NPR recently featured an amazing and fascinating story about Jonathan Keleher, a 33 year old man who was born with part of his brain missing. Keleher is one of a handful of people known to have lived their entire lives without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain’s neurons.

As a result of his exceedingly rare condition, Jonathan has a distinctive way of speaking and a walk that is slightly awkward. He also lacks the balance to ride a bicycle. However, this hasn’t kept him from living on his own, holding down an office job at a non-profit, an making a important contribution to neuroscience.

“What we now understand is what that cerebellum is doing to movement, it’s also doing to intellect and personality and emotional processing,” says Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann, a professor of neurology at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital

Without a cerebellum, Schmahmann says, a person’s thinking and emotions can become as clumsy as their movements.

Listen to the complete story below.

Children can be brutally honest, but at what age do they start to realize what they say can hurt other people’s feelings?

Felix Warneken and Emily Orlins, two researchers at Harvard, recently set out to investigate that question, and they published their results in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

In their experiment they gathered 80 kids from 5-10 years old. They presented the kids with four simple drawings of things like houses or cars, two of which were good and two of which were obviously bad, and asked the kids to sort the drawings into “good” and “bad” piles.

Melissa Dahl from the Science of Us writes, “In one condition, one of the experimenters lamented to the other one how sad she was because she was so bad at drawing. In the other, the experimenter said aloud that she knew she wasn’t very good at drawing, but she was fine with that. Then, in both conditions, the artist-experimenter showed the child her messy picture and asked the kid directly which pile it belonged in.”

The results? At all ages, when the kids heard the experimenter say she was sad, they were more likely to lie to her and say they’d put her drawing in the “good” pile, as compared to the condition in which they heard the experimenter say she knew she wasn’t a great artist and was okay with that. But the older kids were more likely to lie to protect the researcher’s feelings than the younger kids.

Take a look at this past blog we wrote about children lying.

Today, April 2, is Autism Awareness Day. Every year, autism organizations around the world celebrate the day with unique fundraising and awareness-raising events.

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often struggle to recognize emotions from facial expressions (facial affect), hindering their social interactions.

By using Humintell’s emotion recognition training tool MiX, researchers out of Rush University Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois tested children ages 8-14 who are affected with autism spectrum disorder over a six week period.

Russo, et. al’s findings, Efficacy of a facial affect recognition training tool for children with autism spectrum disorders, were presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego, CA this past May.

The results of their study suggests that coach-assisted computerized training with imitation exercises successfully alleviated facial affect recognition deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Although future studies should investigate whether “boosters” are necessary to maintain the skill long-term, their results suggest that by using a computerized emotion recognition training program, children with autism could improve their facial expression recognition ability.

The result of this study correlates directly with another recent study that demonstrates the positive benefits of autistic children and adults using computers.