Saxon's Survival Hour #183: Minimal Brain Damage

Today's excerpt begins on page 64 of The Survivor Volume 1.

The Greatest Therat of Our Age

Whether you realize it or not, you know several people with Minimal Brain Damage.
This isn't a birth defect.
Such a one isn't retarded, and may seem normal in most respects.
He may have attitudes which work against his interests.
But mainly, he just can't get his act together.

The most common sign that a person has Minimal Brain Damage is that he can't read well enough to finish a book, or that its subject bores him to distraction before he's halfway through.

His lack of sustained interest keeps him from holding a job unless he's in such a strong union he can't be fired.
The same situation holds true in most Civil Service jobs.
You've met the Civil Servant with his 'couldn't care less' attitude.
Those with MBD who find their way into Union Shops and Civil Service mark their presence by low production the shop and maddeningly slow bungling service in the office.

These are the leaners of the world.
The rest of society has to prop them up.
Aside from those whose habit patterns permit them to at least sign up for work, the majority are on welfare or in prisons.
Most of those with jobs would do their fellows a favor by going on welfare and getting out of the way.

Newsweek, November 10, 1975, reported 'More than 23 million American adults, one out of every five, cannot read, write or compute well enough to function effectively in today's world.
Forty million more posses just the minimal skills necessary for survival.'
These stark statistics were released by the US Office of Education after a four year study of 'adult functional competency'.

Further along the article stated, 'The College Entrance Examination Board announced the formation of a special panel that will try to find out why scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests have been falling for the past twelve years'.

Another breakdown showed that only 46% of American adults read adequately or well.
This leaves with 54% over half of our adult population incompetent in communication skills one must have to function in a complex society such as ours.

The above diagram shows how the nerve fibers in the infant brain reach across and connect to element in the brain which determine the mental machinery the infant will have to work with as an adult.
These linkages don't happen after 3 or 4 years of age.
So it's now or never in every infant's life.
After 3 or 4 years of nutritional and/or sensory neglect the loving foster parent, the better environment, better diet, will at best produce a housebroken, socially acceptable dingbat.

This irreversible decline in adult competency is not confined to the U.S. Psychology Today, September 1975, stressed the problem as being world-wide.
Roger Lewin's article titled, "STARVED BRAINS; New Research On Hunger's Damage", promises "A generation of Clumsy, Feeble Minded Millions".

“An Infant deprived of nutrition or stimulation will never develop to full mental capacity.
There's no second chance.
Today, 70 percent of the world's population seriously risks permanent damage."

The article describes what actually happens to the infant brain when deprived of proper nutrition or stimulation by the environment.

The only book I know of devoted entirely to Minimal Brain Damage Is, "SOCIETY PAYS; The High Costs of Minimal Brain Damage In America", by Camilla Anderson. M.D. Dr. Anderson, a psychiatrist with forty years of experience in guidance clinics, schools, prisons and welfare agencies, maintains that the answer is Minimal Brain Damage (MBD), a neurological deficit that she thinks has been seriously underrated, if not neglected, by the Mental Health establishment."

Although her excellent book has been circulating for the past four years, Mental Health workers have largely rejected her findings.
Psychiatrists naturally prefer to quiz the MBD on what happened to him during his first six years of life rather than on what didn't happen to his brain during his first two years of life.
One might just as well quiz a Thalidomide basket case on his early attitudes which kept him from making the football team.
Of course, fixing the blame on irreversible brain damage in infancy would deprive these Freudian hacks of lots of $50 an hour fees.
MBD, a deprivation caused calamity, can no more be treated by recalling past experiences than can stunted limbs be restored by even total recall.

Mental Health workers practicing Megavitamin and various drug therapies can reach and strengthen the undamaged portions of the MBD's brain.
Their genuine concern and intensive treatment of MBD's can bring about noticeable improvements.
Even so, their average efforts contribute more to socially acceptable behavior than to the development of competitive skills.

