Group items tagged

Including information on the Forbidden Experiment, Critical Period hypothesis, Victor of Aveyron, Genie, and others.

good questions for discussion

This article is relevant to the Genie case, outlining the many ways isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response - a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This response might've been biologically advantageous for our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for modern humans, the outcome is mostly harmful. A 1957 McGill University study, recreated in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, found that after only a matter of hours, people deprived of perceptual stimulation and meaningful human contact, started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests. In addition, subjects started hallucinating. The brain is used to processing large quantities of data, but in the absence of sensory input, Robbins states that "the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain's central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn't make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern." It tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

This article talks about "genie" a child raised in nearly solitude for twelve years, who was unable to ever develop language skills due to her lack of social interaction in her adolescence.

GENIE An Abused Child's Flight From Silence. By Russ Rymer. 221 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. THE story of the girl known by the pseudonym Genie, who spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a bedroom alone, alternately strapped down to a child's potty chair or straitjacketed into a sleeping bag, fed on baby food and beaten with a wooden paddle when she so much as whimpered, is really three stories woven together.

"The discrepancies between the two accounts which have been identified here are genuine, farreaching, and not merely apparent discrepancies. [...] it is clear that a definitive judgement on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given."

This was interesting because the children speak their own animal language.

Strange but true story with interesting connections to the "Genie" case and the critical period hypothesis. In 2008, in Amstedten, Austria, two brothers, age 5 and 18, were discovered. They were being held captive in a cellar with their mother. The boys use animalistic noises rather than words to communicate with each other. Other than their mother, age 42, who'd lost most of her reading and writing skills after being imprisoned 24 years ago, their only source of linguistic input was a TV. A police officer who met the two boys noted they communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing. "If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate, which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."