Ah yes, I see your point metamemetics, thanks. Which is the more leading cause of violent criminal behavior: circumstance or the person themselves? though, the rate of re offending seems to point towards the people themselves somewhat.
"The Psychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a manual that describes in detail how to score a subject in twenty categories that define psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib and superficially charming, callous and without empathy?"
What question springs to my mind is, given that these people have something like their 'appreciate other people's emotions' bits of their brains not working properly, why don't we see many female psychopaths?
Off the top of my brain, I can come up with a few likely answers:
1: Female 'psychopaths' don't exhibit the same sorts of criminal behavior that male psychopaths do.
2: Females are less susceptible to being a 'psychopath'
I've recently wondered, is the common knowledge that kids pick up languages quickly and better than adults really true?
Adults have a much wider range of skills and far more knowledge than children, adults already have some of the most important aspects of thinking down: a set of concepts about the world. Yet many struggle to learn a second language past a certain time in their life.
Clearly children learn languages better than adults, a near 100% success rate for children picking up their first language, to what may be something less than 50% success rate for adults (guessing these numbers, but its clearly lower for adults).
As a child though, what do you spend nearly every waking minute doing? practicing and learning language, usually from their mother. Where as adults, usually they give up not because its impossible, but because its too hard -- and they have better things to do!
Is ten thousand hours of language study as a kid really worth ten thousand hours of language study as an adult?
I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of research looking into the actual hours/work put in to study a second language to get to some certain level of proficiency where the subjects started learning at different ages (5 years, 10 years, 15, 30 years old etc.)