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Deaf Signers Feel Words On the Tip of their Fingers

February 12, 2009 in Blogs, PsyBlog by PsyBlog

Memory can be frustrating. No doubt you’ll have experienced the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: when despite knowing a particular word (often a name or place), it just won’t come out of your mouth. But did you know that deaf people using sign language experience this phenomenon, except in their case the word isn’t on the tip-of-the-tongue, but on the tip-of-the-fingers? A minority of sign language theorists had thought the tip-of-the-fingers state might be unlikely because meaning in sign language (semantics) is much more closely associated with the form of the language (the ‘phonology’). For example it appears harder to forget the word for Switzerland in sign language because the sign for it in American Sign Language (and British Sign Language) traces out the white cross on the Swiss flag. Most theorists don’t buy this argument, however, and in work published in Psychological Science by Thompson et al. (2005) , researchers found good evidence that deaf signers do experience tip-of-the-fingers states just like speakers. In the research deaf signers were asked to put names to faces, cities and countries. Sure enough signers quite frequently reported knowing the name of the famous person, city or country, but being unable to completely remember the sign. In fact signers could often remember most of the sign, but not all of it. Individual signs are composed of four different components: the shape of the hands, where the hands are, how they move, and how they are oriented. About half the time signers could remember three of these four components, but the final component eluded them – this was most frequently the movement of the hand(s). This is similar to the experience in spoken language of being able to remember part of a word, or its length, still without being able to retrieve the whole thing. Theoretically this supports the idea that semantics (meaning) and phonology (the sign) are separate in sign language just as in spoken languages. But the similarities between sign language and spoken languages shouldn’t be taken too far. For example American Sign Language is not just a mimed version of English, it has its own syntax and grammar. Indeed British Sign Language is very different to American Sign Language and, according to QI: The Pocket Book of General Ignorance a deaf American will find it easier chatting to native deaf signers in Paris than in Britain. For deaf signers, then, rather than Britain and America being two nations divided by a common language, they are two nations divided by two completely different languages. » Find out more about the psychology of memory . [Image credit: sinosplice ]

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Giant killer lungfish from Hell [Laelaps]

February 6, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog

The African lungfish Protopterus , from A Text-Book of Zoology . Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans , an African relative of an eel-like animal that was found by the Austrian explorer Johan Natterer in the depths of the Amazon jungle in 1837. The naturalist sent two specimens back to the Vienna Museum where they were quickly described by Leopold Fitzinger under the name Lepidosiren paradoxa . Fitzinger considered the organisms to be “perennibranchiate reptiles”, meaning that it was a primitive amphibian that did not undergo metamorphosis. Instead, according to the author of a helpful Living Age column, it remained “a gill-breathing, muddy, fishlike groveller, all the days of its life.” The animal Owen had was different,* but it was similar enough to Natterer’s specimen to allow for a close comparison of this important new genus. As a Philosophical Magazine summary of Owen’s lecture reported; Mr. Owen observed, that since the time of the discovery of the Ornithorhynchus [duck-billed platypus] there had not been submitted to naturalists a species which proved more strongly the necessity of a knowledge of its whole organization, both external and internal, in order to arrive at a correct view of its real nature and affinities, than did the Lepidosiren … According to Owen the Lepidosiren was a fish, a creature close to the “perennibranchiate reptiles” but more suitable as a link between cartilaginous fish (like sharks) and the “malacopterygians” (fish like the aquarium favorite the birchir ). Owen’s assessment was eventually confirmed by other scientists, but it was still often presented as an extremely primitive “reptile” (i.e. amphibian) or as the “missing link” between fish and amphibians.** Indeed, Lepidosiren was a “transitional form” that took naturalists by surprise during a time when thoughts of evolution were percolating through the scientific establishment. Even stranger, however, was the claim that in the steaming depths of the Amazon were gigantic individuals of these lungfish that regularly preyed upon large prey at the water’s edge. A December 1847 issue of the newspaper The Friend relayed the report of L.A. da Silva e Souza that the lake Padre Aranda in Brazil was home to creatures called minhocoes that “dwell in the deepest part of the lake, and have often drawn horses and horned cattle under the water.” The creatures were also reported to inhabit Lake Feia, and the local people said they were giant worms that “cause[d] animals to disappear by seizing them by the belly.” The skull of Lepidosiren , from The Illustrated Natural History . (If it reminds you of Dunkleosteus , just wait until next week.) Much of the information from this report came from a widely-reprinted paper by M. Auguste de Saint Hilaire, who had collected anecdotal evidence about the creature during his visit to the region. At first he thought tales of the monster had been inspired by a kind of electric knifefish, Gymnotus , but the local people were already familiar with this animal. A better fit, Hilaire said, was the Lepidosiren which had, of course, been first discovered in the Amazon. Anatomical investigations had revealed just how wicked the jaws of the peaceful-looking lungfish were, and perhaps there was some gigantic form haunting the rivers and lakes of Brazil. Hilaire closed his report with a plea for his fellow zoologists to visit the area to unravel the truth; Zoologists who travel over these distant countries will do well to sojourn on the borders of the lake Feia, of the lake Padre Aranda, or of the Rio des Piloes, in order to ascertain the perfect truth–to learn precisely what the minhocao is; or whether, notwithstanding the testimony of so many persons, even of the most enlightened men, its existence should be, which is not very likely, rejected as fabulous. Hilaire’s colleagues did not seem to be in any rush to confirm his hypothesis, but the minhocao continued to be mentioned every now and then in the scientific and popular literature. The first follow-up report would be delivered by the German entomologist Fritz Muller nearly three decades after Hilare’s notice. As reported an 1878 issue of the Popular Science Monthly (itself a summary of a report that appeared in Nature ) Muller had heard that a fish three feet across was spotted along a river in Brazil. When the person who saw it went to get others, however, the animal disappeared. The party that rushed to the scene only saw the burrow the animal made in its efforts to escape. Similar disturbances of the soil were later seen about six kilometers away, but this was a third-hand anecdote Muller had received from another German who lived in the area. Other reports of churned soil and immense burrows were commonly heard in the region, though, and Muller concluded that theywere made by a gigantic lungfish. Even so, no concrete evidence of the monster fish was found and like Hilaire he could only urge his colleagues to look into the phenomenon further. The reports of Hilaire and Muller must have had some influence as the minhocao appeared in a number of books and periodicals. According to J. Hampden Porter the people who shared the landscape with the giant worm-fish believed that it conspired with the jaguar against humans. Indeed, it was said that some people were so scared of it they had abandoned good fishing grounds out of fear. In a compendium of sea-monster tales by Fletcher Bassett it was said to be an amphibious member of a number of mythical water monsters of the Amazon, so large that it made the water rise when it slipped into the water. (The destruction that such a creature might cause was also alluded to, oddly enough, in the book Days on Staten Island .) It even was mentioned by Jules Verne in the story The Giant Raft , and this is especially significant because some authors took Verne’s story as a primary source. All of these references are rather fleeting, however, and the reports by Muller and Hilaire remained the most detailed. Did anyone ever catch a minhocao? According to an article in Good News in 1878 a boy caught a fish that was three feet across in an area where burrows nearly 10 feet wide had been found. Careful reading, however, reveals this to be a bastardized version of Muller’s report. The author of the article apparently mixed and matched various bits of previous anecdotal reports and conjecture to make a new story. The only original part of it was the author’s speculation that “that [the minhocao] may be a relic of the gigantic armadilloes which in past geological epochs were so abundant in South Brazil.” (This report was cannibalized for the “Table Talk” section of Gentleman’s Magazine that told its readers that proof of “gigantic cuttlefish” had recently come to light. It compared the minhocao to cephalopods, extinct marine reptiles, snakes, and prehistoric armadillos.) As the aptly named article ” A Fish With A History ” stated, the tales of the minhocao were probably based upon the Lepidosiren but taken to extremes for one reason or another. This is made all the more plausible by the way the stories switched from being about a worm-like fish that devoured livestock (Hilaire) to an enormous creature that burrowed in the earth (Muller). During the time between Hilaire’s and Muller’s papers it had been discovered that some species lungfish could cocoon themselves in mucus to wait out the dry season in underground burrows, and this discovery appears to have changed the focus of the stories about the minhocao. That the anecdotes about the creature were not consistent and no specimens had been captured certainly hampered the case for its existence. Perhaps the last of the minhocao was heard in 1894 in a Natural Science article about Lepidosiren . It barely garnered a mention, for despite all the fantastic stories it was never found. There was no reason to think it truly existed, although why such a mythology developed remains an open question. The increasingly-inaccurate reports of the animal in English periodicals can be explained, but where did the legend of giant killer lungfish first spring from? *[And, if I am not mistaken, later turned out to belong to a different genus. Owen had previously briefly described the specimen under the genus name Protopterus in 1837 and this distinction was later upheld.] **[I usually detest the phrase "missing link", but here it is appropriate. The discussion over the affinities of Lepidosiren / Polypterus were going on in the days before On the Origin of Species . Evolutionary language was commonly used in reference to them and Owen certainly cast them as transitional forms, yet the mechanism that affected the transition was missing. It could just as easily be said that the Lepidosiren was a result of God's desire to fill nature up and make sure there were no great gaps in nature, a vestige of the Great Chain of Being into which the fish would have fit.] Post-Script : This post was an off-shoot of some other research I have been conducting, but it is rather strange that I forgot that the remains of an enormous extinct snake, Titanoboa , were announced this week. Titanoboa slithered through the ancient Amazon, and while I am in no way making a connection between it and the minhocao, I am surprised that I did not think of it while writing this post! See the posts by Ed , PZ , Jake , Darren , and Rebecca for more. Read the comments on this post…

