Genie Essay

576 Words3 Pages
Yiwei Hu 3/26/2014 Short Reaction Paper to Story of Genie: The Wild Child Among the psychological stories that I have ever read, the one that stands out is the story of Genie, a feral child. “Genie” is a pseudonym aimed at protecting her identity, and she was also referred to as “The Wild Child” because she was confined for 12 years in a dimly lit room since her infancy. Her father said that she could not be cared for because she was mentally disabled. When her case came to the limelight, she could neither walk properly nor speak, and she only managed to make noises that could not be deciphered. The psychological community was thus provided with a very valuable, but slightly imperfect, opportunity of investigating whether speech is a skill that is learned, or whether it is an intrinsic skill that people are born with. Genie initiated the emergence of heated debates and questions about language and intelligence. In Chapter 9 of Psychology, Myers (2013) says that the most important aspect of humans as a species is that they have large cerebral cortexes that make them very smart. Nevertheless, the case of Genie raised several unanswered questions taking into consideration that she was a normal human being with no abnormalities and yet she was not smart or intelligent. According to Myers, there is a way in which psychologists measure and conceptualize human intelligence, and they include ability to think, to solve problems, to learn from experience, and to adapt to new and different situations (Myers, 2013). This leads me to a very important question. Does it imply that when a person is not capable of portraying the standards of intelligence set by the psychologists makes him unintelligent? To help us answer this questions, we should consider the case of Genie as well as the characteristics set forth by psychologists. People should consider if intelligence is made
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