#cognitive functioning

By: Dr. P

Published: Dec 29, 2023

Let's talk about the impact of PBs on brain development and functioning.

Buckle up folks. This is going to be a long thread!

To understand what PBs do to cognitive development and IQ, you first need to understand what IQ is, how it is constructed and how it's measured. The following explanation is of one model of IQ. There are others. 

Definition: IQ is a property of the mind encompassing many related intellectual abilities, eg the capacities to reason; to plan, to solve problems; to think abstractly; to comprehend ideas; to use language; and to learn. 

Definition: When aggregated, these factors determine the individual’s ability to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with their environment. This is their IQ, or their level of cognitive functioning. The average IQ falls between 85 and 115. 

Types of IQ: Intelligence can be split into two subtypes: Crystalline (Gc) and Fluid (Gf). Gc (Crystalline IQ) is LEARNED or ACQUIRED knowledge: eg 'When was the Magna Carta signed'?; 'What is the name of the Earth's satellite'? It is heavily dependent on education. 

Gc remains stable and/or increases over time as knowledge is gained. Gf (Fluid IQ) is related to novel problem solving, eg, how to put up an Ikea wardrobe, or how to plan a journey from say Cornwall to Aberdeen. Gf increases as the brain matures from childhood to adulthood. 

Because Gf measures NOVEL problem-solving it is largely independent of educational attainment. 

IQ is usually measured using the 3 Weschler scales: WIPPSI young children (2-7); WISC children (6-16); and WAIS adults (16-91). There are between 10 and 15 subtests, aggregated to give the overall FULL SCALE IQ score (FSIQ). The test also yields separate Index scores. 

Impact of PBs: PBs are given when the brain is maturing, through the creation of neural connections and the laying down of fatty tissue (Myelination). PB's interrupt this process. The following table shows the cognitive decline in a Brazillian child over 3 years on Lupron

Her FSIQ fell from 80 to 70. From Low Average to Borderline Learning Disabilities. Her performance also fell on EVERY Index score. This is unprecedented. It is really important to know that IQ is a very STABLE construct. It does not change significantly over the lifespan. 

Using the various Weschler scales, IQ should be roughly the same measured at ages 5, 25, 55 or 85. There will be some small changes (depending on external factors like fatigue, rapport, testing conditions, etc). These are accounted for by reporting the Confidence Interval 

But generally, IQ does NOT change significantly over the lifespan. Unless there is an 'insult' to the brain: eg head injury, infection or disease etc, IQ absolutely SHOULD NOT be dropping by 10 points over 3 years!!!!! 

In 30 years of giving hundreds of IQ tests, I have only seen such a decline ONCE (a few weeks ago), in a man with severe Autism. Otherwise, a fall of this magnitude, without a head injury, tumour or other disease process, is simply unprecedented. 

This finding ALONE, in this single child, should have been enough to immediately halt ALL administration of PBs worldwide until more data was collected. In medical terms, this is almost as unusual and alarming as if her blood type or fingerprints had changed. 

But here's more evidence: Below shows an average 7-point drop in IQ of 25 kids after 2 years on PBs. This rate of decline is consistent with the Brazilian finding. It's not an 'artefact' of testing. Something very serious and dangerous is happening as a result of PBs.

This data is known. This information is out there, yet PBs are still being pushed as 'Affirming' and 'lifesaving' care for children. In reality, PBs are causing significant and possibly IRREVERSIBLE BRAIN DAMAGE. They are impacting both Gf and Gc. 

ALL children should routinely have their IQ tested at the beginning of 'treatment' and periodically whilst on PBs. But gender clinics are not collecting this data, so the true scale of the disaster in terms of the cognitive damage to children is not yet known. 

It's possible these children's IQs are CONTINUING TO FALL. A 10-point drop is the difference between getting a degree or not. A 20-point drop is the difference between living independently or staying at home with parents because you cannot manage life without help. 

This is a scandal of unprecedented and unimaginable proportions. But there's also mounting evidence that X-sex hormones are also causing a decline in IQ in adults even AFTER the critical Myelination process is complete (age 25 to 30). I will do another thread on that. 

Please Rx. Transgender 'healthcare' for children is a Crime Against Humanity. It MUST be stopped. By us. 

PBs do have a role: For a 4-year-old who starts menstruating, the risk of cognitive impairment is less than the psychological consequences of CPP. But they have absolutely NO place in 'treating' the psychological dysfunction of otherwise perfectly HEALTHY children. 

Somehow, shockingly, puberty is now seen as an illness which must be blocked. Regardless of the consequences to children. But PBs affect the ENTIRE body. Not just sexual development They don't mysteriously and miraculously stop working above the shoulders! 

