A Cognitive Test: How Many F's Can You Find?

Read the following sentence:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS
OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Now count how many F's does that sentence contain. Count them ONLY ONCE. Then see below:


























The sentence contains 6 F's. However, most of the people only find 3 of them. If you spotted 4, you're above average intelligence. To see 5 is quite rare. If you caught 6, you might be a genius. There is no catch or a trick. Most people forget the F's in of''s because the human brain tends to see them as Vs instead of F's.

Feral Children and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

  Most of us, if not all, have heard about Mowgli - the boy who was raised in the jungle by a pack of wolves. Fortunately, Mowgli is just a fictional character from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories. However, a great deal of similar cases have occurred in real life as well and children like Mowgli are called feral children.

  A feral child (colloquially, also know as wild child, wolf girl, gazelle boy, monkey boy) is a child who has been isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has grown up with little or no human contact, care, love, or exposure to social behavior and language.

  Just like Mowgli, some feral children are thought to have been raised by animals. Some have allegedly survived on their own in the wild and some have been confined by people (often by their own parents). There have been over one hundred reported cases of feral children.

  Besides Mowgli, there are numerous other legendary and fictional feral children. As it was extremely difficult for Mowgli to fit into human society, he is one of the most realistic fictional feral children. Others, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, J.M Barrie's Peter Pan and many others, were portrayed less factually. They were depicted as being extraordinarily strong, intelligent, and as having better moral standards than "normal" human beings. In reality, feral children are rarely that fortunate.

  What characterizes feral children? How does being isolated from human contact from a young age affect a child's development?

Feral children often lack even the most basic social skills. They have extreme difficulties or are unable to learn simple yet pivotal tasks like using the toilet or getting dressed. They are often cognitively impaired and learning a human language proves to be severely challenging or even impossible.

The fact that feral children have acute difficulties or an inability to grasp the concept of language proves the validity of critical period hypothesis, which states that the first few years of a child's life are crucial for learning a first language and if the child is not surrounded with a language during this period, he or she will never achieve a full comprehension of any language.

What do feral children show us about ourselves?

What we know about feral children makes us ask a question about ourselves - are we a product of our genes or a product of our experiences?

A five-year-old Russian girl was discovered to be living among a herd of cows. Just like the cows, she used mooing to communicate. She could not speak a human language, she was unable to feed herself, and she only drank milk from a saucepan. Besides her, there have been several other cases of feral children found living with animals and most exhibited behavior identical to the animals that reared them, instead of the humans that bore them. Most never learned to speak and many died shortly after their reintroduction to human society. In the few cases where the child did learn to speak, it was because they were separated from humans at an older age, after they already obtained a grasp on language.

These children show us that the few first years in a child's life are crucial to the child's lifelong growth and development, bringing up the nature vs nurture argument that has been a topic of debate for decades. We cannot say that who we are, how we behave, how we communicate, and how our brain develops has nothing to do with our genes, but feral children show that our nature alone does not make us human. The genes we are born with and the experiences we have combined makes us human.


If you are interested in reading more about different cases of feral children, here's a good article to being with - Feral Children (Mowgli Syndrome)

Self-Awareness and the Mirror Test

What is self-awareness?

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, and our likes and dislikes. Developing self-awareness can help us to recognize when we are stressed or under pressure. It's a prerequisite for effective communication and important for developing empathy for others.

However, a simpler definition would be that self-awareness is one's ability to reconcile him or herself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals; self-awareness is the capacity for introspection.

How can one's self-awareness be tested and who is self-aware?

To measure and test self-awareness, we have a test called the mirror test. This test was developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970, partly based on observations made by Charles Darwin. While visiting a zoo, Darwin held a mirror to an orangutan and recorded the animal's reactions to its reflection, which included making a series of facial expressions. Darwin, however, did not resolutely conclude that the orangutan is self-aware. He thought the animal may just be making expressions at what it perceived to be another animal, or possibly been playing a game with a new toy.
What is the mirror test?

The mirror test is a test to determine whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in an mirror as an image of itself.

Gallup accomplished a way to determine whether an animal can recognize its own reflection or not by surreptitiously marking the animal with two odorless dye spots. The test spot is on a part of the animal that is visible in front of a mirror and the other control spot is in an accessible but hidden part of the animal's body. Scientists then observe whether the animal reacts in a manner consistent with being aware that the test dye is located on its own body while ignoring the control dye not visible in front of the mirror. The animals who pass the mirror test as being self-aware will exhibit behavior including turning and adjusting its body in order to get a better view of the marking in the mirror, or poking at the marking on its own body with a limb while observing it from the mirror.

So who is self-aware?

Are humans self-aware? Yes. However, young children and people who have been blind from birth but have their sight restored, initially react as if their reflection in the mirror was another person and not their own reflection. Children tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old. Psychoanalysts call the first 18 months "mirror stage".

Which animals have passed the mirror test?

All great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas. Bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants and European magpies.