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iPhoto Pareidolia [The Questionable Authority]

January 30, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Pareidolia – the phenomenon where our brain is somehow tricked into recognizing vague shapes as significant features – gets mentioned now and then on ScienceBlogs. The usual trigger for this occurs when someone tries to sell the Wonderbread Virgin Mary on Ebay before the blue mold completely erases her from the slice, or when one of our more monomaniacal colleagues sees something that he can associate with the New Atheism. Interestingly, it seems that human-programed face recognition software may be as subject to these issues as our own face recognition is. The latest version of Apple’s iPhoto comes with built-in face recognition. It provides a really cool way to sort pictures, and it seems to work pretty well. Except when it doesn’t: Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Unstructured Play [The Frontal Cortex]

January 30, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Melinda Wenner has an excellent article on the benefits of unstructured playtime – play without any rules – in the latest Sciam Mind. The article reminded me of that great Auden quote, which he adapted from Nietzsche: “Maturity – to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Play actually appears to make kids smarter. In a classic study published in Developmental Psychology in 1973, researchers divided 90 preschool children into three groups. One group was told to play freely with four common objects–among the choices were a pile of paper towels, a screwdriver, a wooden board and a pile of paper clips. A second set was asked to imitate an experimenter using the four objects in common ways. The last group was told to sit at a table and draw whatever they wanted, without ever seeing the objects. Each scenario lasted 10 minutes. Immediately afterward, the researchers asked the children to come up with ideas for how one of the objects could be used. The kids who had played with the objects named, on average, three times as many nonstandard, creative uses for the objects than the youths in either of the other two groups did, suggesting that play fosters creative thinking. [SNIP] Does lack of play, then, impede the development of problem-solving skills? Perhaps, according to animal studies. In a paper published in Developmental Psychobiology in 1978, experimenters separated young rats by mesh partitions–they could see, smell and hear other rats but could not play with them–for the 20 days during development when they would have most frequently played. The researchers taught these rats, and a group that had been allowed to play without constraints, to pull a rubber ball out of the way to get a food treat. A few days later they switched the setup so the rats would have to push the same ball to get the treat. The isolated rats took much longer to try new approaches, and thus solve the problem, than did the rats that had played. The authors speculate that through play, animals learn to try new things, and animals that do not play simply do not acquire this same behavioral flexibility. Playing also appears to help with language development, according to a 2007 study in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Researchers at the University of Washington gave a box of toy blocks to children from middle- and low-income families aged 18 months to two and a half years. Parents of these kids, as well as parents of a similar group of kids who had no blocks, kept track of how often the children played. After six months, the kids who had played with blocks scored significantly higher on language tests than the others did. The researchers are not sure, however, whether these improvements resulted from playing with blocks per se–because by playing with blocks, the youngsters were spending less time in unproductive activities such as watching television. This also reminds me of something I wrote about a few months ago, which is the need to encourage (or at least not actively dis courage) daydreaming in children. Daydreaming, like play, is a skill that must be cultivated. When it’s not cultivated, and kids never learn how to play without rules or think without guidelines (a daydream is the free play of cognition), the results can be damaging: Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were. “The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative,” Belton says, “as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn’t really know how.” After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of “empty time,” or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. “It was a very automatic reaction,” she says. “Television was what they did when they didn’t know what else to do.” The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored – at least, when a television was nearby – they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice.” What’s the takeaway? Legos are the best toy ever, but be sure to sometimes hide the instructions. No rules! Read the comments on this post…

