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considered to be multifactorially inherited

Multifactorial inheritance means that "many factors"

where a combination of genes from both parents, in addition to unknown environmental factors, produce the trait or condition

factors are usually both genetic and environmental

Often, one gender (either males or females) is affected more frequently than the other in multifactorial traits

means that one gender is more likely to show the problem

Slightly more males develop schizophrenia in childhood, however, by adolescence schizophrenia affects males and females equally.

Although schizophrenia affects men and women equally, symptoms in men generally begin earlier than in women

schizophrenia first appears in men during their late teens or early 20s

women, schizophrenia often first appears during their 20s or early 30s.

schizophrenia affects 2.7 million Americans

child born into a family with one or more schizophrenic family member has a greater chance of developing schizophrenia than a child born into a family with no history of schizophrenia.

chance for a sibling to also be diagnosed with schizophrenia is 7 to 8 percen

If a parent has schizophrenia, the chance for a child to have the disorder is 10 to 15 percen

Risks increase with multiple affected family members.

Distorted perception of reality (i.e., difficulty telling dreams from reality) Confused thinking (i.e., confusing television with reality) Detailed and bizarre thoughts and ideas Suspiciousness and/or paranoia (fearfulness that someone, or something, is going to harm them) Hallucinations (seeing, hearing, or feeling things that are not real such as hearing voices telling them to do something) Delusions (ideas that seem real but are not based in reality) Extreme moodiness Severe anxiety and/or fearfulness Flat affect (lack of emotional expression when speaking) or inability to manage emotions Difficulty in performing functions at work and/or school Exaggerated self-worth and/or unrealistic sense of superiority of one's self Social withdrawal (severe problems in making and keeping friends ) Disorganized or catatonic behavior (suddenly becoming agitated and confused, or sitting and staring, as if immobilized) Odd behaviors

The symptoms of schizophrenia are often classified as positive (symptoms including delusions, hallucinations, and bizarre behavior), negative (symptoms including flat affect, withdrawal, and emotional unresponsiveness), disorganized speech (including speech that is incomprehensible), and disorganized or catatonic behavior (including marked mood swings, sudden aggressive, or confusion, followed by sudden motionlessness and staring).

diagnosed by a psychiatrist

Specific treatment for schizophrenia will be determined by your physician based on: Your age, overall health, and medical history Extent of the disease Your tolerance for specific medications, procedures, or therapies Expectations for the course of the disease Your opinion or preference

Types of treatment that may be helpful to an individual with schizophrenia may include: Medications (also called psychopharmacological management; to reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia), including the following: Neuroleptics--a specialized class of medications used to treat schizophrenia. Neuroleptics are used primarily to treat the pervasive, intrusive, and disturbing thoughts of a person with schizophrenia. They are designed to help minimize the severity of delusions and hallucinations the individual is experiencing. Antipsychotic medications--medications that act against the symptoms of psychotic illness, but do not cure the illness. However, these medications can reduce symptoms or reduce the severity of symptoms; a specialized class of medications used to treat schizophrenia. Individual and family psychotherapy (including cognitive and behavioral therapy) Specialized educational and/or structured activity programs (i.e., social skills training, vocational training, speech and language therapy) Self-help and support groups

Preventive measures to reduce the incidence of schizophrenia are not known at this time

absorb the movements that match basic sounds

first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again

University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development.

quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development – more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

Other studies have shown that babies who are best at distinguishing between vowel sounds like "ah" and "ee" shortly before their first birthday wind up with better vocabularies and pre-reading skills by kindergarten.

babies also look to speakers' faces for important social cues about what they're hearing

So he and doctoral student Amy Hansen-Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or Spanish to babies of English speakers. A gadget mounted on a soft headband tracked where each baby was focusing his or her gaze and for how long.

They found a dramatic shift in attention: When the speaker used English, the 4-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-olds spent equal amounts of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth.

At 12 months, attention started shifting back toward the speaker's eyes.

at 6 months, babies begin observing lip movement, Lewkowicz says, because that's about the time babies' brains gain the ability to control their attention rather than automatically look toward noise.

Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum

ested the learning abilities of sleeping newborns by repeating tones that were followed by a gentle puff of air to the eyelids.

After about 20 minutes, 24 of the 26 babies squeezed their eyelids together when the tone was sounded without the puff of air.

