Intellectual disabilities in children
The clinical picture of intellectual impairment is varied. Symptoms should be considered in accordance with the classification: with quantitative changes, there is a decrease in learning ability, difficulties/impossibility of self-care, with qualitative changes, a decrease in intelligence is combined with mosaic, partial development of individual functions.
Impaired mental function.
The level of intelligence is below average, reaching levels borderline with mental retardation. There are two variants of the clinical picture. If cognitive activity is impaired due to insufficient development of the emotional-volitional sphere, a lack of interest in cognitive activity comes to the fore: children are active, impulsive, and prefer simple games. They are not interested in creative and educational activities; they are difficult to organize and encourage reading and drawing. The second option is insufficient formation of the prerequisites for intelligence (memory, performance, attention). Children lack initiative, are not independent, are overly active or passive, get tired quickly, work at a slow pace (signs of cerebrovascular disease).
Moronism.
It is characterized by the primitiveness of thinking, its attachment to specific, visual situations, insufficient differentiation of emotions, and weakness of volitional impulses. Patients later master self-care skills, are able to dress independently, and perform hygiene procedures. According to a special curriculum, they master writing, reading, and counting. Teenagers learn simple working professions.
Imbecility.
Thinking is slow, stiff, experience is difficult to adopt. Intellectual-mnestic functions are reduced. Social interaction is limited and learning skills are impossible. Children are delayed in mastering self-care and simple homework.
Idiocy.
Characterized by a lack of speech and the ability to establish productive contact with others (with the exception of single executions of simple commands). There are often concomitant neurological pathologies and diseases of internal organs. Mobility is limited and self-care is not available.
Damaged and deficient development.
The unevenness of intellectual impairments is explained by the mosaic nature of the damage to the central nervous system: some functions are developed and continue to develop at a normal pace, others slow down (depending on the location of the damage - speech, spatial, auditory-verbal perception, memorization). Complex hierarchical connections fall apart, and intellectual retardation develops. Deficient development leads to intellectual impairment based on a primary defect - pathology of the analyzer (hearing, vision), motor system.
Distorted and disharmonious development
. It is caused by an ongoing pathological process that disrupts the uniform development of functions. Children have well-developed verbal intellectual functions, but adaptation is complicated by the difficulty of assimilation and understanding of social rules. Or the child has unique mathematical abilities, but everyday skills are difficult.
What reduces our intelligence? Or the reasons why we grow dumber
Smoking causes chronic bronchitis and atherosclerosis.
This habit also
provokes lung cancer and coronary heart disease. But it turns out that the list of consequences of cigarette addiction is not limited to this. As Scottish scientists found:
Smoking negatively affects the brain and reduces intellectual abilities.
To come to this conclusion,
Researchers from the University of Aberdeen examined 465 volunteers aged 64 years. Half of them were heavy smokers. First, they were given a battery of psychological tests to assess IQ and memory. The scientists then compared them with the archived results of a similar test conducted more than half a century ago, when the participants were 11 years old.
As it turned out,
smokers “lag behind” their non-smoking peers on all types of tests. Their ability to think logically, as well as their ability to memorize and reproduce information, has significantly decreased. Even when scientists excluded the influence of various “third” factors (social status, level of education, nature of work, alcohol consumption, etc.), although the difference decreased, it still remained large.
Researchers don't yet know
what smoking does to the brain.
But there is a version that nicotine and cigarette tars make nerve cells hypersensitive to the action of free radicals - toxic compounds formed during redox processes. In addition, the resins themselves increase the content of free radicals in the body, which also increases the risk of damage to brain cells. Source
Passive smoking reduces memory and weakens the nerves and impairs the functioning of the nervous system as a whole.
Even
You yourself have never touched a cigarette, but are forced to stay in a smoky room for a long time, there is a high risk that your memory will fail long before old age.
Experts say so
British Northumbria University Tom Heffernan and Terence O'Neill. They conducted a study of the cognitive (that is, those responsible for communication and assimilation of information) abilities of three groups of people. In one group there were heavy smokers, in another - those who were forced to inhale other people's tobacco smoke for a long time in the office or at home, and in the third - lucky ones who managed to avoid any contact with nicotine.
All three groups
The subjects were tested on chronological and event memory. That is, people were given to quickly memorize some texts, poems, and were shown pictures that had to be memorized in chronological order. At the end of the experiment, it became clear that passive smokers forgot almost 20% more compared to non-smokers, and active smokers retained information a third worse, says Addiction magazine.
The authors of the work are sure
that passive smoking not only has a bad effect on the bronchi and lungs, but also on the daily functions of our brain.
And they add that it can negatively affect not only memory, but also mental health. So, those who do not smoke, but have a high level of cotinine in their blood, a by-product of the breakdown of nicotine, have an increased risk of neuroses and a lower threshold for resistance to stress. Source
Israeli Study: Smoking Reduces IQ
As Israeli scientists have established,
Smoking not only increases the risk of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, but also directly affects the mental abilities of a person addicted to tobacco. Heavy smokers have a sharp decline in IQ.
Medical center specialists
Sheba in Tel Aviv recruited twenty thousand male volunteers between the ages of 18 and 21 for the study. A thorough examination revealed that young men who smoke a pack of cigarettes a day before have a lower IQ than non-smokers. Moreover, the more cigarettes a young man needs per day, the weaker his mental abilities are.