And, before I get all the usual, nonsensical pushback: I am a 'real' psychologist; I do have a DClinPsych; I am not, and have never claimed to be a medical doctor; I'm not a 'crackpot'; my views are not outliers; every clinical psychologist knows the truth of this thread. 

See also my thread on the impact of PBs on Executive Functioning ( ie higher level cognitive functioning - if IQ is the engine, EFs are the SatNav).

The impact is equally dire.

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if they differ from cluster to cluster and pd to pd then i wouldnt mind having a general overview but im most focused on learning about bpd and szpd at the moment

@shitborderlinesdo explains cognitive problems in PDs in these posts:

Post 1: "we have difficult taking what we see, hear, feel, etc and using it to learn. We have difficulty recognizing patterns, connections, cause and effect, and significance. For example, I would notice that I would have days that I was incredibly anxious. I just accepted them as bad mental health days. After a few years, I was finally able to connect the fact that I’d gone to sleep late with waking up in an anxious mood."

Post 2: "Cognition covers lots of things! Here are some more specific examples of things that cognitive problems can make difficult:

prioritising (deciding what is most important and/or what needs to be addressed first)

focusing on what you’re doing

imagining other people’s feelings and motivations, eg thinking of reasons why your friend might be late other than “they hate me”

understanding and following instructions, eg remembering all the steps and doing them in the right order

making choices or decisions

interpreting the words you read/hear into meaning

putting your own thoughts and feelings into words

detecting and interpreting signals, eg remembering what a red traffic light means

coming up with alternative strategies if your first idea/attempt fails

recognising how your behaviour affects other people, eg monitoring how loud your voice is and how other people feel about you speaking loudly

filtering out unnecessary/irrelevant information and/or distractions

choosing goals and planning how to achieve them

starting tasks, eg making a rough draft or deciding how to begin

editing or finishing tasks, eg perceiving mistakes, dealing with perfectionism

predicting what you will need so that you can bring it with you

working out what is likely to happen and what is unlikely to happen

understanding your rights and needs and what is fair to you

regulating your own emotions, self-soothing, recognising when you are emotional

complex and/or fine motor skills such as driving or playing a musical instrument

understanding what is socially appropriate, eg knowing when a joke would be appreciated and when it would be offensive

budgeting and handling money

understanding maps or directions, planning how to get places

remembering things briefly, eg remembering what you just read for long enough that you recognise it if you start to accidentally read it again

putting memories in order

processing numbers and letters, eg telling d and b apart, being able to tell how many symbols are in a series of symbols like @@@@@@ (the answer is 6)

[...] it’s common for people with BPD to specifically struggle with perceiving, understanding and describing ourselves, and with understanding what other people are thinking or what motivates other people."

Why Learning a Foreign Language Is the Ultimate Brain Workout

It can also enrich your view of the world

For a groundbreaking 2010 study, a team of Canadian researchers explored the associations between bilingualism and Alzheimer’s disease.

At that time, it was known that socially and physically active older adults tended to enjoy a measure of protection from dementia, and the study team was interested to learn if the cognitive demands of bilingualism — the ability of speaking and understanding two or more languages — offered any similar protections.

To find out, they collected data on more than 200 people recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They found that people who spoke two or more languages developed Alzheimer’s symptoms an average of five years later in life than those who spoke only one language. This time gap persisted even after the study team controlled for occupation, education level, country of birth, and other variables. (Later follow-up work has supported these findings.)

How could bilingualism protect the brain from dementia? The study authors highlight something called “cognitive reserve,” which they describe as the capacity of the brain to maintain proper functioning despite the onslaught of disease. “[Bilingualism] appears to contribute to cognitive reserve, which acts to compensate for the effects of accumulated neuropathology,” they write.

The brain is an organ, not a muscle. But several decades of brain research have revealed that, much like a muscle, the brain appears to benefit from effortful training. Once a person reaches and surpasses middle age, that kind of training may be necessary to prevent the sort of weakening and wasting that, for different reasons, also threatens the muscles. “The brain needs exercise just like the body, or it winnows away,” says Catherine Caldwell-Harris, PhD, a bilingualism researcher and associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University. “The phrase use it or lose it — there’s a lot of neuroscience behind that.”

Caldwell-Harris says that almost any novel activity — from taking up a new hobby to visiting a new place — seems to engage and challenge the brain in ways that can improve its functioning. But learning and using a second language may be the ultimate form of brain training. “Learning a new language is a type of all-demanding activity that involves almost all aspects of cognitive functioning,” she says. “It’s as complicated as chess or any science, but it also involves social interaction and activation and all of those processes.”

Language training not only seems to make the brain healthier and stronger, but it may also helpfully reshape the way its owner experiences and interacts with the world.