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How to Avoid Procrastination: Think Concrete

January 29, 2009 in Blogs, PsyBlog by PsyBlog

Is your to-do list as long as your arm? New study finds procrastination is warded off by considering tasks in concrete terms. Although procrastination is usually thought of as something to be avoided, this hasn’t always been the case. Surveying the history of procrastination Dr Piers Steel finds that before the industrial revolution procrastination might have been seen in neutral terms ( Steel, 2007 ; PDF ). Nowadays, though, for those living in technically advanced societies, procrastination has become a ‘modern malady’: everything must be done now or, even better, three weeks ago. For good or evil there are now endless to-do lists to work through, appointments that must be kept and commitments that have to be fulfilled. Such is modern life. Whatever the cause many people certainly view their procrastination as a problem. Psychologists have found that college students consider themselves champion procrastinators with almost half considering it problematic. Adults are not far behind with some 15-20% self-identifying as ‘chronic procrastinators’. Meanwhile the rest of us are guaranteed to procrastinate from time to time. So, perhaps psychology can offer some hope in the ongoing fight against procrastination. It’s all in the construal In a new study published recently in Psychological Science McCrea, Liberman, Trope & Sherman (2008) examined one possible technique for decreasing procrastination. From previous work they hypothesised that how much we procrastinate might be affected by the level at which we construe it. Across three studies two levels of construing tasks were examined: Abstract construal . Say you want to cut the grass, an abstract construal would have you imagining those beautiful stripes imparted by your roller-mower and how beautiful your garden will look once it’s done. Perhaps you’ll be reminded of the grass courts of Wimbledon and then how the smell takes you back to the time when…well, you get the picture! Concrete construal . Now, instead of being carried off by a flight of fancy, concrete-construers would concentrate on whether the grass is wet, what length to cut it and whether there’s any petrol left in the mower. The three studies used different methods to get participants into one of these two modes of thinking but my favourite involves a painting by pointillist Georges-Pierre Seurat. Participants were presented with one of the two pictures below just before they were asked to complete a simple survey. In the first experimental condition participants looked at the full painting of La Parade (1889) (picture 1) and were told it is a good example of neo-impressionism in which the artist was using order and colour to invoke emotion and harmony. In the second condition participants just saw the detail (picture 2) and were told that this demonstrated the pointillist technique of using contrasting points of colour to build up an image. After this both groups completed the same survey which they were asked to return within three weeks. The survey’s question, however, were essentially irrelevant, the only thing experimenters were interested in was how long participants took to complete and return the questionnaire. This was their measure of procrastination. The results of this apparently simple manipulation were striking. Those who were thinking about the techniques of pointillism (concrete construal) returned their questionnaires in an average of 12.5 days while those thinking about emotion and harmony (abstract construal) took almost twice as long at an average of 20.5 days. This is an impressive result which seems to point to one very straightforward way of avoiding procrastination: to get tasks done, make sure you focus on the details. Another reason this research is potentially very useful is its simplicity. Many of the other techniques for avoiding procrastination seem to involve a lot of mental effort – surely not good for procrastinators! Steel (2007) mentions things like increasing the expectation of success, increasing the value of the task and reducing distractions – all good suggestions but largely effortful. For example it’s difficult to increase your expectation of success without the evidence of having completed a similar task successfully. In other words you have to do the task to find out you can do it – exactly what procrastinators are avoiding! There is, however, another simple technique for avoiding procrastination that has been examined experimentally: using deadlines. Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) found that self-imposed deadlines were effective in improving task performance but, watch out, people aren’t as good at setting their own deadlines as they are at conforming to deadlines set externally. Strangely, when left to their own devices, people seem prone to handicapping themselves with irrational deadlines. Self-control and procrastination Although McCrea and colleagues’ new research has a neat conclusion, it’s vital to consider it in the context of two other studies recently covered here – these show that concrete, low-level construals aren’t always the answer. In the first on self-control experimenters found that higher level construals increased self-control ( Fujita et al., 2006 ). At first glance this appears to be saying the exact opposite of the present study – that procrastination is decreased by higher-level construals – but they are actually looking at subtly different situations. Here’s why: in the present study participants were being asked to carry out a task which they didn’t place much value on and was very easy, it was just something that had to be done at some point, a chore. In other words people weren’t debating with themselves whether the task had to be done, just when it had to be done. In Fujita’s study, however, looking at self-control, it was a question of whether or not participants would do a task. It’s the dimension of time, then, that most distinguishes between procrastination and self-control. Concrete, low-level construals help you start a task sooner but don’t help you decide to do it in the first place. A second study covered here recently looked at how to get big projects done . This added another piece to the picture, suggesting that a low-level, task focus was a great way of coping with demotivating failures on hard tasks. This adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of how we can get things done. In fact taken together these studies start to uncover the complexities inherent in procrastination and self-control. Summary: how to get things done Here’s a summary of the main conclusions from all the studies discussed: To avoid procrastinating on a task, focus on its details and use self-imposed deadlines. To stick to a task, while actually carrying it out , now it is beneficial to keep the ultimate, abstract goal in mind. When evaluating progress on a hard task, when the chance of failure is high, stay focused on the details of the task. Once tasks are easier or the end is in sight, a more abstract, goal focus is once again the psychological approach to choose. So, whether or not you feel procrastination is something in need of a ‘cure’, McCrea and colleagues’ study does show that a very simple manipulation of our thought processes can be incredibly powerful. Who would have thought pointillism could save us from procrastination? [Image credit: monsieurlam ]

