,
there's lots of interesting material there. Read
the last paragraph or so too.
http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/pdf/PRODIGY.PDF
  Richard 
Skipped.... 
long term memory and B12, folic acid protein, and
so on. RNA/DNA formation. 
  
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RE Late-Talkers, visual-spatial abilities, 
chess, and definitions of intelligence.
Posted to Mensa BK list around August 2006

  This is going to take awhile to explain, since
the conventional
wisdom and ways of phrasing things are so
seriously misguided, I think. 
(Another in a long series of paradigm shifts is
needed.) 
  What is intelligence? There are many
definitions with subtle 
differences. In the earliest days of intelligence
testing with the 
Binet and Stanford-Binet tests, the objective was
to identify slower
learners (mostly in the French educational
system) so they could get
the help they needed. Later in the 1950s and
1960s the tests began to be used
more and more to identify those with high
academic potential- in part for the purpose
of producing more nuclear and aerospace engineers
to help win the Cold War. 
(See Vice-Admiral Rickover's book-form collection
of speeches on that issue.) 
  In order to identify aptitude, instead of
measuring accumulated knowledge or expertise, 
the tests were deliberately designed (in general)
to go out of their way to avoid
measuring accumulated knowledge or expertise.
Later on though it became fairly well
established that some of the best quick measures
(on average and in general) of 
aptitude were measures of accumulated knowledge,
since those with higher aptitude
measurements generally (on average) accumulated
more knowledge over time. But because 
of problems with discrimination of many kinds
that insight (mostly justifiably I moralize) 
had very little impact on most test designs. 
  And there's the problem- In all of intelligence
testing there tends to be a huge, huge
blindspot when it comes to consideration of the
ability to acquire expertise. Yet I 
consider the ability to acquire expertise to be
arguably the best single definition 
of what would be more usefully called
"intelligence". 
   In the area of evolutionary psychology there
are many theories about how and 
why human intelligence evolved.
(Machiavellian-social hypotheses; Foraging and
food-processing
hypothesese; ecological dominance hypotheses; And
on and on!...each with many sub-hypotheses
and nuances.) 
  First of all- there needs to be drawn a
distinction between the big-brain issue
and the general intelligence issue. Though there
is a correlation between size and
"intelligence" (in the conventional academic
sense), the amount of the correlation is 
argued over and not particularly huge- and there
are things like plenty of examples of
very high intelligence and low brain size for
example. 
  Rats- I'm writing way too much again. 
  Item: Hillard Kaplan and other anthropologists
have performed detailed field
studies of hunter-gatherers indicating that
expertise/success in hunting doesn't peak 
until later 40s (over a decade after peak muscle
strength). Earlier studies by Napoleon
Chagnon and others demonstrated that males with
greater hunting ability/success left more 
offspring. 
  
   Item: James Watson (Nobelist) writes in SEED
magazine a month or so ago about how
memory-related neurons in the hippocampus tend to
become less active with age- basically, 
it's as if we use up a certain slowing rate of
volume (for accountant's- double-declining 
balance for asset depreciation?) ... of the
hippocampal memory cells. (So larger 
brains have further they can run at high levels,
if enzyme levels etcetera are even set 
higher at all.) 
   Item: Dr. John Skoyles has looked extensively
at current and historical cases of 
microencephaly (very small brain sizes)...his
conclusion/observation being that persons with 
microencephaly never become particular expert
about anything. He can find examples
where they test at average intelligence or
higher, but at least in the paper of 5 years
ago or so, zero cases where their life-activity
involved anything more difficult than 
a five year old could easily learn to do. (There
are several controversial theoretical
issues I think Skoyles, at least awhile ago, has
been well misguided about. But in this, 
his area of expertise, I think he's very likely
spot on.)
  Item: Someone on this list (who?) has suggested
that a good quick way to functionally 
and practically define intelligence in the
classroom is that more gifted kids need 
fewer repititions to learn a topic. Well...Hmmm!!
I actually really like that, a lot, but
there is something I remember extremely annoying
for me all through school. Every year
they would start over re-doing the material from
the previous year. Every year (it seems) 
I would ask other students - didn't they find it
boring as all get out. And every year, 
though I remembered way too much in excruciating
detail, they barely remembered any of it. 
I feel extremely angry that so much of my life
was (obscenity deleted) away year after year
after year after year. In cognitive psychology
there are some really depressing graphs
of what percentage of learned information people
forget after a certain passage of time, 
seconds, minutes, weeks, years... The way I
personally think of it, the vast majority of
people are only three years old, in terms of how
far back they remember things at all well. 
(By the way- I've never been nearly as mentally
"quick" as my two high-level genius older
brothers, 
but my long term memory has always been far
better.) 
  Well, I've already written way too much...but
the point of this was originally about chess, 
so here goes! 
   Item: The conventional thing psychologists say
about chess players is other than
having learned a vast repetiore of positions,
chess masters are no different from
chess experts. 
  Item: The Butterworth article I posted to this
list a short while ago, about a number-
crunching adult who become a sort of
mathmagician- The fMRI showed he was using a lot
of
the long-term memory portions of his brain to
solve the problems. The article used the 
(somewhat weak I think) metaphor of computer
"virtual memory" that uses part of the hard
drive to act as if it's rapid access memory
(RAM). i.e. using long term memory areas of the 
brain s if they were part of the working memory.
(But maybe that's what expertise is?) 
  Item: There are still vast areas of the
neocortex where neuroscientists only have a vague
sense of what is going on there.  
   Item: The USSR did very poorly in a lot of
areas, but one area they excelled in (given their
history, size, rural qualities, corruption,
etcetera) was in producing mathematicians
and engineers. It was often said (still is?) that
chess is the national sport of Russia. 
The acheivement of a certain level of ability in
chess (there are excellent ways of measuring
chess ability, through accumulation of tournament
scores)... of a certain level of ability
in chess in a good rough measure of a person's
potential for developing "expertise" in areas
like math and engineering. Young people often
worked hard in Russia to develop their chess
ability so they could put it on their
applications to college, where it was considered 
an important indicator. 
   Item: Cognitive psychologist looked a lot at
chess in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were
placing a lot of emphasis on sensory-related
cognitive areas in the brain. So for example
their emphasis on thinking about chess as a
spatial-visual task. But that isn't how it's
done!!
So llok at the blind-fold chess players. (I won
all the games in a simul where I was the
blind-folded
player- but there were only two opponents
fortunately!) George Koltanowski wrote the book, 
How to Play Bindfold Chess, and it's extremely
visual in it's approach. But all the leading
blindfold players other than him all agree that
is just not how it's done at all. (only 
three minutes till I have to leave.) You don't
visualize, you go over the moves more as a memory
thing, remembering reasons why. Like playing the
entire game from the start over in your head
as the other players try to decide what moves to
make. (Note: Language isn't auditory, contrary 
to many person's intuitions, as shown in many
studies and explained in Pinker's book.) 
   Finalizing: I'm not so certain I've explained
my thinking here all that well, but one thing I
am certain
of is I've written too much. Summarizing: The
objectives ni the development of intelligence 
testing have resulted in an emphasis on tasks
requiring nearly zero types of memory other than
working
memory. Yet from an evolutionary point of view,
as well as an vocational guidance or academic
placement point of view, there is a great deal to
be gained by adopting a more expertise-oriented
measurement of talents. 
  Richard 
 
