Had kind of an epiphany while reading one of this week's articles;  previously, I had been thinking of literature as something which was about human minds, which made it worthy of study in this class.  Of course, this literature is also a product of human minds, which I fully realized today.  Literature is worthy of study in a neurobiological context because it is a unique behavior produced by the human nervous system - no other animal writes prose.  It's interesting to think about the cognitive mechanisms that interact to produce such a complex institution - writing is a fairly recent development, so it's unlikely that it is an adaptive trait itself.  Maybe a small realization, but I find the subject much more interesting from that perspective.

The 'neuro-turn' piece was rather buzzwordy, but from what I could gather the authors think that the arts and humanities, along with popular culture, are beginning to turn more toward neurological explanations for things.  It also doesn't seem like they're happy about it.  I can see where they're coming from, but I think such a transition is only natural.  Yes, neuroscience is still in it's infancy with regard to what we can explain about the brain, but our knowledge of the mind will only increase with time.  Soon, I think neurobiology and it's implications may be the best way to explain nearly anything that humans do, including the arts and humanities.  After all, these things are products of the human mind (as explained above).

I thought the Brown article about the multiple characteristics and symptoms of ADHD was great - I feel like often people think of ADD as being something characterized only by hyperactivity and high distractability, but there are obviously other facets which the article explained well.  It would have been nice if the article had gone a bit more into the biological basis of ADHD, however.  It's characterization of executive functions was also highly useful to me, as I had not previously fully grasped what this suite of operations was when we talked about it during the memory section (I think that was what we talked about... I may well be wrong.)

I also thought the article about the recent prevalence of hyper attention as opposed to deep attention was interesting, especially the part about how human brains are very plastic in their development.  It's kind of disturbing to think about how media has shaped the new generation of children in western nations - possibly for the worse (as many seem to think), although the article describes the change as something that is only different from the norm rather than objectively worse.  It's hard to tell, but we may find out in the future when the generations of developing nations who grew up without media begin to compete with our own media-raised children.  Such observations in the future may lead to a new set of parental guidelines.  (although the article did caution against using neurobiological findings to shape educational strategies, this is different in that it would be relying upon behavioural observations.)

A Curious Case of  a Dog in the Night Time  is an interesting book because it gives us a chance to perceive the world from the vantage point of an autistic person.  One thing that I noticed was that Christopher's lack of social skills and the problems stemming from his disability all came about as a result of interacting with people without autism; I wonder if perhaps autistic people would get along with each other with far less incident.  Christopher also seemed to be a very productive and intelligent individual outside of the social realm.  It was actually very calming to read this book...  Generally my mind is filled with all sorts of distractions but reading from the Christopher's linear perspective seemed to clean things up a bit.  As a thought experiment, I think if you compared two separate populations - one composed solely of autistic individuals, and one composed solely of normal individuals, over time, the autistic population would outpace the other in terms of technological advancement.  Of course, this is purely hypothetical and based solely upon the description of one high-functioning autist as given by a man who does not suffer from the condition.  However, if we run with this assumption, the conclusion we reach is that social skills, although necessary at some point during our ancestry, have now outlived their usefulness and only serve to hold us back as a species.  Even if this was true, I could never see social aptitudes being eliminated from humanity - they are too important in the process of finding a mate.

On an unrelated note, one problem I did have with this book was that it wasn't written by someone with autism - the description of an autistic mind given by Mark Haddon can therefore not be completely accurate.  He did work with autistic people earlier in his career which does give him some insight, but I'm not sure how much he can know, considering the difficulty autistic people have with communication.