Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Brain Linked to Autism
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."
He believes the genes which make someone analytical may also impair their social and communication skills.
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Proof that the dork and nerd genes are linked. Shocker, that.
But your child is an engineer.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
but I can't communicate my thoughts.
Is this an evolutionary restraint on nerds breeding?
There used to be reports of higher rates of Autist kids in the region around silicon valley back during the dotcom boom.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Professor Baron Cohen is also the cousin of Sascha Baron Cohen, AKA. Ali G.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
This reminds me of a really good article in Wired from maybe 2002 or so, about how autism rates were skyrocketing in Silicon Valley, far too much to be just coinidence, better diagnosis, etc.
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?
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
I though it was from the mother watching the people's court during pregnancy... Gotta Watch Wapner, Gotta Watch Wapner....
Rimshot
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
now, if I conclude that I'm not analytic enough for my chid to be autistic, is that again too analytic, so my child will become autistic? Me logic broken :-/
and why is the code today "impotent"? meh...
A while back, NASA conducted a fifteen year anniversary study on the savant known as Kim Peek. Peek was born with a strange brain deformity known as macrocephaly which results in the two hemispheres of the brain being linked due to a pocket of water at the base of the brain.
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 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?
My work here is dung.
There is a similar story in Wired 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.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
2) I was about to joke about this, but it appears that the Professor actually is the cousin of Sacha "Ali G" Baron Cohen.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Thinking about this, Asperger's Syndrome is defined as "characterized by severe and sustained impairment in social interaction, development of restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities." Give the link that is being suggested by this article, could it entirely be possible that Asperger's Syndrome comes from parents who lack some degree of social sensitivity on a genetic basis? Combine both parents, and you get someone who exhibits Asperger's Syndrome-like behaviour?
Anyone interested in this topic should check out the work of Temple Gradin. She's an autistic professor of Animal Science. In addition to her main field of research, she's done a lot of study on autism and sciencey people.
She was on Science Friday last week. Podcast here.
Smarty-pants couples (of the truly sharp, science-minded variety) having kids is only recently useful (or even likely), in the primate-history scheme of things. Just shows that it takes natural selection a while to catch up with the fact that we're not very far removed from small, pack-like groups living hand to mouth in primitive, hostile circumstances and not living much past 30 years old. Wait... that sounds like my neighborhood!
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is a lot of work, but IME is well worth it. See the conference papers at my website for more on one person's experience of autism...
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here. As far as I can see, it's basically lying and bullshitting, which surely can't be hard for any smart person to learn? I'm sure most of us are pretty successful at bullshitting our bosses, if nothing else.
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.
As an individual diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, I don't find this to be news. I have seen at least a few people who might have Asperger's syndrome in my computer science classes. I cannot say I am attracted to this type, though, and have not met many women who behave stereotypically autistically.
Anyway, I like being oblivious to certain elements, particularly nonverbal cues, of the social environment. It means my dealings with women frequently end up in great disaster.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I think that people without analytical genes lack the ability to communicate and socialize effectively or even sanely--I mean hell, just look at the world around you. The only reason why we analytical types have a problem with these things is because we are in the minority.
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'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you our new Slashdot motto.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
are due to increased awareness of the disease, better screening and more money available for social programs that address it.
20 years ago it was very rare to find programs specifically designed for children with autism. 15 years ago the parents of children with autism began to organize and push for programs and funding. As parents, doctors, school administrators and legislators became more aware of autism the funding blossomed (well, as far as that can happen for social programs) and many more children were diagnosed with it. There has also been a huge increase in the number of Asberger's syndrome cases as well as the catch-all PDD-NOS: Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, which is diagnostic speak for "well, the kid ain't right, but he don't fit none of the other molds."
The classic, Kanner's Austism as diagnosed with the childhood autism rating scale and other tools is still very rare. There is a tendancy to fit kids into whatever diagnoses are sexy and have funding at the time. I worked with plenty of kids who didn't fit the classic diagnosis of autism, but because the district had a nice chunk of money to spend, otherwise "vanilla" developmentally disabled kids would get an autism or PDD-NOS tag so they could get funded.
I hope we aren't going back to an environmental 'refridgerator parents' model of autism. It is clearly an inherited disorder (with the exception of certain febrile onsets due to sever infections of the brain).
