Genius is defined as a person of outstanding mental skills. These skills result from genius’ brain structure and physiology that are determined by genetics. It seems that environment and education may only inhibit development of a genius. Based on a simple model of brain phase space we formulate two hypotheses about dynamics of mental processes in genius’ brain and the difference between genius...

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), to be published in May, will include highly controversial changes. Some diagnoses have been broadened to include a range of behaviours hitherto considered normal. As the coverage of mental disorder diagnoses increases, is there any space left for normal biological variability in human behaviour? Michael Gros...

Much evidence suggests that common posterior parietal mechanisms underlie the orientation of attention in physical space and along the mental number line. For example, the small leftward bias (pseudoneglect) found in paper-and-pencil line bisection is also found when participants "bisect" number pairs, estimating (without calculating) the number midway between two others. For bisection of physi...

This paper presents a pilot study on students' images of the concept of vector space. Three students have been asked to model a real world situation with the mathematical tool of a vector space in interviews and have revealed two very different priorities of looking at a vector space. The part of the interviews this paper deals with is concerned with the students' general notions of the charact...

While research on the spatial representation of number has provided substantial evidence for a horizontally oriented mental number line, recent studies suggest vertical organization as well. Directly comparing the relative strength of horizontal and vertical organization, however, we found no evidence of spontaneous vertical orientation (upward or downward), and horizontal trumped vertical when...

The ability to infer the intentions of other agents on the basis of their motion is a critical psychological faculty. In the present study, we examine a key question underlying this process, namely: What are the psychologically natural categories of intentional agents and actions? To investigate this question empirically, we use displays containing a number of autonomous, independently programm...

Orientation is a fundamental mental function that processes the relations between the behaving self to space (places), time (events), and person (people). Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have hinted at interrelations between processing of these three domains. To unravel the neurocognitive basis of orientation, we used high-resolution 7T functional MRI as 16 subjects compared their subjectiv...

During a three year period 1970--1973 necropsies were performed on 200 patients who died in a mental hospital in the Transvaal, South Africa. There was no selection of cases other than availability of consent for postmortem examination. The necropsy rate for this period was 56%. The patients belonged to three racial groups, Black, White, and Coloured, the latter being defined as those of mixed ...

Human activity takes place in space. To act effectively, people need mental representations of space. People’s mental representations of space differ from space as conceived of by physicists, geometers, and cartographers. Mental representations of space are constructions based on elements, the things in space, and the spatial relations among them relative to a reference frame. People act in dif...

Can learning new linguistic metaphors foster new nonlinguistic representations? We describe a set of studies in which we trained English-speaking participants to talk about time using vertical spatial metaphors that are novel to English. One group learned a mapping that placed earlier events above and the other a mapping that placed earlier events below. After mastering the new metaphors, parti...