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More Evidence of Increase in Profound Autism
I am Jack's username writes "The New York times has an article (no registration required) about an increase in profound autism in California of 273% between 1987 and 1998. Between 1999 and 2001 more than 6 500 cases were reported, similar to the number reported between 1970 to 1995. The increase cannot be accounted for by misdiagnosis, increased awareness, childhood immunizations, emigration, birth injuries, and genetics. Some autism experts think the actual cases to be dramatically more than reported in the UC study. See also previous discussions about high-function geek rich areas like silicon valley."
I know very little of the condition, but considering autistic people have some extraordinary abilities, is it possible this could be an evolutionary step?
Surely the way to chase this down is to get some clever cross-disciplinary folk on the case. Meanwhile, here's two links that don't require registration:
The Independant's version of the same story.
The BBC is bringing up the MMR "link".
I mean they say that a baby breaths in twice the carsinogens in thre first day of life in california than what has been deemed safe for a life time.
what is the autism rate in other parts of the country or the world?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Current theories suggest it's more like sickle-cell mutations. If you have 'half' of autism, you're good at living within your mind/interacting with machines and information - the classic 'geek' skills.
:}
However, breed the right mix together and you get the full whammy, an individual incapable of interacting with social 'reality' at all. As of yet, there's no "niche" for the poor kids (no evolutionary advantage off getting on Maury Povich), but maybe they'd be killer ML coders had we direct-brain interfaces.
If this *is* a consequence of "geek inbreeding," it'd be interesting to consider the sociological factors that make it so widespread.
Of course, I don't think they've ruled out environmental factors yet, either. Could be another thalidomide at play.
This is also being discussed over at kuro5hin.
The cake is a pie
Parents in the study were asked what might have caused their child's autism. Nearly half the parents in both groups said they did not know. A third blamed genetics; smaller numbers cited immunizations, birth injury or environmental factors.
So, just about half of parents are intellectually honest, then. We don't know what causes autism--there is nothing approaching a consensus among researchers, and there are few well-designed studies that even suggest a possible cause. Asking parents what caused their child's autism is like asking a non-technical person why their hard drive crashed. The answer as likely as not will be "I dunno, maybe I've got a virus?" Interesting for investigating the biases of the hapless user, but not a useful diagnosis.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'm just surprised that nobody in the study thought to blame living near power lines--unless that's an "environmental factor".
Hypothesis: The incidence of autism is higher because children aren't being allowed to eat enough dirt. Exposure to more microorganisms when young strengthens the immune system. There exists a microbe (virus, perhaps) as-yet-uncharacterized that causes autism. (This happens sometimes with diseases. For example, most stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium h. pylori and can often be cured with antibiotic therapy. This fact only came to light very recently, after decades of assuming that ulcers were essentially untreatable.) Children's weaker immune systems don't fight this pathogen as effectively as they used to, so they develop autism more frequently.
Solution: Feed all young children dirt.
This hypothesis actually has about as much grounding as many of the other suggested causes of autism. Based on very weak evidence, some parents have started to avoid immunizing their children, putting them at much greater risk for measles and other potentially deadly diseases. Bless the internet and its unquestioned authority on medicine.
~Idarubicin
Some forms of autism make one not like to be around people. I wonder if I have some of that. People who talk too much about non-geek things drive me crackers. Some people just cannot shuddup. My mom, for example, can stretch a 2-minute story into a 20-minute one by providing details that are useless to the story, but I cannot tell her off because she is my mom. She is the reader's digest in reverse.
Mild autism may be what makes a lot of geeks geeks. You never know.
Table-ized A.I.
So this is what happens when all those parents spend too much time reading /. and sucking up monitor radiation!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
California is no where near as polluted as it used to be. There are many other areas of the US which are substantially worse (Houstan, Atlanta). In addition, if it were an issue of pollution, you'd see substantial differences in Southern California, where smog hangs over the city, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the prevailing winds blow most of the smog eastward.
The cake is a pie
"...will have to suffer their entire lives as unattractive and anti-social."
