[Maru]

Originally Posted by kirklancaster

I'm sorry, but on this - as with most subjects on here - I will adhere to my intuition, logic and personal experience.

T.S - I respect your qualification, but to be honest, as far as I am concerned,'facts' from the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience are not facts at all but mere 'theory'.

In my opinion, and as far as psychologists and psychiatrists are concerned, a great number of them need to heed the advice of Jesus in Luke 4.23; 'Physician, heal thyself' because they are among the loopiest people in existence.

1) I agree. Doctors can be reactionary just like any one of us and opinion can supercede common sense. Whatever their degree or field of expertise, humans are not infallible. Psych is a relatively new field in many ways, and going by the state of how that's working and how people are further and further moving from self-management to complete dependence, I think we're quite a ways away from having that be even well understood.... that's my opinion.

2) Add to that, the emphasis on psych and laws to "fix"/"patch" life in such a way to remove all the head work seems to come down to wanting to limit as much personal responsibility as possible for every individual. "Well they should have laws for this... put up another barrier here...add incentives, remove incentives there...". Checks & balances and laws will never trump stupidity... there's warnings for everything now and people can still be quite careless.

3) Just to give an example of how this can work: During the tax day flood a few years ago, this young lady went AROUND a barrier AND an officer sitting at a checkpoint with lights to GO into an underpass at 5am in the morning when it is still pouring and is FLOODED,... yeah... the inevitable happens and there's video of her cries for help flashing her cell phone out the back window of her car as it's sinking. The man at the checkpoint SWAM to go get her, but had to turn back because there was a real risk he would've ended up in peril as well (again, bad weather).. fast-forward and her mother was on TV right away saying what a tragedy it was, but it's because they should've had an electronic gate AS well as the closed gate (the manual one) AND the guard... "like they have in these other cities I have seen on TV", etc... and the city wanting good PR, they put up the damn gate... um, your daughter DROVE around the checkmarks? Clearly marked, NOT SAFE! She actively avoided all the very obvious signs she was about to put herself in danger... who is to say she wouldn't have gotten flooded out on another road further on the way home... it only takes about a ft of fast-moving water to pull a car into the current, so she could've gotten herself in trouble elsewhere... but no, it's the city's fault and everyone else for not putting more warnings... when it is already literally polluted with signage, water guages, on both the roads and underpasses... there's no excuse and I think we're too quick to argue for more "fail-safes" rather than more self-accountability... my 2 cents.

4) Now granted, that lady in #3 may very well be different as a parent, and I think that's also the struggle that some people may be having in relation to this story...

If not for the 'expert' input of some of them at parole board hearings certifying the would-be parolees as 'cured', many twisted evil killers would NOT have been released early from their long prison sentences to kill again.

I know that every human is 'different' mentally and psychologically and that we all react to 'stress' differently, but all over the planet throughout history, there have been and are mothers who struggle to fend off debt whilst raising multiple kids and though some of them may, at times, have had temporary lapses of memory, they did not forget all about a 3 months old baby for almost an entire day.

And THAT is my point; that this was a 3 months old baby.

Which parent - no matter how stressed or distracted they might be, could spend a full day without their virtual new-born baby entering their thoughts?

Seriously?

And would not thinking about that baby have 'jogged' her memory? - caused doubts to surface about whether she HAD dropped off the baby or not?

I have had to turn the car around several times when we had set off for some night out because my wife had suddenly raised doubts about whether she had turned off the iron/her straighteners/locked the door or not - never mind leaving a three months old baby in the back of a searing hot parked car.

Me. Flat-irons, dogs... the doors I can monitor through our alarm system, so there's no running home for that anymore because it won't arm otherwise or it will say disabled when I login to arm... and 99.5% of the time, I did remember anyway.

LT actually makes a succinct but highly valid point when he said: 'I bet she didn't forget her mobile phone' and I'm sorry but SOMETHING about this whole tragic incident does not 'sit right' with me.

If the story is genuine, then Livia is correct and this 'mother' needs to think very carefully about having any more babies, and if it is not, then I hope the truth is eventually ascertained and this 'mother' gets her just dessert.

All that said, kirk, while I agree with your points... I do tend to be very hesistant myself to raise a pitchfork with these kinds of stories and to pass ultimate judgement... but I do have to say, that having more checks is not going to "fix" stupid... and we're all prone to stupid. To that end, I respond very similarly to Ashley here:

Originally Posted by Ashley.

The most important responsibility as a parent is putting your child's needs above your own. Of course she didn't leave him in the car on purpose, but an innocent life was lost because she failed to be a parent that day. She'll receive the punishment of having to live with her actions for the rest of her life, and heaven forbid she has any more children

Giving it that thought, it doesn't mean that her act was not careless and didn't amount to neglect. It does and I'm not OK with just giving a pass because "reasons". We all have reasons for the dumb things we do, but we understandably have to be accountable for them. Doesn't make the grieving process easier.. in fact, I don't how it would. In her shoes, I wouldn't be thinking of how other people thought of my mistake, nor care about pitchforks. I would be absolutely devestated. The "fall-out" of public opinion would be the LEAST of my concerns...

We can't eliminate all the perils in life for peace-of-mind... if an individual really needs to depend on gadgets and gizmos and third parties to tell us how to parent, then they likely won't be very good parents in more practical ways... in fact, I think actually that would affect my own ability to care for someone else in a meaningful way, the anxiety that would introduce (having to constantly "check in" with something)... I think it would just make me more aware of those perils and rather anxious...

So on that point, not everyone can afford a car with top-level safety features.. moreover, it's pushing up the price of every car and the overall standard of living the more laws and regulations we add just for edge-cases.. and we are still worried about poverty? It doesn't prevent people from being stupid. Unless your car can CALL your phone if you leave somene in the car, and even then your phone could be dead, on silent, and that means even more gizmos your car would need to make that happen... and when it malfunctions in an annoying way, more sh** to fix.

I will say too in my case, there was a point when I had severe memory loss from strange reaction to medication.. but then I had to stop driving for that reason, Much less using my gas stove or heating anything that could lead to the home being burnt down... no "safety" features would've helped in those cases, because my mind would go blank... so yeah, I can see if someone is that anxiety-prone where their brain goes on the fritz, it could certainly affect things like that and I wouldn't say in those cases those people are safe to drive if they tend to "switch off"... not good.

TDLR: Blah blah blah... read the post.

[Vicky.]

Originally Posted by Maru

and we're all prone to stupid.

Quite. A point touched upon in my (admittedly very very long) link from earlier.

David Diamond is picking at his breakfast at a Washington hotel, trying to explain.

“Memory is a machine,” he says, “and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. He’s here for a national science conference to give a speech about his research, which involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What he’s found is that under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing center can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is -- by a design as old as the dinosaur’s -- inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid.

Diamond is the memory expert with a lousy memory, the one who recently realized, while driving to the mall, that his infant granddaughter was asleep in the back of the car. He remembered only because his wife, sitting beside him, mentioned the baby. He understands what could have happened had he been alone with the child. Almost worse, he understands exactly why.

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the ‘1812 Overture.’ The cannons take over and overwhelm.”

By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents’ brains, Diamond has found that stress -- either sudden or chronic -- can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars.

“The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back -- it can entirely disappear.”

[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by Vicky.

Quite. A point touched upon in my (admittedly very very long) link from earlier.

Psychobabble, Vicky - Sorry.