Yet some brains are that little bit more remarkable than others. Why do the most gifted and talented brains stand out from the crowd? Is there anything physical or physiological that sets them apart? Here we take a look at some outstanding grey matter, and ask what brains are like at the outer limits of human achievement.

In the New York Times Magazine this weekend, Jennifer Kahn took a hard look at a mental disorder so disturbing that dealing with it honestly is incredibly rare: psychopathy. Many people probably aren't even aware that "psychopath" isn't just a term for someone with a crappy personality, but is a disorder that's believed to be biological in origin, where the sufferer just basically can't feel empathy. Kahn focused on the parents of fledgling psychopaths, parents whose situation should cause extreme sympathy, since attempts to treat this condition have largely been fruitless. from comments: "...have you ever met a psychopath? I'm betting that you have, you just didn't know it at the time. They can be very good at "playing human".

For the past 10 years, Waschbusch has been studying “callous-unemotional” children — those who exhibit a distinctive lack of affect, remorse or empathy — and who are considered at risk of becoming psychopaths as adults. To evaluate Michael, Waschbusch used a combination of psychological exams and teacher- and family-rating scales, including the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits, the Child Psychopathy Scale and a modified version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device — all tools designed to measure the cold, predatory conduct most closely associated with adult psychopathy. (The terms “sociopath” and “psychopath” are essentially identical.) A research assistant interviewed Michael’s parents and teachers about his behavior at home and in school. When all the exams and reports were tabulated, Michael was almost two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-unemotional behavior, which placed him on the severe end of the spectrum.

Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number of psychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5. Crucial to this diagnosis are callous-unemotional traits, which most researchers now believe distinguish “fledgling psychopaths” from children with ordinary conduct disorder, who are also impulsive and hard to control and exhibit hostile or violent behavior.

Welcome to the stressful world of dyscalculia, where numbers rule because inhabitants are continually trying to avoid situations in which they have to perform even basic calculations. Despite affecting about 5 per cent of people - roughly the same proportion as are dyslexic - dyscalculia has long been neglected by science, and people with it incorrectly labelled as stupid. Now, though, researchers are starting to get to the root of the problem, bringing hope that dyscalculic children will start to get specialist help just as youngsters with dyslexia do.

Geoffrey Miller. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012 7: 221 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612441215

ABSTRACT By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did.

Numerous studies have found that people who are natural extroverts tend to be happier than shyer types, but introverts can get a hedonic boost simply by faking it, it appears. And there doesn’t seem to be a downside.

After determining participants’ dispositions through questionnaires, psychologists assigned 117 people to three-person teams and gave them two make-work tasks (ranking the usefulness of tools after a wintertime plane crash, and planning a group day trip). Some participants were assigned to act boldly and assertively; others to be reserved and passive; still others (the control group) received no advice about how to act. Queried later, group members confirmed that people did, in fact, act as they were told to.

Whatever their innate tendencies, the people who acted like extroverts enjoyed the task the most, according self-reports, and they also seemed to be enjoying themselves, according to participants. The researchers had thought that acting against type would cause mental strain, but a subsequent test of concentration and cognition found no cost to introverts pretending to be gregarious knee slappers.

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When the very abstract question of free will is put in this context, I am no longer sure exactly what the question is. If it means can we have self-control, then obviously the answer is yes. If it means can we create a choice with no causal antedecent, in all probability the answer is no. But the second question is not very interesting.

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Temple Grandin thinks animals may think like autistic humans.

"So if a lion could speak, Wittgenstein says, we would not be able to understand it. We might realize that “roar” meant zebra, or that “roar, roar” meant lame zebra, but we would not understand lion ethics, politics, aesthetic taste, religion, humor and such like, if lions have these things. We could not honestly say “I know what you mean” to a lion. Understanding another involves empathy, which requires the kind of similarity that we just do not have with lions, and that many people do not have with other human beings."

Every time I see my cat I wonder what he's thinking.

A phenomenon which causes people to strengthen their previous beliefs when presented with contrary evidence

"But this does not mean that it is wrong to push the question even further, asking how we can be encouraged to care more about the well-being and suffering of those who happened not to be born within the same borders as us. Haidt thinks liberals ignore concepts like authority and the sacred. But really, liberalism’s power consists in challenging the moral relevance of such concepts. Since liberals dispute that authority really is of fundamental moral importance, it is circular reasoning to argue that this is a form of “moral blindness.”"