356. Gullibility, Immaturity and NLD

Gullibility, Immaturity and NLD

In previous entries, I have already expressed the following speculations, hypotheses and assumptions:

1. The development of a child is a repetition of the evolution of the human mind.   
2. Gullibility is the method to acquire information for survival at an early age until the better method of abstract thinking has developed and gullibility becomes obsolete.
3. Gullibility is the passively accepting response to claims without doubting and verifying them.   Proactive gullibility is the diffuse psychological need to reduce unpleasant emotions by adopting a belief and the subsequent active search for the most convenient and fulfilling belief.
4. Maturity is the state of having reached the full evolutionary potential. 
   Intellectual maturity means to outgrow all gullibility and be only guided by consequencity.
   Psychosocial maturity means full self-awareness of the true personal identity based upon introspection and the ability to apply consequencity to interact with others on the principle of a fair balance of giving and taking.   
5. People can be stuck at any age and remain selfishly immature and gullible and never reach maturity.  
   
   There needs to be added:  
6. Children reach language proficiency long before their brains are ready for abstract and complex thinking.   The names for objects in a child's native language are to be learned by imitation and accepted as they are proffered as a requirement of communication.   Therefore it makes sense that the language acquisition goes along with gullibility.     

In entries 271 and 272 I described the impaired abstract thinking of emotional morons.   Based upon all the above premises, my description was the prototype of someone stuck at around the age of ten, still selfish and not yet able to employ advanced rational reasoning, but already verbally proficient.   Therefore he appears much less immature than he really is, especially when a very good memory helps to compensate.   My prototype is not only gullible, but proactively gullible as a way to cope in world, that is not really comprehensible to him without the crutch of believes.  

I did not know until yesterday, that I had given a fairly correct description of someone with NLD, Non-Verbal Learning Disorder or Non-Verbal Learning Disability.   I prefer the latter, because a disorder is a clinical label, while a disability only means to be less than fully able but not automatically being completely void of it.    Most sources about NLD cited in Wikipedia date back less than ten years.   It is a recent concept, and it seems, that this is a result of the growing complexity of modern life.    This will be elaborated in a future entry.

"Concept-formation, problem-solving, strategy-generation, and hypothesis-testing/appreciation of informational feedback: Marked deficits in all of these areas are apparent in persons with NLD, especially when the concept to be formed, the problem to be solved, and/or the problem-solving milieu(x) is/are novel or complex ......  Also evident are significant difficulties in dealing with cause-and-effect relationships and marked deficiencies in the appreciation of incongruities ...... relative deficits in these areas tend to increase markedly with advancing years, as is evident in the often widening gap between performance on rote (overlearned) and novel tasks.
....  failure to appreciate the consequences of one's own behaviour "

"Limitations in formal reasoning, problem-solving, and the like, would be expected to render the person with NLD quite gullible. This means that the person with NLD may be led into all sorts of risky situations, and thrown into the presence of all sorts of people who are prepared to exploit the person in an unethical manner and place the person in harm's way."

http://www.nld-bprourke.ca/BPRA45.html

"Their failure to anticipate consequences and their gullibility would be expected to pose a persistent threat to their physical (and psychological) well-being." 

"The gullibility of children with NLD is a consequence of their failure to draw veridical conclusions about events that are transpiring in their social and physical environments. Although they can learn specific stimulus-response contingencies through repeated practice ......   they tend not to generalize such learning to other, similar situations. An equally probable occurrence is that they will over-generalize many such stimulus-response contingencies because they fail to see that a new situation does, in fact, contain elements that would negate completely the usefulness or appropriateness of a particular response."

http://www.nld-bprourke.ca/BPRA29.html

Reading the quotes and much more on Rourke's very informative web site, I perceive his description of NLD as the description of the normal behavior of small children.  
Somehow NLD seems to me only a new label for an hitherto overlooked aspect of immaturity.   Emotional and psychosocial immaturity has long since been observed and acknowledged, but intellectual immaturity has not, when it is hidden behind impressive verbal skills.   
Rourke considers gullibility as consequence of NLD, while I think that NLD is the only possible expression of a brain, that still only has gullibility to cope, because it has not yet matured enough to apply consequencity.