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  RE ADD and caffeine
  Posted to the Mensa BK list Aug 10th 2006.
  What is being suggested about caffeine is
somewhat disturbing to me... Let me at least try
to clarify my own personal
non-medical-professional views on this... 
  First, it acts through parts of the brain and
neurotransmitters very different than, for
example, methylphenidate. Yes, it helps people
concentrate, but doesn't as far as I know have
zip to do with the paradoxical effect where
stimulants (to the dopaminergic system basically)
have (withing a certain individually associated
range) a "calming" effect instead of a
stimulating effect. (..can even make some
sleepy.) 
   The "standard" model for ADD is insufficient
dopamine being produced/supplied in the central
portions of the brain which then are released
from terminals from those neurons onto the
frontal cortex area of the brain stimulating
those neurons to in turn release what are mostly
various types of "inhibitory neurotransmitters"
onto other areas of the brain, quieting those
other areas thus enabling one area to be active
at a time- greatly oversimplifying of course.
(I've always thought of this as the teacher as
the frontal lobes, and the various parts of the
brain as a noisy classroom of kids. The teacher
tries to quiet the class so there is only one
talking at a time.) There is no evidence the
action of caffeine has anything to do with that.
Caffeine acts through several means- there is an
effect on the cholinergic system- and there is an
effect inhibiting sleep-associated neural
processes. 
  Extremely speculatively- it might be
hypothesized that to the extent ADD and ADHD
symptoms bear some superficial resemblance to
sleep deprivation, or are made somewhat somehow
worse by sleep deprivation, then there might be
some alleviation, in rare cases and individuals
and circumstances....
  But I think (my opinion for what it's worth)
anyone even remotely associated with ever having
been in the position of making medical diagnoses
would be extremely loathe to diagnose ADD or ADHD
on the basis of a few things like reaction to
caffeine. Diagnoses are just not done like that!
(Based on my limited experience as a non-doctor,
and someone who has never given official
diagnoses. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) 
  I have seen people write about how caffeine
calms them, therefore they must have ADD- I think
that is extremely, extremely, extremely
misguided. It ~may~ be in some cases that is the
case- but for me it is somewhat counterintuitive
and if true at all, then only at best a very
weak, very weak indication. If I were in a
psychiatrists office and he was asking me to
explain why I thought I might be ADD or ADHD, I'm
not even sure I'd mention it at all. 
  Finally, note that just because ADD people use
more caffeine (but I haven't actually seen any
hard evidence for that) that doesn't mean that an
individual person using lots of caffeine has ADD
(or ADHD). It says more about sleep habits than
anything else. And if indeed ADD/ADHD individuals
do use more caffeine, the causal directions are
complex - it may be that ADHD individuals are
more prone to be often too "hyper" to easily go
to bed at night for example. 
   If your child is acting ADHD and caffeine
seems to help- First, second, and third- look
into ways to improve their sleeping habits!
... also not a professional, and did not stay at
a Holiday Inn last night. 
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