Saturday, October 18, 2014

Peek a Boo


My granddaughter Danica, 10 months

Ashok brought us this topic and I immediately thought of my newest granddaughter and of the game of Peek a Boo.  That made me think of her development and started my research.

Piaget felt that Peek a Boo, and the fact that it delighted the child so much, was an indication that the child had no sense of object permanence yet, that when you covered your face, the infant felt that you were really gone!!!  But, science doesn't allow a theory to stand on the merit of its beauty of though alone and observation with clever experiments and better ability to observe have thrown this into question.

When a train is moved behind a screen after a small child can see a mouse is in the way of the train's progress, then the mouse is moved when the train and mouse are behind the screen and the train emerges on the other side with the mouse still in place after the screen is removed - uh, I couldn't think of a way to say that more awkwardly - the child should show no more interest than when the mouse is not there if they had no sense of object permanence.  Yet, as young as 3 1/2 months, they do show more excitement, indicating that they have some awareness of the objects impending collision behind the screen!  They must still be aware of the objects to show that excitement.  Or some such.

Does this change your world?  Perhaps not, but for me, I found it fascinating, just as I found it fascinating that a dog has much greater sense of object permanence than a cat and that a crow develops a sense of object permanence fairly much on the level of a human.

Now, who'd have ever thought that the word Peek a Boo would elicit such wonder??? 


Friday, October 3, 2014

Personal Debt

This topic was brought to us by the sage of the Loose Blogger Consortium, Ramana Rajgopaul of Ramana's Musing fame.  And, since he did so, of course synchronicity immediately came into  play ...


Ben Bernanke has a mortgage on his home in DC, a domicil valued at $815,000.  Bernanke gets $250,000 per speech and just signed a book deal for seven figures.  But, he just changed jobs and he was turned down when he tried to refinance!  What was the job he formerly had, you might ask.  He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for America.  Yes, it is that Ben Bernanke.

How stupid is this?  Is there no human intervention or common sense left at all?  Can you imagine anyone who is a better bet to successfully pay his mortgage off in time?

It used to be individuals who had the corner on insanity.  Now it is the system.