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Атлантическият океан има отлична статия за Брендън Симс, първото дете хилядолетие в малкия си Средния запад на града. Родителите на Брендън трудното решение да му позволи да се превърне в жена, защото искаше да бъде момиче, веднага след като той може да изразява себе си. На транссексуални деца В моите няколко месеца, аз говорих с родителите от най-различни среди, които са направили много различни решения за това как да се справят с децата си. Много любимци линия "новата нормалност", а някои не. Но всички те имаха едно общо нещо: в такъв натоварен ситуация, с бъдещето на децата си в опасност, съмнение за избора им не ги обслужват добре. В случай на Брендън, например, съмнение ще принуди Тина да се счита, че ако тя започна да се облича като момиче, тя ще бъде Напук на конвенциите на малкия си град, а по-голямата част на психиатрични експерти, които съветват категорично против практиката. Това ще я принуди да се счита, че тя ще трябва да започнат да произвеждат сериозни медицински решения за Брандън само за няколко години, и че дори и с блокери, той ще се сблъска с живота на хормонални инжекции и вероятно голяма операция. По време на конференцията, Тина се бореше с тези съмнения. Но новите си приятели вече са се преместили покрай тях. "Да, това е поправим" Свирихме друга майка, който бе на 20/20 специална. "Ние я наричаме излекувани с пола разстройство". Има една невероятна раздела за експеримент на полова идентичност, което беше проведено в миналото, в щатите; П рез 1967, д-р Джон Пари стартира експеримент, който помисли си той може да потвърди някои от по-радикалните идеи, възникващи в феминистката мисъл. През 60-те, писатели като Бети Friedan се противопоставиха на идеята, че жените трябва да се ограничи до предписаните им роли като съпруги, домакини и майки. Но други феминистки отдалечават, твърдейки, че цялата идея за пола е социална конструкция и лесен за манипулиране. В една статия от 1955, пари е написал: "Сексуалното поведение и ориентация като мъж или жена, не вродена, инстинктивна основа" Ние се учим, дали са мъже или жени с "в хода на различните преживявания от израстването. 60-те години, той е добре известен за това, че е първата американска клиника за извършване на доброволните операции за смяна на пола, в болница "Джон Хопкинс" в Балтимор. Един ден получих писмо от родителите на новородени близнаци, един от които са прекарали скалъпили обрязването, който изгори-голямата част от пениса му. Пари видя като перфектен тест за неговата теория. Той насърчи родителите да имат момче, Дейвид Reimer, напълно кастрирани и след това да го отгледа като момиче. Когато детето достига пубертета, парите, които им казах, лекарите може да построи влагалището и да му даде феминизират хормони. Преди всичко, той им каза, те не трябва да се колебае в решението си и не трябва да кажа на момчето за инцидента. В хартия след хартия, пари отчете на Reimer страхотна напредък, пише, че "тя" показа запален интерес в кукли и куклени къщи, че тя предпочита рокли, панделки за коса, и накъдрен блузи. Описание на парите на детето си книга Сексуалните Подписи подтикна един критик да я опише като "плаване доволно през детството като на истински момиче." Списание "Тайм" заключи, че на съмнение Reimer случай гласове на убеждението, че половите различия са "неизменно определя от гените при зачеването. Реалността е съвсем различна, като Rolling Stone репортер Джон Colapinto брилянтно документирани в най-добрия 2000 продавача, както природата го прави. Reimer никога не са коригирани, за да е момиче. Искаше само да се изгради укрепления и да играе с брат му самосвали, и настоя, че трябва да се изпикая изправяне. Той е социална катастрофа в училище, бие другите деца и лошо поведение в клас. На 14, Reimer стана толкова отчуждени и депресирани, че родителите му най-накрая му казах истината за неговото раждане, в който момент усети най-вече облекчение, докладва той. Той в крайна сметка претърпя phalloplasty, и той се оженил за жена. Тогава, преди четири години, 38-годишна, Reimer се е застрелял в паркинга на магазин за хранителни стоки. Цялата статия е очарователно четене. Но един човек наистина се открояваше за мен, предполагам, защото това, което той казва, че се пресича с моите интереси. Д-р Кенет Zucker е виждам деца с разстройство пола на самоличността от средата на 1970-те години насам. През 2012 г. Диагностичния и статистически наръчник на психичните разстройства ще бъдат актуализирани и много транссексуални общност го виждат като възможност за премахване на диагнозата на безредици пола на самоличността от книгата. Zucker отговаря на комисия, която ще направи препоръка; В неговия случай проучвания и описания на пациенти, Zucker обикновено обяснява пол дисфория по отношение на това, което той нарича "семейство шум": небрежни родители, които са причинили момче да overidentify с доминиращите големи сестри, майка, която очаква дъщеря и забавяне на именуване на новороденото си син в продължение на осем седмици. Вяра Zucker е, че с достатъчно терапия, тези деца могат да бъдат направени да се чувстват комфортно в тяхната раждане секс. Zucker сравнение малки