For those who did not produce
and did not inhale tobacco smoke, the average IQ was 101 points.
For the average smoker, it decreased to 94, and for those who smoked more than one pack of cigarettes per day, it did not exceed 90. This was convincingly demonstrated by the results of IQ tests of twins, whose mental abilities are initially the same. Source
The level of intelligence began to fall because people do not need to survive
Researchers from Stanford University claim that humanity's intelligence is declining. According to them, the law of natural selection, discovered by Darwin, has ceased to work. Because now we no longer need to fight for survival.
We will order pizza at home, take frozen chicken wings out of the refrigerator, and if we suddenly sneeze, we will quickly get rid of the disease by swallowing an antibiotic.
Scientific and technological progress has saved us from running naked through the jungle chasing a mammoth. And our distant ancestors, in order to find food, a place to live, and even protect their simple household and family from enemy neighbors, had to use remarkable thinking abilities.
And these two processes - surviving and thinking - as it turned out, are tightly connected.
“The genes responsible for the development of intelligence began to develop at an incredible pace in our ancestors even before they began to settle throughout the Earth, emerging from Africa, the “cradle of humanity,” explains lead author of the study, Dr. Gerald Crabtree. “After all, they had very difficult conditions for survival. Therefore, gene mutations led to the peak development of thinking abilities.
And then, according to Crabtree, “with the development of agriculture and urbanization, life became much easier,” and human intellectual power began to decline. Humanity has become weaker in its resistance to mutations leading to intellectual disabilities. Therefore, compared with our distant ancestors, modern man has become considerably stupid.
“We reached the peak several thousand years ago and have been going downhill ever since,” Crabtree is convinced.
According to neuroscientists, from 2 to 5 thousand genes are used in the development of intelligence. It is also known that genes involved in brain function are extremely susceptible to mutation. The scientist calculated the frequency with which harmful mutations appear in the human genome. And it turned out that over the course of three thousand years and 120 generations, humanity suffered two or more mutations, which, alas, led to a deterioration in our intellectual abilities. Professor Crabtree called them “stupid mutations.”
“If we had a time machine, and we suddenly found ourselves in Athens in 1000 BC,” Crabtree fantasized, “then our interlocutors would appear to us smarter than our contemporaries.”
Within five years, Crabtree says, scientists will be investigating every one of the millions of gene mutations that could compromise our intellectual development. And then they will figure out how to correct these mutations. And maybe we'll get wiser again.
SKEPTIC'S COMMENT
Doctor of Psychological Sciences Georgy Kruglitsky:
— The hypothesis lacks solid evidence. Firstly, it is impossible to assess the intelligence of our distant ancestors. Secondly, contrary to the claims of some researchers that stupid people give birth more, which means humanity will become dumber, the average IQ level has been growing in recent years.
In any case, such theories of the evolution of intelligence need radical rethinking. Moreover, recently most scientists have questioned the value of IQ tests. It turned out that those who cracked problems like nuts were considered dull in life. And vice versa: those who did not master even two tasks from popular tests showed miracles of intelligence in a variety of circumstances. In addition, IQ is easily influenced by, for example, education and culture. Surely, today even a Nobel Prize winner will miserably fail an intelligence test prepared for him by an 18th-century Indian from the Sioux tribe.
Recently, Nobel laureate, psychologist Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University (USA) made an amazing discovery. He found that when processing information, our brains have access to two different systems. IQ tests reveal only one side of the brain—the part involved in rational problem solving. But in everyday life, the brain works in a completely different direction - it is “turned on” to intuition. It was this powerful force that allowed people to survive and spread across the Earth. Today, our rational mind creates smart machines, looks at distant quasars and climbs inside a cell. But his intuition fails him, because all great scientific discoveries can lead to the death of humanity. Let's remember Hiroshima, Fukushima, Chernobyl. Now the threat of a third world war looms. Therefore, talking about the stupidity of people is unscientific. Rather, it is a matter of short-sightedness, which has become inherent in modern man, whose intuition has atrophied.
The inability to see a mistake and not make it, and also when solving a problem not to strive to know ourselves as best as possible - these are the roots of our stupidity. Therefore, even a high intellectual can be stupid. In general, stupidity is especially dangerous in people with high IQs, because they are often given great responsibility.
BY THE WAY
Only 20 percent of intelligence is passed on to us from our parents.
Researchers studied the DNA and IQ test results of tens of thousands of children
Why is one smart and the other stupid? What does the development of intelligence depend on - on nature or nurture? Wanting to find answers to these questions, Australian scientists from the University of Queensland studied the genes and administered IQ tests to 18,000 people aged 6 to 18 years from four countries: Australia, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.
And it turned out that only 20 percent of intelligence is passed on to a child. Only in rare cases do parents pass on up to 40 percent of their “brain” to their children. Until now, it was believed that at least 50 percent depends on nature. It turns out that if a child has not very smart ancestors, this does not mean that he will follow in their footsteps. Education and environment help develop IQ quite high.
For example, scientists have found out that orphanage children from families in which parents did not shine with their abilities, after their adoption into families where they were seriously involved in their education, even became child prodigies.
What do we know about geniuses? Read on the website.
