Canaries In The Coal Mine By Lisa Geng 9/11/03 Speech disorders and learning disabilities did not run in either my mom or dad’s family. Genius runs in my mom’s side of the family. Most people assume if you grew up across the street from factories you are in low-income housing not -in NJ. In the…
Theories
Yikes! The scary reality of microplastics in breast milk
We all know that plastic pollution is a huge problem. It’s in our oceans, our landfills, and now, according to a new study, it’s in our breast milk. That’s right—researchers have found microplastics in human breast milk for the first time. And while we don’t yet know the full extent of the health impacts of…
Studies finds EPA and GLA more important than DHA for cognition
The results of the current research reveal that 26 wk of supplementation with EPA-rich oil improved global cognitive function in terms of both speed and accuracy, compared with placebo and DHA-rich oil. EPA-rich oil also significantly increased the accuracy of performing all the memory tasks compared with the DHA-rich oil. he American Journal of Clinical…
Autism severity can change substantially during early childhood
“IQ is considered to be the strongest predictor of symptom severity for children with autism, As IQ scores increased from age 3 to age 6, symptom severity levels decreased” Waizbard-Bartov et al. (2020). UC Davis MIND Institute study Around 30 percent of young children with autism have less severe autism symptoms at age 6 than…
Vitamin D3 and COVID-19
Vitamin D3 deficiency is suspected to raise the risk of more severe complications or death from COVID-19 such as cytokine storms which can happen to adults and is suspected to be the cause of the multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, Not only does vitamin D enhance our innate immune systems, but it also prevents our…
Study: Baby and adult brains sync up during play
Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn’t yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be “on the same wavelength,” experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions. I just read this study and thought this would be very interesting…
Should contingency management plans include planned aversive consequences?
Should only positive reinforcement be specified or should plans be made to use multiple contingencies that include aversive consequences? With “normal” subjects addition of a mildly aversive contingency will often neither help nor hurt. Hundert (1976) compared giving tokens, taking tokens away for failure to emit the target behaviors a mildly aversive token cost punishment…
Scientists Create Natural Sounding Speech From Brain Activity
“For the first time, this study demonstrates that we can generate entire spoken sentences based on an individual’s brain activity, This is an exhilarating proof of principle that with technology that is already within reach, we should be able to build a device that is clinically viable in patients with speech loss.” Edward Chang MD…
Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech
The implications for AI thought to speech technology if developed fully is so exciting not just for adults who experienced an accident or head injury that affect speech, but for all of us who have children with a communication impairment. When my son Tanner was younger, he would try to talk, and everyone would look…
Organic Food And Heavy Metals
“Some of the worst offenders in the Clean Label Project’s tests were organic, plant-based protein powders. More than 75 percent had measurable levels of lead. And certified organic products averaged twice the heavy metals of their uncertified counterparts.” Simply stated, organic produce and other ingredients are grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage…