There is nothing funny or foolish about the thought screen helmet. It does stop aliens from abducting humans. I make them and send them to people all over the world for free. It takes me over four hours to make each helmet and I screen each person before I send them one.

There is a page on the website labeled Intelligence.

This is an enlarged version of what it says:

INTELLIGENCE
The aliens may be a million years ahead of us in technology, but they are still using physical forces which can be understood and controlled. The thought screen helmet demonstrates that the aliens communicate with some form of electro-magnetic energy and that form of energy, which may also be a form of telepathic communication, can be blocked or jammed. We are coming closer to learning about real alien technology by taking an intelligent approach to the problem.” – Michael Menkin

“Intelligence is not what you know, but what you do when you don't know. ” – Piaget.

John Holt's remarks about intelligence are given because he says that intelligence is not capacity, it is not more of the same thing, rather intelligence is a way one perceives the world and responds to it.

John Holt on Intelligence, from His Classic Book, How Children Learn

One thing we see in our intelligent children is that they are intensely involved with life. Rachel, Pat, Elaine, Garry, all are daydreamers. But Barbara, Betty, Maria, Ralph, and Hal spoke once of a love affair with learning. These children don't withdraw from life; they embrace it. We spoke once of a love affair with learning. These children seem to have a love affair with life. Think of the gusto with which Betty, or Barbara, or Sam tell even the simplest story about themselves.

Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense. They check their answers and their thoughts against common sense, while other children, not expecting answers to make sense, not knowing what is sense, see no point in checking, no way of checking. Yet the difference may go deeper than this. It seems as if what we call intelligent children feel that the universe can be trusted even when it does not seem to make any sense, that even when you don't understand it you can be fairly sure that it is not going to play dirty tricks on you. How close this is in spirit to the remark of Einstein's, “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe.”

On page 54 in the July 1958 Scientific American, in the article “Profile of Creativity,” there is the following apt comparison:

The creative scientist analyzes a problem slowly and carefully, then proceeds rapidly with a solution. The less creative man is apt to flounder in disorganized attempts to get a quick answer. Indeed he is! How often have we seen our answer-grabbers get into trouble. The fact is that problems and answers are simply different ways of looking at a relationship, a structure, an order. A problem is a picture with a piece missing; the answer is the missing piece. The children who take time to see, and feel, and grip the problem, soon find that the answer is there. The ones who get in trouble are the ones who see a problem as an order to start running at top speed from a given starting point, in an unknown direction, to an unknown destination. They dash after the answer before they have considered the problem. What's their big hurry?

Here are Elaine, the answer-grabber, and Barbara, the thinker, at work on the problem 3/4 + 2/5 = ?

Elaine (adding tops and bottoms, as is her usual custom): Why not 5/9?

Barbara: 5/9 is less than 3/4. She saw that since 2/5 was added to 3/4, the answer would have to be bigger than 3/4; so 5/9 could not be it. But this went right over Elaine's head.

Elaine: Where's the 3/4?
Barbara: In the problem!

Yet I doubt that any amount of explaining could have made Elaine understand what Barbara was saying, far less enable her to do the same kind of thinking for herself.

The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his time and looks at the problem. Is the difference merely a matter of a skill in thought, a technique which, with ingenuity and luck, we might teach and train into children? I'm afraid not. The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor thinker can't stand not knowing; it drives him crazy.

This cannot be completely explained by the fear of being wrong. No doubt this fear puts, say, Monica under heavy pressure; but Hal is under the same pressure, and maybe I am as well. Monica is not alone in wanting to be right and fearing to be wrong. What is involved here is another insecurity, the insecurity of not having any answer to a problem. Monica wants the right answer, yes; but what she wants, first of all, is an answer, any old answer, and she will do almost anything to get some kind of answer. Once she gets it, a large part of the pressure is off. Rachel was like this; so was Gerald, and many others. They can't stand a problem without a solution, even if they know that their solution will probably be wrong. This panicky search for certainty, this inability to tolerate unanswered questions and unsolved problems seems to lie at the heart of many problems of intelligence. But what causes it?

Some might say here that this is all a matter for the psychiatrists. I am not so sure. A person might well be distrustful in personal relationships and still have a kind of intellectual confidence in the universe. Or is this possible? And if so, can it be taught in school?

There is one well-known psychiatrist who confirms Holt’s 50 year old observation, Dr. Stanley Greenspan, author of The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans.

Dr. Greenspan is also the author of: Intelligence and Adaptation: An Integration of Psychoanalytic and Piagetian Developmental Psychology.