Austism has no connection with how you look. In some cases there may be other complications from the autistic person, such as downs, but that's a whole differnt disorder.
"It's nothing more than just an enhanced perception of life"
I can't really blame you for thinking of Rainman or other similar cases when thinking of autism, but to think that the average person is made better by this disorder is kind of ignorant. In most cases, it's not only a person's social development that is slowed/stopped/messed up. In fact, their cognative levels are supressed throughout their life.
Be a man! View at -1
acm.cs.uwec.edu
There is some pretty compelling evidence that gluten, a grain protein, triggers autism. Many parents of formerly autistic (!) children swear that a gluten-free diet "cured" their child's autism.
For some unknown reason the medical/scientific community has been very resistant to studying this phenomenon.
-Peter
The Telegraph had an article back in February of last year (no longer available) that set the rate of autism in the UK at 1 in 175 children, or 58 out of every 10,000 (compared to the 10 in 10,000 rate reported in California.)
/.'ers may find Mercola's website hard to stomach, since he's going to tell you to exercise and to stop eating McD's fries and twinkies. ;-)
The evidence is becoming very persuasive that immunizations do bear a large portion of the blame. See the National Vaccine Information Center for some good articles on links to this and other complications.
For our part, after reading dozens of books and talking to as many people, we made the decision not to vaccinate our now six year old. (Commence the flamebait about how we're playing with fire, yadda yadda yadda...)
Dr. Mercola, a naturopathic doctor out of Chicago, also has many good articles about the possible causes of austism. WARNING:
Crocuta
If you think autism is "an enhanced perception of life," you are terribly misinformed.
Please, go spend some time with autistic children. Between your comments, those about "California hypochondriacs", and about evolution(!?), I am surprised at the level of ignorance about this disease. It is a profound illness, not just lonely smart kids. Not even close.
Flat5
I'll bite ...
... but they are certainly peer-reviewed, and not completely anecdotal!)
...
What economic motives are there for vaccine makers to produce a product that could cause autism?
Just FYI, most of the employees at the vaccine company I am familiar with insist on their families being inoculated with the vaccine produced by that company. They are aware of the stringent testing, QA/QC and improvements in the products made by the company. Of course, all vaccine manufacturers have to meet an extremely high standard of quality now, but it shows you the loyalty and security that these employees feel about their employer's products.
As for searching the newsgroups, I have to just laugh. What an unbiased and peer-reviewed source! (Admittedly, not all scientific publications can be regarded as unbiased
With the recent upsurge of panicked parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated, I'm (pessimistically) awaiting the return of the scourges that our grandparents used to fear
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
Could I suggest that people who are really interested about vaccines consult references on both sides of the story? Or even read something based on facts, on scientific methods, peer-reviewed (scientific publications in refereed journals)?
/.! Never mind. ;-)
Oh, wait, this is
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
However, there is no shortage of theories to explain the surge in autism. There are two of them that seem to deserve some research:
- Autism is caused by mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines.
- Autism is caused by methylmercury in fish, when eaten during pregnancy.
The FDA already discourages eating some types of fish during pregnancy (they even publish mercury levels in seafood).I suggest you increase your "experiences" a bit more and read up on autism here.
:-)
Or check this out. It's a list of symptoms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly referred to as "The DSM IV").
Sure, a lot of us geeks fit the criteria, but one must be very careful to not confuse introversion with autism.
"I have to admit, it's alot of shots these days, and there's clear economic motives for the makers."
Never mind the horrors of death by Polio(you think an autistic childs a problem - try a full body polio cripple), or Tuberculosis, or Measles - the list of truly horrible diseases that killed MILLIONS and were all but eradicated by public vaccination goes on, as do the children saved with vaccinations.
This new epidemic in California is probably just a bunch of really smart people having children together.
Have they attempted to corrolate it at all with both parents starting families later in life?
Most of my friends (the very beginning of gen-x, born in the late 60s) started their families late. Even though we were 25 when we had our son (and I thought that was late... couple of years out of college), many just got started a year or so ago.