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Correcting an Error about Dopamine Signaling [Pure Pedantry]

January 14, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish . The article isn’t bad. It is about why people have trouble overcoming unproductive habits like trouble exercising.  But I want to correct something she says that is inaccurate. Dopamine has a primary role in the signaling reward, and this is a point made in her article. But she also says : Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what’s good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald’s french fries), which causes a dopamine surge. Some of that dopamine travels to the area of your brain where memories are formed and creates a memory connecting those fries with getting a reward. At that point, in sciencespeak, the fries have become “salient.” And when you’re exposed to something that’s salient, you may think, “That’s bad for me, I shouldn’t,” but your brain registers, “Dopamine jackpot!” Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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The promise and challenges of Big Genetics [Genetic Future]

January 14, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog

Olivia Judson’s blog has a guest post by Aaron Hirsh got me thinking about a topic that will be familiar to most scientists: the transition of research towards Big Science . Big Science basically includes any project involving a large consortium of research groups working together on a tightly-defined problem, usually with a very specific goal in mind (e.g. sequence and analyse a genome, or build a big machine to smash particles together at high speed). Hirsh only mentions genetics in passing, but this field – and particularly human genetics – is an area where the trend towards Big Science has been spectacularly visible. Large-scale collaborative efforts such as the sequencing of the human genome and the production of the HapMap catalogue of common genetic variation have provided incredibly useful tools for the genetics community. Such projects have typically sparked heated debate at their inception, with detractors claiming that the money could be better spent elsewhere – but as I noted last year , such criticism has typically lost its bite once the value of the resulting data became clear. Big Genetics is now a familiar feature of the human genetics landscape. This year will see major data releases from several massive projects (e.g. the 1000 Genomes Project and the Cancer Genome Atlas ) and disease genetics consortia such as the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium , GIANT , and dozens of other disease-specific collaborations. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) field provides an interesting case study in both the power and the challenges of Big Genetics. The relentless demand for ever-larger samples of disease patients – to fuel the search for variants with ever-smaller effect sizes – has provided a powerful incentive to create large-scale collaborations, but there are considerable barriers to achieving this. Researchers have spent years and sometimes decades laboriously collecting and cataloguing DNA samples from disease patients, and are thus understandably reluctant to exchange these samples for the relative anonymity of middle-authorship on a large-scale GWAS paper. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Baby signing in the real world

January 12, 2009 in Blogs, Cognitive Daily by Cognitive Daily

Take a look at this video made by fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis . She’s talking with her son, a toddler who adorably mimics her as she says very complicated words such as “Adventures in Ethics and Science” and “Wackaloon” (but sadly, not “Cognitive Daily”): It’s cute, but it’s difficult to say whether Dr. Isis is really talking with her child. The difficulty babies have pronouncing words has led many parents to suspect they might be able to communicate better with their children using hand signs. Last week we talked about a study suggesting that teaching babies even a few signs like those used by the Deaf can help babies and their parents communicate. Babies can learn the signs earlier than spoken words, and these signs may represent a marked improvement in the ability of parents to communicate with their babies. This can mean that babies cry less and both parents and children get along better. But what does this communication look like in the real world, outside of a laboratory setting? Do babies stop signing as they get older? Why? One advocate of ASL (American Sign Language) suggested that the baby-signing movement might improve understanding between the Deaf and hearing communities. Does it live up to that promise? Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2008 [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

