Does X really mark the spot? Why are there at least four boys diagnosed as autistic for every girl? This gender ratio is a big mystery in neuroscience, but holds clues to the causes of autism. Some of the genes associated with autism lie on the x chromosome and, early on, this alone was thought […]
If you bring your young child to a doctor’s office because he lacks social skills, doesn’t make good eye contact and talks very little or has unusual speech patterns, he will undoubtedly be diagnosed as “autistic.” You are also likely to be told nothing can be done. That is tragic because, these vague symptoms can […]
Several years ago I awoke in a panic from a nightmare. I didn’t remember the nightmare, but the first thought that I had upon awakening was, What if it is melanoma? I’m not prone to nightmares, and I wasn’t worried about the new mole that I had seen on the back of my leg the […]
While researching nonverbal communication with an autistic girl named “Hayley”, I realized the pervasive and painful lack of understanding about the nonverbal children discussed in the video above. Many children diagnosed with autism are seriously misunderstood, and spreading the information below could literally save a life. It already has. A nonverbal child was almost denied […]
Recently I was asked a simple, yet profound, question by Steven Frampton, a British radio host. He wanted to know why American scientists don’t believe in ESP. We talked about the fear of changing one’s view of reality, and how ESP research has been a death knell to scientists’ credibility. Shortly thereafter, he and his […]
We had just arrived, before dusk, on our trip to Yellowstone National Park to see its new wolves. Within minutes of passing the gate, a raven flew onto our rental car’s side-mirror. It grasped the mirror with its claws and began pecking at my window… while we were driving towards our lodge. Its acrobatics caught […]
I looked up Extrasensory Perception on Wikipedia out of curiosity and because its page on psychokinesis cites my book. I was surprised at what I found. The page on ESP is written from the die-hard skeptic’s perspective and puts down parapsychologists as “pseudoscientists”. Parapsychologists are among the most careful researchers I have met. They want […]
Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s star chimp, Ayumu, was in a 2012 BBC film “Super Smart Animals” because he can remember the sequence and location of nine random digits displayed for only 60 milliseconds. First of all, phone numbers, not including area codes, are seven digits long because that is most people’s short-term memory capacity. More importantly, 60 milliseconds […]
Meet eight-year-old Vishal, an autistic savant who “knows without studying.” He attends a school for autistic children, where he learns social skills rather than academics. He doesn’t have the attention span to study from books or teachers and doesn’t understand why he should because information just comes to him. Like other autistic children, he is […]