At the edge of every disaster stands a clever fellow who points. Virginia Wolfe
Autism - is it good, or is it whack?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Austism extends beyond Asberger's, though Asberger's is far and away the most common type of autism. Austistic social deficits go much farther than simple shyness or bad conversational skills. In their extreme stage, they can cripple a person's ability to lead any semblance of a normal life.
A friend of mine has a young boy with autism. For him, the line between reality and fantasy is blurred to the point of non-existance. He refers to his parents as Mario and Peach (from the video games), and relates everything to Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or some other SF/F film. He believes he is a part of the world of those films. It's more than losing yourself in a fantasy. He does it because he cannot make sense of the world around him otherwise. It's becoming more apparent as he grows older that he will not be able to function on his own in society, and will require constant supervision.
Doing some volunteer work a few years ago, I met a kid with a severe form of autism. At the time his condition left him unable to speak more than a few coherent words. He communicated through grunts or other noises, or the few signs in American Sign Language that his parents and doctor had managed to teach him. His temper was incredibly short and he was prone to flying off the handle about things you or I might shrug our shoulders over. He has improved a good deal over the past few years and can communicate much more effectively, but his temper still remains his major social issue.
However the previous examples are more extreme cases and people with milder cases of autism can function quite normally.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
It's refreshing to hear that what I have suspected now has a little more weight... that there is a connection between those who are more actively analytical and autism. That said, to be an idiot-savant is quite rare, where most autistic forms make a person mostly or completely incapable of unassisted living with nothing else that would otherwise be interesting or novel about them. (Is that too insensitive a way to put it?)
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.
This is just more proof that I should pick the Hot dumb Cheerleader type for a wife. Honestly, it is for the kid's benefit.
"He believes the genes which make someone analytical may also impair their social and communication skills."
I've heard this before and I still question why this would be anything other than obvious. I personally find situations that require what is typically considered "social skills" to be almost completely void of reason. It has taken quite a bit of effort on my part to adjust to socializing with other people and I don't believe that I have any form of autism/Asperger's. When I was young (highschool) I just didn't get it. I still don't, but I can play the game by the rules pretty well for the most part. Is it really that surprising to find that someone who is significantly more hard-wired for analytical thinking than most to have trouble adapting to such an illogical system?
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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 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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
He's right on even if it's empirical evidence. I actually mated...more than once...and have both really bright and Aspie kids. Both of us are science geeks. It's a whole new world where geeks mate. We are selecting for a new geek breed of human incapable of lying and really good with discrete mathematics.
We use only a small portion of the full capacity of our brain. Its not size. Its in the wiring.
Newsweek has a test that you can take to see if you have autistic traits. My take on it is that autism runs along a continuum with everyone having a degree of it as part of the human condition. It doesn't sound like it's really a problem if you have autistic traits unless it affects your ability to function in society. I guess if you are autistic-leaning and are planning on having children, you may want to carefully screen your partner to make sure s/he isn't similarly affected so you don't pass on a double dose of it.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Used to volunteer with the mentally challenged and handicapped in high school. The more severe cases of autism are not an inability to relate, but an inability to communicate. Autistic kids (I was working with teenagers) have no sense of empathy. If you tried to say hello, they would not look you in the face. Kids with serious autism can't stand human interaction. Its not a matter of learning human interaction, its a matter of being withdrawn from the world and not being able to pull yourself to the level of the rest of society. We operated a summer camp for children, both differently and regularly abled. Part of the time his parents were there - we tried operating a boat ride with him. It took us 10 minutes to get a life preserver on him. You can't get face to face to put a life preserver on; having a face within 3 feet of him is too intimate of contact for a severe case of Autism. They get scared and withdraw. This kid was a runner too, when he did get scared he ran - he had boundless energy.
Now granted, there are intermediate cases, and I know people with slight cases who operate well enough in real life. Its not a cakewalk and certain social interactions can't just "be learned". Some can be faked well enough to get along but its not the same for the person living the life. But autism is very real, and very abstract. Its nothing like being a geek and just not being socially aware. That is not a valid comparison.
+2 INT -2 CHA
Here's the basic problem:
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.
I've never been impressed with Baren-Cohen's ideas about autism. To say that autists are "systemizers" is about as utilitarian as saying that artists are "feelers." Beyond that, it's a simplification to label a broad range of behavior as all being "autism," much like labeling all disconnected thinking as schizophrenia. The brain is an incredibly arcane system of systems, all interconnected through myriad feedback loops and spurious environmental inputs. The spectrum of behavior that results has a broad range of overlap, and its interpretation is very subjective.