Moreover, most of their patients are referred to them as real social problems, being dangerous to themselves or others.
So the MBDs receiving treatment are a tiny minority out of the teeming millions of hopeless, tragic boobs shambling around in our rapidly collapsing society.

Minimal Brain Damage is not always marked by the inability to read well.
In a permanent state of arrested development, the MBD is prone to the infantile demand for instant gratification.
This sets patterns of obsessive behavior where instant gratification is sought by the MBD with no thought of the consequences to the MBD or those he uses.

The person with a mature brain can, with imagination and foresight, create mutually satisfying relationships with those around him.
The infantile brain of the MBD lacks the thought machinery to practice the self-discipline needed to set up long term, mutually advantageous relationships with individuals and society.

In the sexually oriented MBD we find the Don Juan, nymphomaniac, rapist, child molester, male and female homosexual, sadist and most other one-sided, unproductive and often destructive sexual relationships.

In some MBDs the reading level and I.Q. may be quite high.
Yet, arrested development has affected other critical parts of the brain's machinery.
Thus, the otherwise intelligent MBD will work as a barely passable fry-cook rather than as the brain surgeon of his fantasies.
His infantile demand for instant success, coupled with his lack of self-discipline, prevents him from applying himself to the years of preparation for any far-off goal.

So although he is very bright, he can't seem to finish anything.
It's either instant success or mediocre drudgery.
In short, he's a functional moron.
Here we find the fanatic, the paranoid, the terrorist and the professional (as opposed to the petty) criminal.

With such examples of MBD around them, the movers and shakers in society, often MBDs themselves, blame everything but the source problem.
They blame the educational system, as if dropping College Entrance Exam scores and rising juvenile crime rates (one third of Chicago's murders are committed by youths under 18) are the teachers' fault.

As I was writing this, ABC, on May 27 at 10:00 p.m., put on a special called "American Schools: Flunking the Test".
An incredibly stupid and distorted report.
Its focus was against the teachers, the unions, the school system, budget cuts. etc.
But in the whole hour there was no suggestion of inability due to a lack of intelligence.

All the students interviewed were dull-faced with speech patterns and vocabularies that freely displayed their dullness and stupidity.
My impression was that they all had MBD.
Had they been interviewed apart from that program, a viewer would swear that they were all students at a school for mental defectives.

The program’s prime example, and representative of the one out of five illiterate high school students, was a wretch they called "Peter Doe".
"Of average intelligence (?).
Peter is a product of the San Francisco Public Schools.
He attended class regularly, attracted little attention, and in 1972 graduated from high school.

“But when Petar Doe tried to get a job it was quickly apparent he was a functional illiterate.
Despite that high school diploma his reading ability was barely at a fourth or fifth grade level.
Stunned, Peter and his parents went to a lawyer and sued for 'Educational Malpractice'.

He comes from a basically middle-class white family.
Throughout his schooling his report cards said he was doing all right.

Only now, after two years of tutoring at great expense to his parents, is Peter able to read and attend junior college."

Only a vary stupid youth could fail to realize such incompetence.
Only indifferent, neglectful and unobserving parents could fail to recognize such stupidity in their own child.

Any competent teacher will tell you, and can show proof, that any normal child with a normal interest in his surroundings will learn to read adequately in his first eight years of schooling.
Any high school student who can’t read and/or apply himself to a disciplined pursuit of adult skills has MBD.
Petor Doe couldn't rise above the fourth or fifth grade reading level even after twelve years of steady schooling.
Moreover, it took him two more years, with tutoring, just to qualify for Junior College.

The blame for such turkeys was placed squarely on the teachers because they pass them on to grade levels they can't handle.
But what is the teacher to do?
Our educational sewer lines must be kept open.
The social refuse must move on to make room for more.
The teacher is simply unable to reach the clod and has no room for him and his fellows in her next semester's class.

If the MBD is not a disciplinary problem she can only write polite comments on his report cards which the parents see as meaning he is doing all right.
What the teacher means, however, is that he can read well enough to find the right john, lest he foul himself thereby, and that he can count to eleven without removing both shoes.