December 30, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

Phew. Another year almost over and it’s been a really good one. This time last year, I was still blogging at WordPress, and it was only in late February that I beamed aboard the mighty ScienceBlog mothership . It’s been a great experience and all in all, I’ve managed to rack up about 190 posts on new research (excluding reposts and random stuff), over 1,500 comments and over 400,000 page views in a year. Elsewhere, I published a book based on this blog , I wrote about 2% of another book called ” Defining Moments in Science “, and I wrote three features and several news pieces for New Scientist. And given all that, it’s nice to take some time for reflection and with that in mind, I’m going to continue a tradition that I started last year – choosing some of the favourite stories from 2008. This list has no pretensions to be a catalogue of the year’s biggest stories or its most important breakthroughs. It’s just what I personally deemed to be the most interesting and just plain, downright cool. So, without further ado, here are my picks. Once again, a massive thanks to anyone who read, commented on, or linked to this site over the last year. I hope you’ll join me for 2009. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2008 [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

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Lies Addiction Experts Tell, #1 — addiction is an equal-opportunity despoiler

December 29, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

A famous poster released by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism depicts a range of people from every kind of background and claims that each represents the "typical alcoholic." The point: there is no typical alcoholic and, by extension, everyone is equally susceptible to alcoholism and addiction. Unfortunately, the science of epidemiology knocks this idea for a loop. But we don’t need epidemiology to tell us what everyone already knows.  Do you believe that Native Americans living in poverty are no more likely to become alcoholic than doctors? Really? Have I got a bridge to sell you – or else, you can become an addiction and alcoholism expert.  These worthies tell us that, since addiction is a disease, it can just as readily befall people in any social situation. In fact, the reliable ways social factors predict addiction and substance abuse prove addiction is not a disease. "Well," you say, "there are more drugs in poor neighborhoods, and that’s why there is more addiction in these places." Really? Have I got a National Survey on Drug Use and Health for you. The better-educated you are and the higher your socioeconomic status, the more likely you are to drink, but the less likely you are to drink unhealthily. And kids from better-off economic backgrounds are at least as likely to use drugs as kids in poor neighborhoods. People with more control of their lives don’t avoid substances – they control their substance use. It really is Psych 101. Yes, successful, smart people succumb to addictions. And don’t we love to read about them! They prove that "perfect" people are not perfect. But, more often than not, being raised under comfortable economic conditions, growing up in an in-tact non-violent family, doing well in school, living in a good neighborhood, not having a major emotional issue – you’re unlikely to be sidetracked by substance abuse and addiction. And the opposites of all of these characteristics are risk factors for addiction. As I point out in Addiction-Proof Your Child , everyone in school knows who the high-risk children are – that’s why they’re called "high risk" – the ones who don’t fit in, who have troubled home lives and their own emotional problems, who get poor grades and don’t participate in school activities, and who early on get in trouble with authorities. "Now, wait a second," you say – "that sounds like me as a kid, and I turned out fine." Really? You had a bad economic and family situation, poor study habits, frequent emotional distress, no constructive interests? This last distinguishes many who fall outside the high-risk pale. If you had a strong motivation to pursue something as a kid, you were the opposite of high risk.  This is why any good school administration will encourage whatever positive predilections kids exhibit, even if they’re not the kind that lead to careers in medicine, law, or nuclear physics. You only need one strong set of skills and interests to build a life. But even if you don’t translate a childhood interest into a career, it teaches you to focus and to marshal your resources in ways that provide lifelong lessons, values, and skills. Why do addiction experts love to tell us the opposite of what every school teacher – every sensible person – knows is true? We’ve already seen that they want to sell us a bill of goods. But the delusion that addiction is unrelated to an individual’s social and personal resources is critical because it causes us to misallocate our resources in worrisome ways. For example, United States government agencies are now honeycombed with addiction prevention and treatment programs. Who would vote against more addiction programs? But these programs and expenditures come at the cost of downplaying fundamental job training, housing support, education, skills training etc. – programs which address the foundation for non-addicted lives. We are actually systematically undermining the basis for preventing addiction in our society with our focus on addiction! I know what you’re thinking – I must have been one of those high-risk children who didn’t get along in school. Ask me one night when you catch me in a bar, and I’ll tell you all about it. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Lies Addiction Experts Tell, #1 — addiction is an equal-opportunity despoiler

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