There's a good amount of data on chromosonal damage beginning in the thirties, including a real decline in late 30s. Add that to everyone using fertility drugs (hint: you're starting too late) and people having second and third kids in their 40s, and you've got to have more problems.
I'd expect this trend to be even stronger on the west coast where being a DINK is a class statement (and often necessary requirement to get that BMW 5 series, 5,000+ sq. foot house, clothes, etc).
*scoove*
What about other areas with a high density of intelligent people? OR what does Silicon Valley have that no other area does?
I have no idea what causes the problem but neither does anyone else.
This gluten story is typical of bullshitotherapists. What happens is that *some* people have an intolerance to gluten (I think it's called coelial disease), and their body reacts badly to it, with very different symptoms from person to person.
It happens that, among those few people who have this disorder, the symptoms can look like ADHD or Autism. But those persons do not have ADHD or Autism, they really have gluten intolerance! The problem is that, IIRC, this disorder is pretty difficult to diagnose, and since it's quite rare, and as a result of the confusing symptoms, most of the victims are not properly treated.
Now here comes the bullshitotherapist stupidity: blame ADHD and Autism on gluten. Et voila!
But yeah, if you suffer from this gluten problem, and you stop eating gluten altogether, the symptoms will usually go away; now the difference is that psychostimulants won't do a thing to those people: they will still have the ADHD-like symptoms. Conversely, people with real ADHD won't get any benefit from removing gluten from their diet, they'll just waste a lot of their time.
The following data is lifted directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/autism/au
Epidemiologic studies have shown no relationship between MMR vaccination in children and development of autism:
* In 1997, the National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES) was examined to see if there was any link between measles vaccine and neurological events. The researchers found no indication that measles vaccine contributes to the development of long-term neurological damage, including educational and behavioral deficits (Miller et al., 1997).
* A study by Gillberg and Heijbel (1998) examined the prevalence of autism in children born in Sweden from 1975-1984. There was no difference in the prevalence of autism among children born before the introduction of the MMR vaccine in Sweden and those born after the vaccine was introduced.
* In 1999, the British Committee on Safety of Medicines convened a "Working Party on MMR Vaccine" to conduct a systematic review of reports of autism, gastrointestinal disease, and similar disorders after receipt of MMR or measles/rubella vaccine. It was concluded that the available information did not support the posited associations between MMR and autism and other disorders.
* Taylor and colleagues (1999) studied 498 children with autism in the UK and found the age at which they were diagnosed was the same regardless of whether they received the MMR vaccine before or after 18 months of age or whether they were never vaccinated. Importantly, the first signs or diagnoses of autism were not more likely to occur within time periods following MMR vaccination than during other time periods. Also, there was no sudden increase in cases of autism after the introduction of MMR vaccine in the UK. Such a jump would have been expected if MMR vaccine was causing a substantial increase in autism.
* Kaye and colleagues (2001) assessed the relationship between the risk of autism among children in the UK and MMR vaccine. Among a subgroup of boys aged 2-5 years, the risk of autism increased almost 4 fold from 1988 to 1993, while MMR vaccination coverage remained constant at approximately 95% over these same years.
* Researchers in the U.S. found that among children born between 1980 and 1994 and enrolled in California kindergartens, there was a 373% relative increase in autism cases, though the relative increase in MMR vaccine coverage by the age of 24 months was only 14% (Dales et al., 2001). For more on this study, see California Data on Theory of Autism and MMR Immunization.
* Researchers in the UK (Frombonne & Chakrabarti, 2001) conducted a study to test the idea that a new form, or "new variant," of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) exists. This new variant IBD has been described as a combination of developmental regression and gastrointestinal symptoms occurring shortly after MMR immunization. Information on 96 children (95 immunized with MMR) who were born between 1992 and 1995 and were diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder were compared with data from 2 groups of autistic patients (one group of 98 born before MMR was ever used and one group of 68 who were likely to have received MMR vaccine). No evidence was found to support a new syndrome of MMR-induced IBD/autism. For instance, the researchers found that there were no differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups with regard to when their parents first became concerned about their child's development. Similarly, the rate of developmental regression reported in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups was not different; therefore, there was no suggestion that developmental regression had increased in frequency since MMR was introduced. Of the 96 children in the first group, no inflammatory bowel disorder was reported. Furthermore, there was no association found between developmental regression and gastrointestinal symptoms.
