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Scientific Brain Linked to Autism
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jan 30, 2006 09:17 AM
from the buffer-overflow dept.
from the buffer-overflow dept.
squoozer writes "The BBC is reporting that a leading scientist in area of Developmental Psychopathology, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, is indicating that there is good chance that there is a scientific basis to the observed phenomenon that children with highly analytical parents are more likely to be autistic. He believes the genes which make someone analytical may also impair their social and communication skills. A weakness in these areas is the key characteristic of autism."
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pwn3d (Score:4, Funny)
Genetics thrives on diversity and buckles under similarities; look at incestuous offspring and you'll see that diversity is the core requirement for better results.
Most of the geekiest people here at Slashdot lack the necessary tools to hold a decent conversation; if two slashdotters marry and produce offspring, the result would be dangerous to society!
Successful geeks have really hot wives (with possibly no intellect whatsoever) -- so perhaps science accounts for success and rewards success and punishes failure?
The point being -- if you have a really smart wife, you must be stupid or unsuccessful because that woman will own your ass.
Re:pwn3d (Score:4, Funny)
Such an event would probably cause a rift in space time, either that or result in really ugly kids.
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Re:pwn3d (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:pwn3d (Score:5, Funny)
This effect is now known as Slashdautism.
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Re:pwn3d (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously.
I was mostly joking around, but on another note -- crack comes in flavours now???
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Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sorry ma'am... (Score:5, Funny)
Full Dilbert Quote: (Score:3, Funny)
Doctor: I'm afraid your son has the knack.
Dilmom: The knack?
Doctor: It's a rare condition characterized by an extreme intuition about all things mechanical and electrical...and utter social ineptitude.
Dilmom (worried): Can he lead a normal life?
Doctor: No. He'll be an engineer.
Dilmom (crying): Oh No!
Doctor: there there...don't blame yourself.
Dilmom: Will it go away over time?
Doctor: It might but I pray it doesn't. If an engineer loses the knack the results can be devastating.
I analyzed the article (Score:5, Funny)
Evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
While our civilisation builds upon what smart people have come up with, the survival of the species when civilisation collapses will depend on the non-smart but physically able people. Don't kid yourself: civil
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that a balance is needed. Slashdotters: find yourself an artsy chick to get down with; one who's pretty smart and asthetically pleasing. Add a little creativity to them logical sperm you've been carrying around.
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
Use phrases more like "Pardon me, female, will you marry me?"
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Evolution (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more accurately a social restraint on nerds breeding. I've never seen any information to suggest that there is a lower rate of fertility among autistic / aspergers individuals, or even common nerds.
Over the large span of human evolution, characteristics such as physical strength, size, agression and so forth had much more to do with the ability of an individual to procreate, as opposed to the ability to smooth-talk a member of the opposite sex.
Our modern social conventions are obviously much 'nicer', but as for the positive / negative consequences for our gene pool, only time will tell.
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old news.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:old news.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:old news.... (Score:5, Informative)
But how much of that was attributed to the ground water pollution from fiascos like Fairchild?
For those who weren't there, there were many companies back in the early eighties that were caught dumping chemicals on their site. Fairchild's was on Bernal Road. The plant was shut down, but the building stood vacant until about five years ago when the site was developed into an Albertson's strip mall.
Here's an article: http://www.elandar.com/toxics/stories/neighborhoo
"The Fairchild Semiconductor manufacturing plant in South San Jose had been dumping industrial solvents in a leaky underground tank for about four years before some grounds workers noticed some rust colored dirt. They asked their boss about it, and a little while later Fairchild mentioned the leak to the Great Oaks Water Company, just in case there was a problem.
There was a problem.
The tank had leaked 58,000 gallons of 1,1,1 trichloroethane (TCA), a chemical known for damaging the liver, circulatory system, and nervous system. Just two thousand feet away, a well providing water to the surrounding neighborhood had twenty times the acceptable concentrations of TCA.