деца, които вярват, че те са предназначени да живеят като другия пол за хора, които искат да ампутират здрави крайници, които вярват, че са котки, или тези, с нещо, наречено етническа идентичност разстройство. "Ако 5-годишният черно хлапе влезе в клиника и каза, че иска да бъде бял, ние подкрепяме това?", Ми каза той. "Аз не мисля така. Това, което ще искате да направите, е да каже: "Какво става с това дете, кара го да се чувства, че би било по-добре да е бяла?" Малките деца, обяснява той, са много конкретни мотиви, те могат да вярват, че ако искат да носят рокли, те са момичета. Но той го вижда като работата си и parents' да им помогне, че в по-гъвкави начини. "Ако едно дете има масивна тревожност от раздяла и не иска да ходи на училище, едно решение би било да им позволи да си остана вкъщи. Това ще реши проблема на едно ниво, но не на друго. Така е и с половата идентичност ", която позволява едно дете да превключите на пола, с други думи, най-вероятно няма да стигнем до корена на психологически проблем, но предлагат само повърхностни корекции.
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3 Quarks Daily has an interesting interview looking at a new theory on the nature of delusion. Current theories fall in to “top-down” or “bottom-up” models, where the phenomenon is seen as either a consequence of a disturbance in high level understanding, or of false perceptions. In his article “Delusional Realities”, Shaun Gallagher, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, suggests several inadequacies with previous explanations and gives his own; So, Gallagher proposes an alternative description, which incorporates both top-down and bottom-up components and emphasizes the influence of bodily and social factors. On this view, “in the spirit of embodied, situated and phenomenological views of cognition,” the delusional subject “does not live in the one unified world of meaning that is defined objectively (in a view from nowhere), but in multiple realities, sub-universes or finite provinces of meaning.” He likens the experience of these realities to being “in-the-world” of a book, movie, or video game, but says that “unlike other multiple realities…[delusional ones] may be ‘firmly sustained…’” Conceiving of delusional states in this way, Gallagher argues, allows us to account for previously unexplained aspects of delusion. For instance, it has been noted that some delusional patients actually find it strange when others express agreement with their delusional claims. This may be because they see themselves as responding to a distinct reality. The interviewer, Olivia Scheck, asks the question that this begs at the end of the interview; “This is a philosophical approach to answering a psychiatric question, but do you also think it has implications for other areas of philosophy? For instance, does showing that people can experience alternate realities suggest that to some extent aspects of objective reality are just shared beliefs about the world, and does this suggest that our ideas about the world are more constructed than we normally think of them as being?” Imagine a world in which the nature of reality was generally agreed upon. It’s easy to think of vast swathes of the world’s population that are living “in the world” of various books. The interview also links to a great TED talk by Vilayanur Ramachandran entitled “A journey to the center of your mind”, which looks at the brain’s most basic mechanisms and gives an entertaining bottom-up explanation for Capgras Delusion; Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on a study from the New School for Social Research, which surveyed 1,800 people picked from Jewish Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and Palestinian students, in Israel and the Palestinian territories. About half of the Palestinian students in the study were members of Hamas or related organizations. The study asked the participants to consider compromise over issues that were relevant to them (land for peace, giving up the right to land, claim to Jerusalem). They found that participants on both sides fell into two groups- the moral absolutists and the non-absolutists. And the interesting part of the experiment came when they introduced incentives to sweeten the deal. Faced with the prospect of the same compromise, only with a rational or financial incentive to make it more attractive, the two groups behaved completely differently. The incentives included peace, resulting from the end of hostilities, and money in the form of donations from the EU or the US. Whilst the moderates responded well to these incentives, the absolutists reacted vehemently, with more of them recommending a violent response than before. Symbolic gestures had the opposite effect. It didn’t matter if these symbolic gestures altered the costs or benefits of the compromise, and in fact it didn’t even matter if these deals would be successfully carried out. The only thing the study doesn’t seem to have gone into, is whether or not violence itself constitutes a symbolic gesture. If you fire rockets blindly into Israeli territory, or take out Hamas targets and then post