* Another group of researchers in the UK (Taylor et al., 2002) also examined whether MMR vaccination is associated with bowel problems and developmental regression in children with autism, looking for evidence of a "new variant" form of IBD/autism. The study included 278 cases of children with autism and 195 with atypical autism (cases with many of the features of childhood autism but not quite meeting the required criteria for that diagnosis, or with atypical features such as onset of symptoms after the age of 3 years). The cases included in this study were born between 1979 and 1998. The proportion of children with developmental regression or bowel symptoms did not change significantly from 1979 to 1988, a period which included the introduction of MMR vaccination in the UK in 1988. No significant difference was found in rates of bowel problems or regression in children who received the MMR vaccine before their parents became concerned about their development, compared with those who received it only after such concern and those who had not received the MMR vaccine. The findings provide no support for an MMR associated "new variant" form of autism and further evidence against involvement of MMR vaccine in autism.
What's changed in a big way in the last twenty years? Fast food. Tolerance for fat people.
On study I heard about suggested that the modern "fear of fat" - the fear of actually eating fat, not of being fat - was actually harming the development of children. Lack of fatty-acids imparing the development of brain tissue or something.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
There was this kid who, as he got older, never spoke. His parents took him to doctors, specialists, psychiatrists, all to no avail. In ever other way, he seemed normal. This continued until his 10th birthday, when one night at dinner, he said "These beans are cold".
His overjoyed parents asked "if you can talk, why haven't you said anything before?"
He replied "Up to now, everything's been ok".
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
My grandparents had their kids at 16, my parents had me around 20-22, my wife and I are 29-27 respectively. We haven't had children yet because we want to wait for things to become financially stable (we want our kids to have a good home)
:)
Out of all the factors in the article, it didn't seem to touch too much on the age factor. I read somewhere once that older parents can lead to all sorts of abnormalities with pregnancy. Could it be age is playing a role here?
There are a lot of similiar couples/singles my wife and I know, they're slowly approaching 30's, no children yet. Compared with our parents who all had thier kids in their 20's we're a bit behind
It seems that the older we have children, the more that can go wrong. Silicon valley is a tough place to live (financially) and the burden of buying a house here and paying the bills has made alot of my friend put off having children till their 30's. It's an enviromentally prompted response to make sure we give our successive generation a strong foothold in life.
I think the answer is as simple as, people in silicon valley have children at an older age, therefore more autistic children are born as a result.
I consider gluten an unlikely culprit. It's hardly a new item in the environment... it's present in huge quantities in almost every wheat-based product, most notably bread, and always has been. You can't account for an upswing in autism by blaming gluten; we've been swimming in the stuff for centuries, and I doubt that California has suddenly experienced a massive increase in bread consumption.
I'll take these stories more seriously when I see convincing, controlled, peer-reviewed studies that show that they're for real.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Autism genes that enhance programming abilities may lead to less children for the autistic programmer (AP), but if the AP is programming in the area of, say, development of life-extending technology (e.g., beating old age, cancer etc.) then the AP genes may lead to greater disperal of human genes later down the road.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
Interestingly, the test result interpretation key says: Scores over 32 are generally taken to indicate Asperger's Syndrome or high-functioning autism, with more than 34 an "extreme" score. A "normal" score, based on control groups, is about 16 (or 15 for women and between 17 and 18 for men). A group of mathematics-contest winners scored an average of 24.5. A group of scientists scored an average of 18.5 (19 for men, 17 for women), with computer scientists at about 21, physicists at 19 and those in biology or medicine at about 15.