Lorraine Ross had lived near the Fairchild plant in South San Jose for six years and her youngest child was struggling with multiple congenital heart defects. There was talk that something was wrong - on her block alone there were four children with birth defects, two miscarriages, and one stillbirth."
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Fascinating fact (Score:5, Funny)
Pertinent question (Score:5, Funny)
Autism - is it good, or is it whack?
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Re:Fascinating fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually according to this article [findarticles.com], you are correct.
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Wired article a few years back (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone else remember it? It doesn't seem to be on their website (tried searching "autism" and "autistic"). It came with a quiz and everything. Anyone? Anyone?
Re:Wired article a few years back (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wired article a few years back (Score:5, Informative)
Autism is a spectrum disorder. That means it has a wide variety of symptoms and conditions. It means that people classified as "autistic" can be anywhere from mildly to sevearly affected. The big thing to keep in mind is that they are not all the same, probably not even similar in some cases. It is a wide variety of conditions captured in one term: Autism. The most common symptom between them is childhood development delays and weakness in language and social development.
There are reports that Autism increased in the 90's due to the use of Mercury [newmediaexplorer.org] in childhood vaccines [chetday.com]. The vaccine preservative in question was discontinued in the US a few years ago, but is still in use in other parts of the world.
The combined result is likely something like:
1. Some genetic combinations can cause autistic trates immediately.
2. Some genetic combinations can cause latent autistic tendencies that must be activated by external force, like mild metal contamination (mercury, lead, other heavy metals).
3. Some genetic combinations are not succeptable to autistic trates. However, extreme contamination can still cause developmental damage.
How these different traits manifest themselves may depend on both the genetic condition, and the severity of the contamination.
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Autism (Score:3, Funny)
Rimshot
hmm... (Score:3, Funny)
and why is the code today "impotent"? meh...
Kim Peek & NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, there has been a lot of speculation about how neurons work and what makes someone autistic. I once had a lengthy conversation with James Olds of George Mason's Krasnow Institute [gmu.edu] and asked him about Peek. Olds explained to me that it's very mysterious how savants develop. I asked him if Peek had an abnormally large cortex but he dismissed this, citing that elephants are not geniuses. He also gave me an anecdotal story of a Harvard football player that injured his shoulder blade as the star quarter back. When they x-rayed him, they also found out that his head was mostly filled with water and the result was a severe lack of brain tissue. However, he was a 4.0 grade point average student. I asked Dr. Olds if Peek's neurons might be more densely populated but he also dismissed this saying that neurons are huge on nutrient consumption and if they grow too closely together, they will kill each other.
Anyone care to take a stab at this? Can anyone speculate on this?
Re:Kim Peek & NASA (Score:5, Funny)
-Stephen
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Wired ran a story in 2001 (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a similar story in Wired [wired.com] about the rise of Autism in Rochester, Mn (home of a very large number of IBM employees).
Apparently, slight to mild autism is a genetic trait that is good for programmers.
Well.... (Score:5, Informative)
2) I was about to joke about this, but it appears that the Professor actually is the cousin of Sacha "Ali G" Baron Cohen.
I wonder if this applies to Asperger's Syndrom... (Score:4, Interesting)
Temple Gradin (Score:4, Informative)
She was on Science Friday last week. Podcast here [sciencefriday.com].
Yup. We're still cavemen. (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, a close friend is an occupational therapist with a lot of experience in helping out kids experiencing the full spectrum of autistic characteristics. She's indicated that a somewhat unscientific review of those kids' parents (hundreds of which she's met and gotten to know) would completely resonate with the findings mentioned in the article. She and her husband, both sharp, analytical people, just gave birth - and not without some trepidation. Just in case, they watched re-runs of "Pimp My Ride" before conceiving.
Makes sense to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lot of work, but IME is well worth it. See the conference papers at my website [davespicer.org] for more on one person's experience of autism...