the results on YouTube, what are you actually doing? The videos and images of violence from these places are absolutely stuffed full of symbolism. Pink Tentacle reports that scientists at Japan’s Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, have developed new Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology (that analyses blood flow in the brain), to reconstruct images from people’s minds. Subjects were shown various images to calibrate the machine, which monitored changes in brain activity. Then they were shown a new set of images (including the letters in the diagram above) and the machine was able to display what the subject was seeing solely based on brain activity. The researchers think they’ll soon be able to reproduce color, as well as display people’s dreams whilst they are asleep. They see a future where thoughts, feelings and complicated emotional states can be read. The fields of art and design could utilize the technology to quickly asses the images inside an artist’s mind, and psychiatry could benefit from new ways to treat disorders that involve hallucinations. They have clearly stressed the most benign and non-threatening possible uses for the technology. But wow. It does have some staggering implications in all sorts of ways… I don’t normally post stuff that’s been posted on BoingBoing (also Wired) but this is so close to what I’ve been looking at recently that it has to go in. Even just for my own reference. It’s the rubber hand illusion, but with the whole body. Scientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden have used live streamed images and VR headsets to create the sensation of being inside someone else’s body; The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person’s body or an artificial body was one’s own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person’s body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one’s body. Henrik Ehrsson told the BBC; “The first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are.” These experiments provide even more evidence for the argument that Ehrsson has been making for several years. Vision — not just tactile sense — plays a major role in our sense of where our bodies end and the environment begins. “Thus, the matching of multisensory and motor signals from the first person perspective is sufficient to create a full sense of ownership of the entire body.” The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality, so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game. This is boggling my mind; according to a study at Oxford University, pain and swelling in an aching hand can be controlled, by making the hand look larger or smaller. When I first read that, I immediately thought that the change in visual size may affect the way in which pain is reported by the patient, if the way it’s reported is visual. But swelling? That’s extremely interesting. Both pain and swelling were increased or decreased depending on whether the patient’s hand was magnified or minimized. Lorimer Mosley’s study is covered in Neurophilosophy, who writes; Exactly how a distortion of the body image modulates painful sensations is unclear. It may be the case that magnifying the body leads to an enhancement of the sense of touch. Some evidence for this comes from a 2001 study which showed that the ability to discriminate between two tactile stimuli was improved by magnification of the arm, and a neuroimaging study published earlier this year, which showed that magnification of the arm alters its somatosensory representation. By the same token, minifying a part of the body would have the opposite effect on tactile sensations. Nick Carr reports that Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute has published an in-depth roadmap to “whole brain emulation”- the replication of a fully functional human brain inside a computer. As a non-scientist it makes for strange but fascinating reading. At one point, for example, it wrestles with the problem of where to stop, or start simplifying the simulation. One obvious place is where “scale separation” exists, where different aspects of the system exist on such different scales that they can become uncoupled; An important issue to be determined is whether such a cut‐off exists in the case of the human brain and, if it does exist, at what level. While this paper phrases it in terms of simulation/emulation, it is encountered in a range of fields (AI, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind) in other forms: what level of organisation is necessary for intelligent, personal, or conscious behaviour? A key assumption of WBE is that, at some intermediary level of simulation resolution between the atomic and the macroscopic, there exists at least one cut‐off such that meeting criteria 1a and 1b at this level of resolution also enables the higher criteria to be met. At such a spatial, temporal, or organisational scale, the dynamics on the larger/slower scale is not functionally sensitive to the dynamics of the smaller/faster scale. Such scale separation might occur at the synaptic scale, where the detailed chemical dynamics underlying