Most of the theories [guesses] seem to focus on genetics or environmental factors.
I don't think it's genetics. People haven't changed that much in general and there isn't a "California" gene pool to point to--new people are moving to California and having children all the time. (I was born and raised in California and I'm still live there [here] so I'm seeing this firsthand.) And I don't think that there are enough "geeks" to account for that big of a shift even in Silicon Valley--It still takes a small army of burger flippers, gas station attendants, janitors, car washers, etc. to support a high-performance "geek."
Under environmental factors there seem to be two areas being looked at: stuff happening or being done to children such as vaccinations, and general lifestyle such as poor diet.
I think that it is environmental and probably something unnatural. My guess is some government mandated program such MTBE in the gasoline.
--
But then again I thought VCR+ was a stupid idea and would die a quick death--so what do I know?
The Globe and Mail (Saturday October 19, 2002) has a related article (with the title given in the subject line) in print and online.
They even have an "AQ" test to see where you are on the "autism spectrum".
I'm not sure I share the enthusiasm some of the quoted experts have for the idea that a number of talented people are having children with "good genes", which is causing this recent increase in autistic behaviour. Even assuming that exteme talent implies retarded social skills, I find it hard to believe that the basic talent it takes to write code, train users and invent documentation is extreme enough to warrant this kind of musing.
Add to that the skepticism I have for anything as complex as social interaction and family having a measurable genetic quality...
Good read nonetheless.
-- clvrmnky
So, what might cause Asthma (Which may be leveling off as we speak), childhood Diabetes, increased incidence of autoimmune disorders and cancer, and increased incidence of autism?
It isn't vaccines! The science doesn't stand up. If you think it's vaccines, we'll agree to disagree, okay?
I blame the chlorinated carbon molecule.
Organochlorines have been absent from the earth, in any appreciable amounts, since before the appearance of multicelled life. They are immensely stable, but nothing natural creates them - for energetic reasons, they are purely synthetic. They have unique (powerful, TOXIC) chemistry that we can "exploit but never control", in the words of Pandora's Poison author Shalini Ramanathan. This is an excellent book if you're interested in which feature of our 20th century lifestyle is raising disease incidences.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I remember a very old 2-3 year slashdot news article mentioning this. It is no longer online. Basically a women did a study with nerdy and brilliant computer geniuses and mathematicians to find out if they are autistic to a mild degree. Turns out she discovered a separate syndrome which is in the mild autism category.
For the geeks reading this:
1.) Do you find certain social situations difficult or awkward?
2.) Do you feel out of place sometimes?
3.) Do you have bizarre certain interests that no on cares about? *computers cough cough
4.) Do you feel smart in certain area's but lack knowledge sometimes of other different area's?
5.) Do you find expressing emotions difficult even though you have them?
6.) Do you feel yourself to be somewhat clumsy ?
7.) As a kid did you feel more interested in complex things like science or weather rather then playing GI joe ?
8.) Do you find yourself to be somewhat compulsive?
Chances are you may be mildly autistic
Autism and its related aspergers syndrome is very complex. Its different then mental retardation and is hard to describe. I know because I have aspergers which is a mild variant of autism and have an IQ of 122.
I have both conditions that match autism and aspergers so I am unique. For example I can easily handle most social situations but I am clumsy and have poor eye and hand coordination. To this day I can not play a piano with two hands. The mechanism in the brain that divides the signals to my hands does not work properly. My left hand will play the rhythm of my right and my right would play the rhythms of my left. In complex situations like in relationships, I can notice my difficulties. I do not do well when women are not real direct about how they feel. Why do women do this?