'Social skills' (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what really upsets the average person is not that 'geeks' don't have 'social skills', but that they just can't be bothered to bullshit with someone who has little to nothing in common with them. Why bother? What's the point in spending an evening talking about football scores when you could be doing something constructive and interesting instead? I don't get it.
Stop the presses! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you our new Slashdot motto.
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Re:'Social skills' (Score:5, Insightful)
They also generally have a difficult time understanding and picking up on more subtle forms of communication. They only hear the words. They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines. Furthermore, they have a difficult time extrapolating the thoughts and feelings of another person. They can't "put themselves in the other person's shoes." Basically, if something isn't said, it doesn't exist to them. That is a crippling disadvantage in social situations.
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Re:'Social skills' (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still trying to figure out how that's a benefit
But let me give an example: recently I went to a gathering of my extended family. Most of them work in agriculture or construction, and few of them can even manage to turn on a computer. What of 'what comes to mind' am I supposed to talk to them about? Trying to get a simulated Apollo Guidance Computer running again in a simulated CSM? Why
I can't even explain to them what I do for a living without them having at least a reasonable grounding in IT. About the closest thing to a common experience is talking to them about my moonlighting on low-budget movies as a hobby: at least they've seen movies.
Now, I like my family, and I don't think they're idiots, but I have little common ground to talk to them about and little reason to do so. You might say that I 'have no social skills' because I don't want to sit there chatting about the latest reality TV show or football scores, but I don't even care.
"They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines"
Again, I'm not convinced. That may well be true with clinically autistic people, but personally when I'm bored or pissed off with someone I love screwing with them by ignoring their 'between the lines' cues and deliberately feeding them 'cues' of my own to make them respond 'wrong'. You would then say I 'lack social skills', whereas I think that being able to deliberately choose what 'cues' to respond to and send is far more skilled than just responding in certain ways because you're programmed to... knowing what 'cues' to send and what to say lets me manipulate most people like crazy if I get the urge to do so: I'm just too 'nice' to abuse it.
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Not always a problem... (Score:4, Funny)
Basically, if something isn't said, it doesn't exist to them. That is a crippling disadvantage in social situations.
It's not always a problem. I have been in several situations with my wife where another female - e.g. a waitress, a cashier, a friend's sister - flirted with me and I had zero clue re: the flirtation. My better half explained it to me later (with some amusement). Had I recognized what was happening I could have been rather uncomfortable, but since everything went right over my head I was as happy as a happy thing. Sometimes (ignorance == bliss).
For you single
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Re:'Social skills' (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal people communicate in the opposite way: they hear the emotional cues, inflections and facial expressions very clearly, but have a difficult time with the literal content of the communication. This is why so many people aren't able to grasp the logical consequences of anything that is said, and why so many geeks feel that they are not listened to in business meetings and other non-technical discussions. What we say is encoded in the literal meaning of the words we speak, not the non-verbal cues, and normals are logically tone-deaf in the same way we are emotionally tone-deaf.
I vividly recall telling a former employer that I'd completed a major contract for a very happy client, and that the revenues would keep the company afloat for the rest of the year (we would otherwise have been out of business.) He said, "Yeah, that's good" and then moved on to the next thing, which was the "great job" being done by a charismatic under-achiever who was running a year behind on an eight-month contract and whose inability to do his job was the reason why the company was just about broke. My information didn't have the right emotional cues packaged with it--it was just a factual report of a successfully completed major contract.
In contrast, the only thing the charismatic under-achiever had going for him was a mastery of the non-verbal, emotional aspects of communication. He made people feel good about themselves when he dealt with them.. He would make a great salesperson, but as someone who actually had to deliver working code he was a danger to himself and everyone around him.
He understood that the fundamental purpose of any human interaction is to control how the other person feels. If you can do that, then anything is possible and you don't actually have to have any skills, because people will want you around and will ignore all but the most blatant failures (and sometimes even those, for a while). We are extremely fortunate to live in a society where a small amount of attention is paid to literal content--this is a rare circumstance in human history, and if we aren't careful it will be a short-lived one.
