Depression... in babies?!

Apparently, symptoms of depression have been observed in babies as young as six months.

These include:

-> Lack of interaction with others.
-> Staring/averted gaze or sad facial expressions.
-> Lack of interst in their environment.
-> Slow movements.
-> Sleeping and eating problems.

etc.

If these persevere for longer than three months and no physical reason can be found, then it could be depression (diagnosed via a psychological assessment. How you psychologically assess a baby is beyond me- but then what the hell do I know about psychology?).

A baby is more likely to present with these symptoms if they have a depressive mother- this could be because of genetic or environmental factors.

Dr. Shatkin (director of education and training at New York University's Child Study Centre) estimates this figure to be about 1 in 6 babies.



Ok. Whoa. I know that there are genes which make depression more likely- but for the illness to present in an infant not even a year old? Wow. I always associated depression with maturity, for some reason. Maybe because so many artists and intelligent figures had depression at some at point; depression has stemmed so many stunning pieces of work.

Some people who had depression:
-> William Blake.
-> Charles Beaudelaire.
-> Woody Allen.
-> Agatha Christie.
-> Beyoncé.

and many more great people.

Buuuut, science does not know its debt to imagination. The more we know, the more we can do to counter it.

Anywy, let's have some pictures of happy babies to even this horrible news out:















Awwww! :)

You've gotta love BoJo

Oh, Bojo.

Pope's aide: the UK is a "third world country".

Why?
Because the UK is marked by "a new and aggressive atheism".

So the UK is a third world country... because we have atheists.

But wait a minute, that's not what I meant, cries the aide! Instead he was referring to "Britain's multi-cultural society". Much better...

basically.

.

9/11. RIP.

It strikes me as sad how, with everything, the story is presented, it maybe lingers for a bit- then it's forgotten. Chances are, the people involved in the incident won't be able to forget so easily. A murder, for example. I can't imagine that the suffering of the family/friends would ever cease and yet no one remembers the name of anyone involved for longer than a week or two.

And with 9/11, even though it initially seems like the opposite has happened, I think the same trend has been followed. The incident hasn't been forgotten, yes, but it has been engulfed in conspiracy theories, wars and extremism. Behind all of this lies human suffering (both on 9/11 and as a consequent of it) which isn't so addressed. It's not forgotten, true, but you have to look behind a smoke screen to be able see it.

9/11 should be a reminded of how fragile human life and relations can be. It shouldn't be a site of religious hatred and intolerance. I doubt it's what any of the dead would have wanted. I doubt it's what anyone wants.

Long time no blog!

I guess I'm accustomed to blogging as a form of procrastination and so now that it's the holidays, I'm not having to put off any work using it. That and the fact that I don't really have much to blog about, seeing as I'm spending most days sleeping and, well, being a teenager.

I found an article that made me laugh today, though, entitled "Stingy aliens may call us on cheap rates only"

Considering that aliens are normally presented like this...



(don't ask, that's the first picture that came up when I googled "alien".)

... it's quite difficult to imagine them having qualities like being frugal or neurotic. But all of the unknown signals that scientists have ever seen have only ever lasted around 10 seconds and then were never seen again:

"Frugal aliens would swing a pulsed microwave beam across the disc of the Milky Way, where most of our galaxy's stars reside. "They wouldn't want to target individual stars: there are far too many of them," he says. "Instead, they'd build a powerful beacon, then swing that beacon around and repeat it.

"If aliens did follow that strategy, their signals would not repeat for many months. "Astronomers have seen some unexplained signals that lasted for tens of seconds then were never seen again," says Benford. "Some of those could have been extraterrestrial beacons but there wasn't enough observing time to wait for any repeats."

Chances are, the title of the article was coined to attract attention, but I'll still point out that I think it's incredibly presumptuous and somewhat shallow of us to assume that aliens would have our characteristics. If our characteristics and ethics are a by-product of evolution, then these extraterrestrials would have had to have gone through a similar evolutionary process to us... unless, that is, there are underlying themes in evolutionary and survival ethics, no matter what path the creatures took to reach to their present state. But, of course, we haven't a clue.

You are what you speak.

I found this article in New Scientist.

The general theory with language has been that there are underlying rules; some kind of pattern which connects all languages that ever have been. This is termed "universal grammar" and was put forwards in the 60s by Noam Chomsky. However, a new theory has been presented courtsey of two guys called Evans and Levinson. Their theory is that the language we learn actually shapes our brain.

So what made linguists question the universal grammar theory?

-> It was thought that there would never have been a syllable in any language that begins with a vowel and ends in a consenant if it didn't also have syllables that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. But this was shown to be wrong when the language Arrernte was found.

-> It was thought that every language would at least have verbs and nouns. Some, however, don't.

-> The fact that where some languages need an entire sentence to depict something, other languages have but one word for the meaning (e.g. In English, for example, you'd say "I cooked the wrong meat for them again". In the Indigenous Australian language Bininj Gun-wok you would say "abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng"). It's hard to see an underlying structure in the two.

But there's a more worrying, or at least more eye opening, side to this discovery:

This theory suggests that humans are more diverse than we thought, with our brains having differences depending on the language environment in which we grew up. And that leads to a disturbing conclusion: every time a language becomes extinct, humanity loses an important piece of diversity.

Considering that half of world languages have gone extinct in the past 500 years, it's scary how much we must have lost with them. Each particular brain structure must have had with it new ideas that we could have used to enrich the world and improve it. With all the problems we're facing, we can't really afford to be losing out on new ideas.
Every time a book is translated, it loses some of its authenticity and some of its original meaning- hence the phrase "lost in translation". If so much can be lost simply by the act of translation, how much do we lose every time a language goes extinct?
I guess the blow is softened if the language evolves into another instead of just disappearing- which I would presume would happen because shifting language would be extremely difficult for a society (the only time I can see it working is if it is a forced change- i.e. imperialism).

On the other hand, there are cultures out there which speak the same language as another country but have different ways of life and societies- for example France and the Republic of Congo which both speak French. On the other hand, there are other recognised languages in the Congo- it's just that France is the official national one.

Also, presuming all of this is true, the evolution of new languages will mean new cultures and new ways of life which is exciting.