As a kid I fell into the autism category but as I grew up I become less and less autistic. I use to daydream at school and go into my own world whenever the teacher wasn't looking. I no longer do this. I can do things today that I could not do a decade ago. Its weird and I can not explain it but I guess maybe my brain is re-wiring itself. I have brilliant in some area's but falter in others. Especially anything doing with 3d-space or mathematics. However I am great with logic and programming which uses the same area's of the brain.
http://saveie6.com/
First of all, note that I am not saying you don't have Asperger's. But it doesn't neccessarily follow from the definition you provided that Asperger's is even the most common cause for the behaviors described. For example, I was a bright little kid. I picked up reading early, enjoyed it greatly, and so of course I was made fun of often in elementary school. This, for a long time, made me reluctant to interact with other people or try to make friends - I thought they'd just make fun of me. (Sound familiar, slashdotters?) I got over it eventually, but for a lot of my early childhood, I missed out on a lot of the normal socialization process.
:-)
:-)
/. to assume they have Asperger's - it's an easy explanation for nerdiness, but it needn't always (or even often) be the correct one.
As a result, I'm a bit socially inept. A lot of social interactions other people take for granted - especially interacting with groups of people - I picked up later. But this isn't because of some sort of neurological problem - I just didn't have a normal social life, because the other kids made it hard to have one.
Likewise, I have above-average verbal skills (don't judge by this post, please), a strong interest in politics and history, and I'm a bit self-centered in my conversation. But this can all be easily enough explained as the product of social isolation and an affinity for the written word, not Asperger's. If you like to read, history (and politics, which is really just a subset of the same) is something you're going to have an easy time learning. And as for being a bit self-centered - again, that could be the result of social isolation. Or, I could just be an asshole, that's certainly a possibility.
In the interests of intellectual honesty though, I feel the need to mention some things that I can't explain away with social/psychological factors. Asperger's suffers, if I read the definition write, tend to have mild speech problems - I had to visit a speech therapist for a while when I was seven. And my handwriting has always been very, very bad. And, as my friends and family can attest, I do seem to lack common sense.
My point, however, is it makes no sense for the tends of thousands of fine people on
I'm the stranger...posting to
We think that this could have something to do with our five-year-old with autism, but it's hard to know. Our son was diagnosed with kidney reflux as a fetus using ultrasound, and at six months he was prescribed a low dose of amoxicillin to be taken every day to prevent bladder infections, which could back up into the kidneys a destroy them. We did this until he was about 22 months old or so.
While this is the kind of rediculous anecdote that shouldn't be given too much credence, it amazed me to find another patient of the same kidney specialist in our autism support group; with the same antibiotic program. Probably just a coincidence, but maybe not. Both syndromes are quite rare (although autism apparently becoming less so), and to find both in two kids is pretty darn unlikely, but of course possible.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
However, it is possible that a milder expression of the same genes does have advantages, ala tech centers. Think sickle-cell anemia, where one gene gives you malaria resistantance, but two make you very sick.
So clearly, the answer to stopping the spread of this Autism is to mandate that every geek coder in Silicon Valley must mate with a supermodel who has no math or technical skills whatsoever. They must not mate with other geeks, but only with those who get paid to wear their underwear on stage. This is absolutely necessary for the survival of intelligence and technology in our country! So please models, take one for the team!
I'm totally serious. There's a brief test at the end of this Globe and Mail article on the autism explosion and the apparent geek link.
:-)
Interestingly enough, I received an AQ of 12 (below the average of 18), meaning I'm more well-adjusted than "normal" people. Rather amusing I thought.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Some people have found gluten-free diets successful in helping autistic children.
The whole gluten-intolerance area is *way* behind other areas of research; hopefully someday there will be more discoveries that can help both conditions (especially autism).
Rather than slashdotting a specific site, I'll just mention that a google search for "gluten intolerance" and autism has a lot of related sites and articles.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I'm sorry, but how can any Autism study say there's a 273% increase in Autsim and not take into account that the DIAGNOSTIC RULES CHANGED IN 1994?
The DSM-IV came out in 1994 and significantly broadened the diagnostic criteria for Autism. In my not so humble opinion, this has to have contributed directly to the 273% number the UCD study spouts.
My 3-year-old son was diagnosed with Autism last year. There are a huge number of "autistic traits" scattered through out my family. I have no doubt that if born today, I would have been diagnosed on the "autism spectrum", my father certainly would have been, as well as two of my nephews and quite likely my sister.