synaptic function could be replaced by a simplified qualitative model of its effects on signals and synaptic strengths. At the other end of the scale, there is also the cut off point relating to, well, the entire body and world that the brain exists in. That’s the aspect of this concept that seems most fudged; Similarly, the high‐level achievements related to social roles, mental states, and personal identify (6a, 6b and 6c) are both poorly understood and hard to operationalize, but given the philosophical interest in WBE we have included them here for completeness. It is not obvious how these criteria relate to one another, or to what extent they might be entailed by the criteria for 4 and 5. So, at the low end of the achievement scale there is “functional emulation”, whilst at the high end (for example 5) there is “individual brain emulation”. So what they’re talking about, really, is to use the brain as a model to try and create machine consciousness. The road map to emulate a human brain at high-level achievement of 6, would have to also emulate the body and world, surely? Nick Carr picks up on the way in which they deal with free will- “They deal with the problem of free will, or, as they term it, the possibility of a random or “physically indeterministic element” in the working of the human brain, by declaring it a non-problem”; Hidden variables or indeterministic free will appear to have the same status as quantum consciousness: while not in any obvious way directly ruled out by current observations, there is no evidence that they occur or are necessary to explain observed phenomena. The whole document amounts to a kind of philosophy or expression of the idea of materialism. Both of a materialistic concept of the human mind and materialism in general. They write, “the economic impact of copyable brains could be immense, and could have profound societal consequences.” Mind Hacks has an interesting piece about the game “Mirror’s Edge” and a story in Wired that talks about the realism of the game’s simulation of free-running and the physical effects on the player; Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys wrestled with nausea. The Wired writer thinks that the game fools the body’s sense of where it’s limbs are. Also known as “proprioception”. Mind Hacks adds; Research into illusions of proprioception — your sense of where you body is in space — has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact it’s out at the side, or behind you; Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror’s Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing. A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn’t that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing — we just ask our brains ‘jump’ and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed. I often find that myself. As I’m leaping from rooftop to rooftop at night; that it feels like nothing. Same with when I’m gunning shoppers down in the supermarket… Ha ha. It’s an interesting thought; that a video game is simulating the experience of competence- the feeling that your body has learned something. Anyone who’s ever trained at something athletic or demanding of huge coordination- something physical- knows the pain and the perseverance required to get to the point where it feels effortless. But in so many ways the world of the video game is the world of sensation. Much more so than movies ever could be. This is the characteristic of simulation- it’s an active representation. The processes of feeling and experiencing are represented. The research going into first person shooters, for example, is amazing. Right down to levels of excitement experienced whilst using individual weapon types, in different games. Alva Noe has an interesting talk up on Edge about our relationship with pictures; One experience that I’ve been especially interested in is our understanding and experience of pictures. If I show you a picture from a newspaper—for example, a photo of Hillary Clinton—there is a sense in which, when you look at that picture, you see Hillary. There she is, in the picture. Of course, Hillary is not there, so there is an obvious sense in which you don’t see Hillary when you look at the picture. There is a sense in which you see her; and a sense in which you don’t. She shows up for you, in the picture, even though she is not there. She shows up as not there. Getting clear about this phenomenon is the central empirical and conceptual problem about depiction. One idea might be to say, well, seeing a picture of Hillary is just like seeing Hillary. Seeing a picture of Hillary produces in you, the perceiver, just the same effects that actually seeing Hillary would produce. The problem with that suggestion is that if that’s right then we lose our sense of the difference between seeing Hillary and seeing a picture of Hillary. The distinctive thing about seeing Hillary in a picture is that she is there but not there. She is there but visually absent. She is manifestly absent in her visual presence. It’s a kind of a paradoxical thing. There is something paradoxical about pictures. My view is that traditional