Christopher Milam's List: Wk2 - PYP

• Mark H. Johnson
• There is a continuing debate in developmental neuroscience about the importance of activity-dependent processes. The relatively delayed rate of development of the human brain, compared with that of other mammals, might make it more susceptible to the influence of postnatal experience. The human infant is well adapted to capitalize on this opportunity through primitive biases to attend to relevant stimuli in its environment. The infant's interaction with its environment helps to sculpt inter- and intraregional connections within the cortex, eventually resulting in the highly specialized adult brain.

•  Design principles of the human brain: An evolutionary perspective
• The evolution of the brain in mammals has been accompanied by a reorganization of the brain as a result of differential growth of certain brain regions. Consequently, the geometry of the brain, and especially the size and shape of the cerebral cortex, has changed notably during evolution. Comparative studies of the cerebral cortex suggest that there are general architectural principles governing its growth and evolutionary development and that the primate neocortex is uniformly organized and composed of neural processing units. We are beginning to understand the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of these neuronal networks. In this review, some of the design principles and operational modes will be explored that underlie the information processing capacity of the cerebral cortex in primates, and it will be argued that with the evolution of the human brain we have nearly reached the limits of biological intelligence.

• The relationship between play, brain growth and behavioural flexibility in primates
• Play behaviour is common across mammals, but it is particularly frequent in primates. Several explanations for the occurrence of play have been proposed, both adaptive and nonadaptive. One popular explanation is that play supports the development of complex cognition and behavioural flexibility. This hypothesis is supported by a relationship between the relative size of several brain regions, including the neocortex and cerebellum, and the frequency of social play. However, a direct link with either behavioural flexibility or brain maturation has yet to be shown. Using a comparative data set of the frequency of social and nonsocial play across primates, I tested two predictions of this hypothesis: (1) that the frequency of play is associated with the amount of postnatal brain growth; and (2) that the frequency of play is associated with measures of behavioural flexibility. I found support for both predictions, and, notably, the results suggest that social and nonsocial play may contribute to different aspects of behavioural flexibility.

• • Page 146
    Brownell's report

• The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder,
• young people who are naturally weepy after breakups are often urged to medicate themselves
• Lyubomirsky
• "Becoming happier takes work, but it may be the most rewarding and fun work you'll ever do,"

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• Key Characteristics of Happy People

• WHERE TO FIND FLOW
• Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses
• FLOW AT WORK
• ESM studies find more occasions of flow on the job than in free time.
• FLOW AT PLAY
• The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite
• Leisure time in our society is occupied by three major sorts of activities: media consumption, conversation, and active leisure--such as hobbies
• SOCIAL FLOW
• At one moment we experience flow, the next apathy, anxiety, relaxation, or boredom. Over and over, however, our findings suggest that people get depressed when they are alone, and that they revive when they rejoin the company of others. The moods that people with chronic depression or eating disorders experience are indistinguishable from those of healthy people as long as they are in company and doing something that requires concentration. But when they are alone with nothing to do, their minds begin to be occupied by depressing thoughts, and their consciousness becomes scattered.
• finding some compatibility between our goals and those of the other person or persons, and becoming willing to invest attention in the other person's goals
• OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
• Flow is a source of mental energy in that it focuses attention and motivates action

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