As it is, we were simply called "different" or "challenging" or "problematic". "Autism" was reserved for the likes of "Rainman".
The study (at least as it's being reported) is invalid. There has not been a 273% increase in Autism, there has been a 273% percent increase in the Autism cases being diagnosed.
One of the implicit themes I see here that has not gotten much open discussion is that of being smarter than other people, both as a kid and afterwards. This notion seems very deeply embedded in geek culture, and is tightly bound up the sense of alienation that seems so prevalent here. For some reason, being "smarter" than other kids seems to set one in the direction of alienting narcissism.
As Jay Matthews, a very well-spoken education columnist for the Washington Post puts it in a piece on college interviews:
This is some of this wisest advice I can imagine giving a teenager. First of all the notion of being "smarter" than other people is suspect - you have to define smart in a very narrow way to believe that. Or put another way, there sure are a lot of "dumb jerks" out there who seem to be able to accomplish many of their life goals. Are they "smart"? Who cares, they're getting what they're after.
None of this is to contest the more knowledgeable points of view on autism or Asperger's, but simply to point out that there's a pretty strong link between alienation and one-dimensional estimations of intelligence (see the work of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, and to encourage everyone in this very intellectual crowd, particularly those raising children (saw a couple disturbing posts of 40+ somethings who really think they're smarter than most others) to look hard at what it means to be smart, and at the consequences of teaching a child to be a particular kind of smart.
"Autism is caused by mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines [mercola.com]."
If this were true, in the future we should see a sharp drop in Autism cases, in children born right around now. The FDA passed down an instruction to reduce the use of thimerosal a while ago, and most manufacturers have either reformulated, or are in the process of reformulating to use other preservatives (a few never used thimerosal to begin with).
Many forms of Autism are related to the link between both sides of the brain. People with less connections (or less effective connections -- which is a different problem) tend to be geeks. The other end of the spectrum seems are the socialites. Thouse with low levels of cross conects tend to be able to focus on a problem on one side of the brain but are hopeless for problems that require both. Men typicaly have fewer cross connects than women. A high level of cross connects are very importaint for verbal communication of ideas (and they play a part in strange moodyness as well).
If your mother's father was an Engineer, your very likly to be a geek if your male. When you throw this into a social context, you will find that most of the women who like hanging around with geeks, have a geeky father or or gradfather. This means they have the gene for this and have become conditioned to the "different" level of communication. If a geek breeds with a woman who has the gene, a geeky child is very likly. Its standard genetics and it explains why the best geeks of all time had a very short line of decendants.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments about this one. I'd even be willing to bet that most /.ers have more symptoms of Aspergers than not.
Getting down to cases: I can only theorise based on my own internal experiences. So, here goes some facts and opinions, without attempt at analysis:
When I was about 6, I had a General Anaesthetic. It took me over 10 hours to come out of it. For much of that period I was dimly aware of external stimuli, they just weren't important. Eventually I managed to decode the face-slaps and sounds as attempts to wake me up, and thought it useful to do so. I guess (and I do mean guess) that a lot of autistic children just haven't seen a good reason to interact socially or with anything else in the Universe. Even a fingerprint can be endlessly fascinating, so why bother with the sounds that the universe (the bits that are other people) makes? They are just a distraction. You can make them go away by screaming, so why remember words? As for my own son - who's now 16 months old - I'm playing games with him with lots of mechanical toys (lots of fun to be had with swinging doors ), but also playing social-interaction games such as "pass the juice bottle" where we share a cup of juice, taking turns. And a lot of exaggerated facial grimaces for smiles, frowns and other non-verbal communications. I want to show him that things outside himself are interesting too. Because to lose speech and get too fascinated by internals is debilitating and very very not-useful, fun though it might be. You will get frustrated, and not know how to alter your environment to make it better. You will also upset people around you who care about you.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
The New York times has an article (no registration required)
About farking time. Taco, perhaps you might want to add code to Googleize NYT links in stories?