philosophy and cognitive science has been asking the wrong question when it comes to pictures. They ask, how does the picture affect us and give rise to an experience in our heads? Instead, what they should ask is how do we achieve a kind of access to Hillary, to properties of Hillary, such as her visual appearance, by exploration of something which is not Hillary, namely, a picture? The critical thing is the relation between this model, this picture, and that which is absent, such that we can gain access to what is absent in the picture. Once again we are thrown back to this idea that the perceiving is an achievement of access by making use of skills, knowledge. I need to know what Hillary looks like in order to recognize Hillary in her picture. A striking feature of pictures is their immediacy. A picture of Hillary doesn’t seem to be a symbolic representation of Hillary. There seems to be the sense in which merely knowing how to recognize Hillary or how to recognize a human form, a figure, is enough to recognize a picture of Hillary. There is this idea that we don’t need any further knowledge or further skills in order to perceive something in the picture. That is a very interesting idea. But, in fact, there is a nice comparison we can make to help us see that pictures don’t really have this sort of immediacy. Think about something like the Macintosh operating system. No promotional endorsement intended, but the Mac OS is user friendly. If you understand a few basic metaphors, about the desktop, clicking, open files, closing files, a few basic metaphors allow you to unpack just about any program that you might be working with. So there is a sense in which the functionality of the graphical user interface is straightforward and immediate. But, of course, that is precisely because the engineers have built the program with our particular predilections and capacities in mind. They built it to be easy for us. It’s not as though it just happens to be easy. Technological evolution made it transparent for us. And pictures are just the same. You encounter pictures in a newspaper, say, and we find it easy to see Hillary Clinton in the picture. We don’t need any further training. But that is not because you don’t require training to see Hillary Clinton in a picture. It’s because that technology was devised to be easy for us. The technology was designed for people with the training we already had. OK, what does that mean? Pictorial technologies, both painting and photography, have been designed to be straightforward for people that already know how to recognize things by using their eyes. Certain background visual skills are all that is presupposed. But then seeing itself requires tremendous background knowledge. How do we achieve access to properties of Hillary? Such that we can gain access to that which is absent in the picture? Not that you’d want to. It’s interesting to think about in relation to, say, war in video games. Probably none or very few of the people who make those games have experience of real war. Neither do most of the people that play them. But the war in the game is really just an aesthetic, derived from other representations of war in movies or pictures. The images of war in a video game exist only to give us access to the sensation of shooting. The relationship to war is very tenuous. Even more so when you consider that the movies and pictures that the images in the video game is based on, have their own rules of abstraction. The background knowledge required to successfully access what you are intended to access, is not about the thing that’s represented. The Atlantic has an excellent article about Brandon Simms, the first millenium child in his tiny midwestern town. Brandon’s parents made the difficult decision to allow him to become female, because he wanted to be a girl as soon as he could express himself. In my few months of meeting transgender children, I talked to parents from many different backgrounds, who had made very different decisions about how to handle their children. Many accepted the “new normalcy” line, and some did not. But they all had one thing in common: in such a loaded situation, with their children’s future at stake, doubt about their choices did not serve them well. In Brandon’s case, for example, doubt would force Tina to consider that if she began letting him dress as a girl, she would be defying the conventions of her small town, and the majority of psychiatric experts, who advise strongly against the practice. It would force her to consider that she would have to begin making serious medical decisions for Brandon in only a couple of years, and that even with the blockers, he would face a lifetime of hormone injections and possibly major surgery. At the conference, Tina struggled with these doubts. But her new friends had already moved past them. “Yeah, it is fixable,” piped up another mom, who’d been on the 20/20 special. “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.” There is an amazing section on an experiment on gender identity that was conducted in the past, in the states; In 1967, Dr. John Money launched an experiment