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'Social skills' can be 'learned' (Score:5, Informative)
My mother was baffled by me, too, but never quit on me. She worked hard to socialize me. She'd wake me up to watch SNL and Monty Python. I learned to tell jokes and understand humor. She exposed me to history, art and religion.
As I grew older I worked to socialize myself. I studied literature and learned how to read and write. I worked with animals and competed in sports (geek sports that required routine, discipline and long times spent alone training).
Still this didn't fully prepare me for the big world and I fell into the geek downward spiral... long periods of coding and disregard for personal hygine...
I could see it wasn't working and went into a concerted effort to break the cycle. I studied how people dressed and made an effort to be more social by going to a coffee shop regularly where the staff began to know me since I always ordered the same drink. But I also worked on learning to talk to people by studying interviews on the radio by Michael Enright, Terry Gross... My computer science teachers taught me a great deal too, one of the focuses of the course work was preparing geeks to interact with the public and the teachers were brilliant at bring us out of our shells. I am forever indebted.
Right now, a good friend of mine is hating his cube life and I am encouraging him to pursue work with autistic children since he enjoys his volunteer work much more than his job. I tell him that it can be done, people can be socialized. It just takes work.
And yes, there are people who are beyond hope, but most of these kids being diagnosed are within range of treatment. It just takes time and dedication to set them on the route. Once taught how to work at it, their innate need for repetition will carry them along.
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I tend to believe the converse (Score:5, Insightful)
If the majority of the population were like us, it would be the nonanalytical, impulsive, controled-by-their-emotions people that would be viewed as antisocial.
I have always suspected it myself (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, like so many other slashdotters, I suspect my analytical disconnection (my own handicap in it's own way) has always been a hinderance in terms of social skills and adaptation. I have learned, however, that I can compensate to a degree (though not completely by any stretch) by reaching out to the more emotional part of myself and allow it to do some of the thinking for me. This results in at least a mildly child-like acclimation, but I believe it's a start for most as I have found myself growing quite a bit through such exercises. As for the rest of the balance, I have found that learning how to transmit the impression of confidence, competence and wisdom, while trying not to appear arrogant and superior, makes up for anything else. I have found that most people are really very shallow and don't require much illusion to be convinced... just dress the dress, walk the walk, talk the talk and the people are believers.
Easier said than done, of course -- it takes a lot of practice and a great many episodes in life where you closely identify with Data from ST:TNG.
Dumb Spouses (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong Line of Research (Score:5, Insightful)
at this point, there is no reliable _physical_ test for autism.
All diagnosis of autism has to be done using behavioral analysis--and the criteria very greatly accross legal jurisdictions(i.e. what is "autistic" in california may not be in Wyoming).
The genetic line of reasoning is also rather questionable. There are clearly genetic risk factors(about 90% of autistic are type A blood type and male for example)--however the percentage of Type A kids that are autistic varies a _lot_ in various areas. Even among identical twins, raised together, about 5% of those autistics have a twin that isn't that may go down further if you change the line to explude milder lines of autism)--and there are lines of research that claim there are risk factors that aren't genetic that all twins would share.
What I think we need most urgently here:
a good, biological test that can sort out autistic from non-autistic kids reliably. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work of V.K. Singh at Utah State and Hugh Fudenberg(formerly of UCSF).
I expect we are seeing several different viral and environmental causes of autism spectrum disorders. There may genetic susceptability--just like populations differ in how much they are impacted by various infectious diseases. However claiming that stuff like assortive mating and genetics is causing autism just isn't good scientific method.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it can be helpful and interesting to scramble up some statistics on a question for a study omelette, but we have certainly destroyed some information in the process. Ex post facto attempts to opine about the original materials will leave us with egg on the face.
Elsewhere on Wikipedia, Einstein [wikiquote.org] is on record for doubting whether the Almighty throws dice with the universe. Allow me to second that from the standpoint of refusing to fret. Do what you consider Destiny would have you do with respect to your reproduction; rejoice in any outcome.
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