People read articles like this and walk away with the idea that "nerds" are autistic, and that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and "social skills". Perhaps there is an association, but who's to say that people who don't perform as expected in a conversation aren't more accurately constrained by ADD or dyslexia or subclinical epilepsy or a dozen other syndromes that affect the ability to maintain and mirror appropriate social responses? You find what you're looking for, and assuming that these tidy relationships describe broad traits will assuredly result in identifying those traits in people, like someone seeing "his father's eyes" in the baby of a cuckold son.
Science works best when the topic uder review posseses discrete qualities, which can be measured and compared on a uniform basis. Presently, there are few such methods for studying behavior. Perhaps in the future better brain imaging scans, neurotransmitter assays, and more unbiased, involuntary behavioral tests will ferret out usable associations and predictions about brain disorders.
One of my sons has Asperger, which of course influences his life considerably - however his mind is not particularly analytical in the sense that mine is (I am a scientist). His talents manifest themselves more in along the lines of having amazing recall of information - both auditory and visual. For example he can recite a piece of music that he heard once several years ago note for note. He learns new languages with facile ease. In various academic competitions he excels (in competitions in high school he would achieve top 10 national rankings) if the format is based on factual recall.
I am fully aware of how valuable social skills are in the modern world.
However...
They amount to little more than mutual stroking. Stroking of the lymbic system via words and body language, but nonetheless just stroking.
The reason they are "so important" is simple: the world is run by people who have them, use them, and judge you by them. They, however, have little intrinsic value.
I am not saying that the would would be a better place if we had no emotions. However, I am suggesting that we live in a great emotion-orgy, and that we would be far better off if there were a lot more mild autistics in the world.
Usually, the people who disagree with me the most strongly are people who are quite stupid, have no genuinely productive capabilities, but talk well. Go figure.
--AC
I grew up before the main clinical description of autism was published, roughly 1984. This was lucky, since instead of being pigeonholed I just baffled the psychiatrists who the school had evaluate me. One example from sixth grade, the psychiatrist said I got the question wrong when asked why oil floated on top of water: I answered with a fairly complex explaination of the molecular make up (including diagrams) and why they can't mix. The answer written in the book was because oil is lighter. So I got it wrong.
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.
Byrna Seigal at UCSF said the same thing years ago. Neither one had any real data to back up their claim-because there isn't any. Autism rose in places like Silicon Valley rather rapidly. Changes in mating patterns tend to be more gradual. Also, the changes in mating patterns that were going on in the hotspots were places where there was more stuff going on like marriage of folks from rather different parts of the world(i.e. a big chunk of white male Silicon Valley engineers are married to Asian or Hispanic women).
This theory belongs right up there with the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis.
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
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Really neat! Just when our species needs asocial individuals who will spend years in solitude playing with really geeky kit while they pilot starships away from a broken planet, evolution once again begins to provide the variation that fits the niche...
It is an interesting idea, and suspect that there is some truth to it, but IMHO the problem goes deeper than genes. From personal experience, thinking analytically for extended period of times impairs you social skills (a bit like drinking and driving I suppose). Hence, It's not how only how your brain is wired that determine your social skill, but how you use it on a daily basis.
I was never singled out as someone with low social skill (or if I was, it was behind my back), but when I started a B. Sc. in physics and math, I quickly came to realize that I had trouble dealing with my peers and more dramatically in my intimate relationships. I first thought it was because I was overworked, but I don't think this explanation does justice to the problem. I was starting to approach my relations with a binary attitude: they were either good or bad, right or wrong, etc. I lost patience, if things weren't going the way I wanted them. I was missing all the subtleties of bounding and I was no longer an understanding companion, not particularly good.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I eventually went into law after finishing my B. Sc. Low and behold, the above problems slowly receeded and it felt much easier to bound with people (not only law students, but my old science friends too).
The story doesn't stop there... there is only so much law "mumbo jumbo" a mathematician can take (the only three mathematicians in our faculty left in a period 2 years). After a year and a half of law, I am now back in math. Unsurprisingly, my social problems are surfacing again. It's causing havoc in my relation with my girlfriend (she only knew me as a law student), and I still hope it won't spread to my friendships.
I can't speak for everyone, but to me it feels like social skills and analytical skills have hard to co-habiting. So far my only solution have found is to allow for a "buffer period" between meeting people and finishing my work.
I would be curious to know if any one else has experience somehing similar.