Bilingualism and the brain’s executive functions

The brain is not a static organ. It’s constantly changing in response to the tasks it performs. Many of those changes are measurable — both in terms of the brain’s electrical activity and in the actual mass and density of its cortical structures.

For a 2019 study in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Italian researchers measured the effects of language training on the brains of healthy older adults between 59 and 79. After just four months of studying English, the people in the study scored significantly better on two research-backed measures of brain health and acuity: tests of global cognition and functional connectivity.

“Learning a foreign language is one of the non-pharmacological cognitive interventions that can boost cognition in young and older adults,” says Giovanna Bubbico, PhD, first author of the study and a postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine and D’Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara in Italy.

Unlike other novel activities — the cognitive benefits of which tend to fade once a person’s brain has gotten the hang of things — a second language never stops challenging the brain in helpful ways. “A second language forces the brain to switch between two languages — inhibiting one and favoring the other — depending on the context,” Bubbico says. The cerebral processes involved in this sort of context-monitoring and switching seems to beef up the brain’s executive functions, or its ability to plan, concentrate, make decisions, and engage in other important aspects of cognition, she explains.

Caldwell-Harris adds to this point. “Being cognitively flexible and able to switch from one task to the other, rather than staying in autopilot, is an important aspect of executive functioning,” she says.

People who have poor executive functioning — an issue that often emerges late in life, or in some cases following a brain injury — have a reduced ability to shift their thinking or behavior in response to changing circumstances. Basically, their brains become mired in old or unhelpful patterns of activity. “If you’re bilingual, you have to constantly be alert to what language is being spoken to you, which keeps alive this switching aspect,” she says. This may be one way in which bilingualism helps keep the brain agile and healthy.

At this point, Caldwell-Harris says that it’s not clear whether learning a second language during childhood or early adulthood is somehow better for the brain than tackling this challenge later in life. But she points out that much of the research on the benefits of bilingualism — such as the work showing its associations with delayed Alzheimer’s disease — have involved people who learned a second language at a young age.

Just as adopting a healthy diet or exercise routine early in life is surely better than doing so only in old age, it’s a good bet that challenging the brain with a second language while young will be better for the brain than doing so later on. And apart from making the brain sharper or more adept, there’s evidence that learning a second language can enrich the way people interact with others and with the world.

The concept of “linguistic relativity”

The Aymara, an indigenous people of South America, aren’t looking forward to 2021. That’s because, in their native language, the idea of “looking forward” to anything in the future would make no sense.

For a 2006 study in Cognitive Science, researchers documented the way the Aymara talk about time. While English speakers — and the speakers of most other languages — describe the future as something in front of them that they’re moving toward, the Aymara people talk about time from the opposite orientation. Since the future is unseeable, they reason, it must be behind them and out of sight. The past, which can be seen, therefore lies before them. The Aymara even gesture at their backs when talking about the future, the study team found.

This is just one example of how language can influence the way a speaker thinks about life and the world. This influence is known as linguistic relativity. Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language — whether Spanish or French or Chinese — has likely noticed how that language’s treatment of certain ideas or concepts may differ from one’s own.

“When you learn a foreign language, you learn that other people may think about things very differently than you do,” Caldwell-Harris says. “This experience can reveal new shades of meaning.”

She offers two more examples. The Russian language, unlike English, has two distinct words for the color blue — one referring to light blue shades and the other to dark blue shades. And research has found that, thanks to this linguistic distinction, Russians are quicker than English speakers at spotting differences among closely related shades of blue.

She also brings up the German word schadenfreude, which refers to the pleasure one may feel from another’s misfortune. While English speakers can understand this concept just as well as Germans, the fact that German speakers have a specific word for it likely strengthens their ability to identify and acknowledge this emotion in themselves or others.

Learning a new language confronts the brain with these sorts of unfamiliar, perspective-shifting insights. Basically, it takes what the brain thinks it understands and shakes it up, and this sort of shake-up is not only “mentally invigorating,” Caldwell-Harris says, but it can also help people see the world — and one another — in new and enriching ways.

She says that there are countless language learning tools online — many of which are free. Those are great places to get started. Once a person has some rudimentary knowledge, there are services that can connect learners with native speakers. (Search online for “language exchange” programs, which can pair you up with someone who speaks the language you’re studying and is also interested in learning your language. Most are inexpensive.)

“The problem with learning a foreign language is that people really just want the end result — to be fluent,” Caldwell-Harris adds. While fluency is an admirable goal, the real payoff for the brain begins as soon as a person starts learning. And it doesn’t stop.

The Intricate Relationship Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind Introduction:The human mind is a complex and fascinating entity that has captivated researchers, philosophers, and psychologists for centuries. Among the various theories and perspectives on the workings of the mind, one intriguing concept suggests that the conscious mind is merely a shadow, a fraction of the vast and…