Again, Peter Doe wasn’t exceptional.
The program stated that one out of five high school students are functional illiterates.
The national average for adult functional Illiterates Is also one out of five.
The alarming thing this report shows is that the figures of one out of five only apply to students actually attending high school.
When you consider the millions and millions of high school dropouts, just as incompetent, it is quite likely that our upcoming generation will prove to have one out of four functional illiterates; far worse than our present adult generation.

In their turn, many teachers blamed TV.
Any harmful effects of TV are because the young victim of MBD doesn't have the normal brain circuitry which would depersonalize the boob tube.
In cases where the ignorant parent has plopped the undeveloped infant down in front of the TV as baby sitter and caretaker, TV can be a part of the problem.

To the infant, the TV is simply movement, sound and often color.
But it has no reality except that which his infantile fancy gives it.
It is up to both parents to constantly stimulate the infant with loving cuddling, play, talking, all of which demand positive responses from the infant and which causes the brain to reach out and thus develop normally.

Parents who both work and leave their child's upbringing to an impersonal TV or an indifferent babysitter or nursery school custodian have no one to blame but themselves when their tad becomes a cloddish degenerate later on.
A monster or a permanent dependent is too high a price to pay for "the finer things in life".
The mother who stays home giving her infants loving attention and making do on her husband's salary will have a far more liberated life than will the mothers of the Peter Does.

In poverty areas where most parents have MBD the problems are more obvious.
The infant is usually denied both proper nutrition (mainly through ignorance) which the developing brain must have, and sensory stimulation, which is just as important as nutrition.

It's widely believed that poor people, with their generally low I.Q.s, pass on their stupidity through heredity.
This is academic.
MBD is not a birth defect.

Even if a potential genius is born to ignorant parents, the poor diet, the neglect, the life pattern alternating between chaos and boring drabness will produce a defective nearly every time.

An infant needs a pleasant routine he can anticipate.
He needs his mother's milk at first, later supplemented by a well balanced diet of natural foods, free from chemical additives.
He needs hours of peekaboo, patty cake and cuddling every day, preferably from both parents.
After six months he needs bright toys to knock around, blocks to stack, crayons to make pretty marks on walls and an appreciative audience to applaud his antics and reward his progress.
Scoldings and even an occasional spanking for excesses is still positive attention to his development.
A lot of attention does not mean spoiling.

One thing the infant doesn't need is wall to wall brothers and sisters.
Little children do not challenge one another to develop.
Childish prattle from others is not communicative and serves only to remind the infant that he has a lot of unfair competition.

Recent studies have shown that one or two children are the most a couple can have and still give them the individual stimulation each needs for brain development.
More than two children guarantees neglect and shortchanging of the whole brood.
Another way to look at it is that if you have four or more children, the one most aggressive for attention might be smarter, but he may also be neurotic and anxious.
Those less aggressive for attention will usually become mentally stunted and generally withdrawn and slow.

Having fewer children is a good idea in these times of uncertainty.
It Is also the best guarantee that the one or two you stop with will be brighter and better human beings.

If you are a parent-to-be or have an infant, Dr. Camilla Anderson's book, "Society Pays", published by Walker and Company, New York, 1972, is a must read.
It will tell you what you must do to insure that your child does not suffer brain damage due to either nutritional or sensory deprivation.
Get it from your library or order it through a book store.

Your library can also probably dig out a copy of "Psychology Today" for September 1975.
Reprints of its feature article on "Starved Brains" are available at 50c each.
Minimum order is six reprints.
Order from: Psychology Today, Consumer Service Division, 595 Broadway. New York, N.Y. 10012.

Kurt Saxon thought civilization would have collapsed by now.
He spent the majority of his life collecting knowledge of home based business.
His goal was for all his readers to survive at a more comfortable level than those that were less provident.

He knew the importance of communicating at a level folks could understand.
Most of what he has compiled for our benefit can be easily understood by everybody.

He also includes a subtle sense of humor.

You can find the majority of his life's work here.

Hear him read his stories.

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