> Kenneth,
>
> I'm skeptical enough that "this is in the literature"
> doesn't strike me as sufficient information. Can you please
> give us citations on the correlation you mentioned between
> resistance to thyroid hormone, duplicated Henschle's gyri
> and Sylvian fissures, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
> Also, is the correlation between all three, or between each of
> the first two and the third? That is, is there a correlation between
> resistance to thyroid hormone and duplicated Henschle's gyri
> and Sylvian fissures? Also, I gather that either you or the
> researchers are unclear on what resistance to thyroid hormone
> means; this does not increase my confidence in the results.
>
> In any case, I believe there are drugs that can be
> useful for people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder,
> which may make the activities in question possible despite
> the underlying difficulty. I think it's useful to distinguish between
> "this person cannot do X now" (but will acquire or regain this
> ability given time), "this person cannot do X without
> medical assistance," "this person cannot do X, even with what
> current medical technology allows," and "this person cannot do
> X and will never be able to do it." (The last may be an empty set;
> betting on what technology won't be able to accomplish is risky
> at best.) Hyperactivity seems to be somewhere between the
> second and third categories.
>
> I'm sorry: I thought this was going to lead somewhere obvious and
> useful in terms of memetics, but it hasn't. I'm sending it anyway, in
> the hope that someone will find it useful.
>
> Vicki
> rosenzweig@acm.org
Certainly. I did an abstract dump on Attention Deficit Disorder from the
Cambridge Life Sciences CD-ROM at Farrell library, K-State University. I
got 26 abstracts, some inobviously related to my subject. In other
words, I copied summaries of research papers published from March 1995 to
March 1996. [There's no way I can actually read all of them; they're
highly technical, AND I'm not a biochemistry specialist!]
Abstract #1 reported this (I paraphrase heavily):
Resistance to thyroid hormone results from an autosomal recessive
[not on sex chromosomes] variant on the thyroxine receptor, which makes
it less effective in binding to the hormone. As such, it WILL show up
during prenatal development. The study was an attempt to find
differences in brain anatomy between normal and ADHD-afflicted cases.
Sorted by gender [keep in mind that women are developmentally more
stable]:
Neither population had any instances of undercount on either of the
features I mentioned. On overcounts [I think my source rounded...]
Normals: Neither gender had any instances of overcount on Henschle's
gyri. Women had about 10% incidence for Sylvian fissure overcount. Men
had about 30% incidence for Sylvian fissure overcount.
ADHD: Women showed 30% chance of overcount on Sylvian fissures, and
10% for overcount on the gyri. Men had 70% chance of overcount on the
fissures, and 30% chance for overcount on the gyri.
Note that multiplied gyri is almost positive ID for ADHD, immediately.
Researching several general-reference works, I was able to learn the
following:
Sylvian fissures are responsible for dividing Broca's area and the
other one responsible for linguistic processing. Henschle's gyri are the
brain centers responsible for determining what we pay attention to.
They're the important ones for my analysis.
You can imagine what having multiple functional centers for determining
what one pays attention to does. They would constantly interrupt each
other, thus superficially justifying my claim.
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >
> > On 15 Oct 96 at 21:35, Reed Konsler wrote:
> >
> > > I assert: For the vast majority of people (95%) genetics plays little
> or
> > > no role in memetic development.
> >
> > Except possibly where the physical structure of the brain has an
> > effect on its content, but this would apply more to the memetic
> > development of a species rather than its individual members.
>
> No, definitely:
>
> This is in the literature:
>
> There is a high correlation between the following:
> Resistance to thyroid hormone [whatever that is; it's a single
> recessive allele. This must be prenatal to be effective.]
> Duplicated Henschle's gyri and Sylvian fissures
> Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
>
> The last has major effects on memetic content, since the usual
> implementation is to make it physically impossible to stay on-task! This
> completely changes the organization techniques required to function in
> daily life, let alone at work.
>
> That is: (some of) the physiological alterations at stage 2 reflect
> functional changes in ADHD, which physically render a typical mental skill
> IMPOSSIBLE. Just as a quadriplegic cannot walk for physical reasons, so
> an ADHD person cannot stay on-task for physical reasons. And all of this
> is driven by a single duplicated recessive allele. Stage 1 may be
> biasing, but if the Stage 2 effects are physiological, Stage 3 becomes
> almost unavoidable.
>
> //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
> / Towards the conversion of data into information....
> /
> / Kenneth Boyd
> //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////