that he thought might confirm some of the more radical ideas emerging in feminist thought. Throughout the ’60s, writers such as Betty Friedan were challenging the notion that women should be limited to their prescribed roles as wives, housekeepers, and mothers. But other feminists pushed further, arguing that the whole notion of gender was a social construction, and easy to manipulate. In a 1955 paper, Money had written: “Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis.” We learn whether we are male or female “in the course of the various experiences of growing up.” By the ’60s, he was well-known for having established the first American clinic to perform voluntary sex-change operations, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. One day, he got a letter from the parents of infant twin boys, one of whom had suffered a botched circumcision that had burned off most of his penis. Money saw the case as a perfect test for his theory. He encouraged the parents to have the boy, David Reimer, fully castrated and then to raise him as a girl. When the child reached puberty, Money told them, doctors could construct a vagina and give him feminizing hormones. Above all, he told them, they must not waver in their decision and must not tell the boy about the accident. In paper after paper, Money reported on Reimer’s fabulous progress, writing that “she” showed an avid interest in dolls and dollhouses, that she preferred dresses, hair ribbons, and frilly blouses. Money’s description of the child in his book Sexual Signatures prompted one reviewer to describe her as “sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” Time magazine concluded that the Reimer case cast doubt on the belief that sex differences are “immutably set by the genes at conception.” The reality was quite different, as Rolling Stone reporter John Colapinto brilliantly documented in the 2000 best seller As Nature Made Him. Reimer had never adjusted to being a girl at all. He wanted only to build forts and play with his brother’s dump trucks, and insisted that he should pee standing up. He was a social disaster at school, beating up other kids and misbehaving in class. At 14, Reimer became so alienated and depressed that his parents finally told him the truth about his birth, at which point he felt mostly relief, he reported. He eventually underwent phalloplasty, and he married a woman. Then four years ago, at age 38, Reimer shot himself dead in a grocery-store parking lot. The whole article is fascinating reading. But one guy really stood out for me, I suppose because what he’s saying intersects with my interests. Dr Kenneth Zucker has been seeing children with gender-identity disorder since the mid 1970′s. In 2012 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will be updated, and many in the transgender community see it as the chance to remove the diagnosis of gender-identity disorder from the book. Zucker is in charge of the committee that will make the recommendation; In his case studies and descriptions of patients, Zucker usually explains gender dysphoria in terms of what he calls “family noise”: neglectful parents who caused a boy to overidentify with his domineering older sisters; a mother who expected a daughter and delayed naming her newborn son for eight weeks. Zucker’s belief is that with enough therapy, such children can be made to feel comfortable in their birth sex. Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder. “If a 5-year-old black kid came into the clinic and said he wanted to be white, would we endorse that?” he told me. “I don’t think so. What we would want to do is say, ‘What’s going on with this kid that’s making him feel that it would be better to be white?’” Young children, he explains, have very concrete reasoning; they may believe that if they want to wear dresses, they are girls. But he sees it as his job—and the parents’—to help them think in more-flexible ways. “If a kid has massive separation anxiety and does not want to go to school, one solution would be to let them stay home. That would solve the problem at one level, but not at another. So it is with gender identity.” Allowing a child to switch genders, in other words, would probably not get to the root of the psychological problem, but only offer a superficial fix. Cognitive Daily has an article about priming effects in movies, from music played before or after footage of a character who’s emotionally ambiguous. The music was carefully chosen from an earlier study, which showed that each piece evoked either happiness, sadness, fear or anger. What’s interesting is that music played before or after the sequence featuring the character, affected the interpretation of the character’s emotional state, apart from with “angry” music. It isn’t explained why, although maybe people would expect anger to have more visual clues than the other emotions, and could easily interpret the music as dramatic and unrelated to the character’s emotional state. Anyway, one of the commentors on the piece posted a link to a trailer for “The Shining”, set to happy music, and one for “Mary Poppins”, set to scary music, enjoy;