The brain waves of the 24 infants were found to change, providing a neural measurement of memory updating.

While past studies find this type of learning can occur in infants who are awake, this is the first study to document it in their most frequent state, while they are asleep

Learned eyelid movement reflects the normal functioning of the circuitry in the cerebellum, a neural structure at the base of the brain. This study's method potentially offers a unique non-invasive tool for early identification of infants with atypical cerebellar structure, who are potentially at risk for a range of developmental disorders, including autism and dyslexia, she said.

Newborn infants' sleep patterns are quite different than those of older children or adults in that they show more active sleep where heart and breathing rates are very changeable," she said. "It may be this sleep state is more amenable to experiencing the world in a way that facilitates learning."

Another factor is that infants' brains have greater neural plasticity, which is the ability for the neural connections to be changed

2009 by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee,

But the Falk study was based on only a handful of photographs that had been previously made available by Harvey, who died in 2007.

several regions feature additional convolutions and folds rarely seen in other subjects.

and his prefrontal cortex—linked to planning, focused attention, and perseverance in the face of challenges—is also greatly expanded.

Albert Galaburda, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says that "what's great about this paper is that it puts down … the entire anatomy of Einstein's brain in great detail.

he study raises "very important questions for which we don't have an answer."

whether Einstein started off with a special brain that predisposed him to be a great physicist, or whether doing great physics caused certain parts of his brain to expand

"some combination of a special brain and the environment he lived in."

Falk agrees that both nature and nurture were probably involved

"he had the right brain in the right place at the right time."

C-section babies have a pattern of "at risk" microorganisms in their gastrointestinal tract that may make them more susceptible to developing the antibody Immunoglobulin E, or IgE,

They also may have trouble organizing their thoughts and expressing themselves

speech and behavior can be so disorganized that they may seem frightening to others

most misunderstood mental illnesses

Jekyll-and-Hyde" type of split personality

Schizophrenia literally means "a split mind," and this may be where the misconception of split personality took root.

difficulty functioning in society, at work, and in school

But the symptoms of schizophrenia vary widely from one person to another. In some people, the dissociated feelings caused by the illness are a constant part of life. In others, the symptoms will come and go. People with schizophrenia do not always act abnormally. They may appear perfectly responsible and in control, even when experiencing hallucinations or delusions.

Schizophrenia cannot be cured

"Dancing is universal among humans, and until recently, it was thought to be unique to humans as well," said Cook

study co-author Colleen Reichmuth, PhD, with the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz

ed by doctoral candidate Peter Cook at the Long Marine Lab at UCSC.

Apr. 1, 2013

six experiment

“Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.” - Jonah Lehrer from his piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t”

“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.” - Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today

Interestingly, these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it. - Dan Ariely, from his book “Predictably Irrational”

"Too often, people dismiss ADHD as being down to bad parenting or poor diet. As a clinician, it was clear to me that this was unlikely to be the case. Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children."

The condition is highly heritable -- children with ADHD are statistically more likely to also have a parent with the condition and a child with an identical twin with ADHD has a three in four chance of also having the condition.

"Children with ADHD have a significantly higher rate of missing or duplicated DNA segments compared to other children and we have seen a clear genetic link between these segments and other brain disorders," explains Dr Nigel Williams. "These findings give us tantalising clues to the changes that can lead to ADHD."

ADHD is not caused by a single genetic change, but is likely caused by a number of genetic changes, including CNVs, interacting with a child's environment," explains Dr Kate Langley.

Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002

Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time

Harvard economist David Laibson has shown

that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan.

Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly

delaying tough decisions

Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.

sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence

Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Jason Babcock is the founder of Positive Science, a New York company that has developed eye-tracking devices over the last decade

John Franchak, a doctoral student at NYU and leader of the project

infants would be looking at their mothers constantly because that was common knowledge within [the field of] social cognition with infants." But in a room full of toys scattered everywhere and obstacles to climb on and crawl on, the infants only looked toward their mothers about half the time.  And even if they did look at their mothers, they looked at their mothers' faces only about 15 percent of the time.

toddlers almost always look directly at the object when reaching for it.

Toddlers are able to use information from their peripheral vision and still walk very well.

Another interesting finding was that while infants look directly at an obstacle before walking onto or over it, 75 percent of the time they don't always have to.

According to Franchak, down the line it could offer more research applications that could help infants with developmental disorders, medical research and applied research.