Reviews of, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans by Stanley Greenspan, MD

In the childhood of every human being and at the dawn of human history there is an amazing and, until now, unexplained leap from simple genetically programmed behavior to language, symbolic thinking, and culture. In The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker explore this missing link and offer brilliant new insights into two longstanding questions: how human beings first create symbols and how these abilities evolved and were transmitted across generations over millions of years. From fascinating research into the intelligence of both human infants and apes, they identify certain cultural practices that are vitally important if we are to have stable and reflective future societies.
“Gives the reader a deeper appreciation of the power and formative potential of human emotional interaction…. Through their creative thinking about emotional interpersonal aspects of early human development, Greenspan and Shanker have helped us to find our bearings for the intellectual fight ahead.” -Nature

Noam Chomsky is the best-known advocate of the view that language skills are hardwired into our brains, and Steven Pinker made this argument in The Blank Slate. Authors Greenspan, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, and Shanker, an authority in child- and ape-language studies, completely reject this theory, claiming instead that our ability to reason is founded not on genetics but on emotional responses by infants to their environment, with emotional interactions forming the missing link in the development of symbols and language. In line with other recent research that ties cultural practices to areas of human development long held to be biologically determined, they maintain that symbolic thinking has been molded by cultural practices dating back to prehuman species. The authors trace the development of language skills and personality from birth to old age with a 16-stage hierarchy of what they call “functional emotional development capabilities” ranging from “Regulation and Interest in the Word” to “Wisdom of the Ages.” In the last part of the book, they use these stages to examine major intellectual turning points and figures in history, such as the Greek philosophers, Descartes and Freud. This book should appeal most to readers working in psychology and child development, but its revolutionary ideas no doubt will lead to lively and well-publicized debates.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
When and how did humans acquire the faculty of symbolic thinking? In this study of the origin of human intelligence, the nature-versus-nurture conundrum is no closer to resolution. However, the nurture side of the debate does get a boost here. Greenspan and Shanker, a child psychiatrist and a philosopher, respectively, explicate their 16-level “functional/emotional” framework to support the evidence about human intelligence that they have gathered from the fields of child development, animal (especially chimpanzee) communication, paleoanthropology, sociology, and the history of philosophy. Apart from building their construct, Greenspan and Shanker challenge the nature champions, such as neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain, 1996) and Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, 2002). Public-library interest is apt to be spotty yet definite for this rather formidable read (main ideas are expressed in polysyllabic phrases such as “co-regulated reciprocal emotional interactions”), especially with research-oriented readers willing to discern, as the authors do, millions of years of social (rather than genetic) evolution in a toddler's amazing mental growth. Gilbert

About the Author
Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School, is the author of internationally acclaimed books including The Growth of the Mind, and, together with T. Berry Brazelton, The Irreducible Needs of Children.
Stuart G. Shanker, D. Phil. (Oxon.), Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto and a leading figure in ape and child language research, is author of Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Talbot Taylor).

Dear Mr Menkin,

Thanks you for your very comprehensive reply to my blog article.

I understand you take your work very seriously and just to clarify, nowhere in my article did I suggest that there is anything 'funny or foolish' about your thought screen helmet.

Your site was referred to as one of the 'weird and wonderful' links we found when doing our research, plainly because for those unaffected by alien mind control, the concept of alien abductions is a little 'weird', whilst for those whom you've helped would, I'm sure, consider your work to be 'wonderful'.

The other link, to the Ministry of Defence spokesperson, was included alongside yours to give the email credibility. The MoD had just released details of UFO sightings and alien encounters reported in the UK over the last thirty years. I read some of these reports and there's no doubt that for those civilians and even the reporting policeman, those alien encounters were very real indeed.

However, the concept of an insurance company selling insurance to safeguard customers against alien abduction is both funny and foolish – but then, that is the point of an April Fool.

April Fool's Day is a old tradition that dates back in the UK to when the transistion was made from the Pagan calendar to the Christian calendar. It's just a harmless bit of fun, designed to raise a smile.

Interestingly enough, the Swinton email goes out to a wide base of UK customers, very few of them will have been aware of the service you offer and a proportion of which, I'm sure, would be interested in the protection offered by your thought screen helmet.

From our analysis we can see that your website received over 1500 click throughs from our emails, and countless forwards. So April Fool or not, our email, and indeed this blog, has helped to raise awareness of your helmet.

Best wishes and keep up the good work.
Kind regards,

Katie

Hi Katie:
I envy you Red C staffers. You seem to have exciting jobs where you learn more and more every passing day. I'm stuck here in an office that would make every slavemaster salivate.

I sometimes worry about cannibalising our current client base, but think about it, these are probably the easiest people to sell your business to. Not only do they have first-hand experience with how you work, but also how well you work.

Thanks for sharing your experiences on this aspect here. Much appreciated!

[...] but it’s one I’ve heard. Virgin Media use ferrets to lay broadband cables. Yeah! Right! Swinton offers insurance against alien abductions. Well, you never know. People would pay for anything and this type of insurance would have a market [...]

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