Reviews for Child Abusers: Research and Treatment

The average rating for Child Abusers: Research and Treatment based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-15 00:00:00 Thomas Wojtowicz I had first discovered Daniel Tammet with Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant , his autobiography where he retells his life with Asperger, synaesthesia, and savant syndrome. I had found it so compelling (what a incredible mind!) that I decided to follow up with Embracing The Wide Sky. In here, he takes the reader for a journey across our mind; with insights both from science and his personal experience. All in all, it's a very good read. Brain's structure, memory, language, intelligence, creativity, sensory perceptions etc. It's a 'wide sky' indeed, and, so, there is a lot to learn about many topics... that is: if you don't know much about them to start with! Having roughly the same interests as the author when it comes to the brain (hence my interest in him, perhaps?) I knew most of what he was writing about in here. Personally, then, I haven't learnt much. What I found really interesting, though, is how he uses researches and science to, combined with his personal experience, shed more than welcome lights upon various topics. Having savant syndrome and so a very high IQ (he was encouraged to join Mensa) he nevertheless debunks IQ testing. It's not that he rejects the idea that intelligence can be assessed, but, he insists on how varied such concept is -referring to the works of a Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, and else... I liked that part! His arguments echo those of Stephen Jay Gould a few decades ago: 1/ such tests do not 'measure' reflection, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination (they are just a number put on very specific skill, and so cannot account for intelligence as the holistic phenomenon that it is in term of abilities); 2/ they are a vain attempt to concretely quantify, on an ascending scale at that, a feature which is abstract; 3/ they also are dangerously deterministic (not only for their troubled past, but, for blatantly ignoring that our brains are so plastic our 'intelligence' itself is ever-changing...). So much for a fixed value x put on it! He is blunt: '...the bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two-thirds of the world's population have an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some 4.5 billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values ('He's a 94', 'You're a 110', 'I'm a 103') equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This reminds me of astrology lumping everyone into one of twelve signs of the zodiac. Is human intelligence really so uniform that it can be summed up in just a handful of figures?' Being a polyglot who even managed to learn Icelandic in a week for a TV show (yes, you're read that right: he learnt Icelandic in a week -I warned you he's an incredible mind!) his takes on linguistics, foreign language learning in particular, are also interesting and echo my own experience. You don't learn a language using audio-material 'listen-repeat', nor through grammar drills. You learn by submerging yourself in the target language - through reading, watching movies, listening to the radio etc. '... no child acquires his mother tongue by studying its grammar or making lists of words... it is too fragmentary' His take on numeracy skills are also interesting. Coming from him (who holds the record for reciting from memory the most digits in the mathematical constant pi -22,514 in five hours!- and is able to perform incredible calculations) they are indeed a fascinating explanation for how he manages such mathematical feats. You know what we all do when playing Scrabble, arranging and re-arranging tiles until words emerge from the process? He does the same with numbers: 'This process of taking a sum and manipulating it in my head into meaningful number shapes and patterns that generate a solution is one I consider syntactic - analogous to how most people take a jumble of thoughts in their minds and effortlessly manipulate them mentally into a coherent, grammatical and meaningful order that they can express as a sentence. For some reason they cannot do anything like this with numbers. Most people just seem overwhelmed by large numbers and are unable to think about them in the way they think about words in a sentence. In contrast, I am able to take the numbers in a sum (…) mentally break them down into meaningful shapes (…) which I can then manipulate into a 'sentence' that is grammatical (…) in the sense that it produces the correct answer.' Such way of thinking is amazing. It allows him, above all, to discuss 'inhibition'; the mental process by which our brains prevents its parts not performing a task to interfere with the ones performing it. If the cognitive capabilities of neurotypicals are very defined within their brains (eg some areas for various linguistic skills, other for mathematical skills, others again for various sensory perceptions...) his, like other people with savant syndrome and, to a certain extend, synaesthesia or even autism, are not. It's an amazing outlook, those consequence serve to nail a point which need to be nailed again and again: the variety of human brains is such, that it's an asset to humanity as much as biodiversity is to ecology. Here's a deeply human book besides being a great introduction to the human brain. You may or not think he is loosing track in the last few chapters, where he discusses how our brains fare in our contemporary societies (eg debunking various logical and statistical fallacies, and questioning the overload of informations constantly bombarding us with truly negative effects... - I personally found that welcomed). But, there's no denying this is a very informative read. It might have been too light for me (again, since I have a personal interest in most of the topics discussed, I haven't learnt much) yet it was entertaining and engaging throughout. A really good book!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-05 00:00:00 Laura Fogo This is a great book. It transported me back to the college courses I took in the late 90s for a teacher's credential. It was basically an overview of what I had learned over a two year period, except in a condensed, readable, and interesting format - although sometimes difficult to grasp and a few time to understand, due to my own lack of abilities. He writes about how he believes our brains work and tries to dispell the myth that the human brain is like a computer arguing that our humanity is the greatest part of what makes our minds so special. He addresses autism and other brain differences, as well as language aqusition, mathematical skills, creativity, illogical and imprecise thinking, and other interesting aspects of how we learn, think, remember, and create. Even as I accessed this book in a readable fashion it becomes apparrent how amazing Tammet is. He is an autistic savant and considered to have one of the greatest minds alive. Among many other gifts he learned the very difficult language of Icelandic in approximately one week, and spoke it fluently with native speakers in a TV interview. Incredible!