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."

Comments

I'm sorry ma'am...

[faloi]

But your child is an engineer.

I analyzed the article

[Anonymous Coward]

but I can't communicate my thoughts.

old news....

[scenestar]

There used to be reports of higher rates of Autist kids in the region around silicon valley back during the dotcom boom.

Re:old news....

[gEvil (beta)]

I remember reading this article in Wired a number of years ago (I would guess probably around December 2001 from the date on it). Interesting read, especially if you're curious about autism and Asperger's.

Fascinating fact

[Geeky]

Professor Baron Cohen is also the cousin of Sascha Baron Cohen, AKA. Ali G.

Wired article a few years back

[Andrew Lenahan]

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?

Re:Wired article a few years back

[Autistic]

There are a variety of ideas around the causes of Autism. Some are genetic, some are environmental. Most likely it is a combination of them.

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 in childhood vaccines. 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.

Kim Peek & NASA

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Kim Peek & NASA

[sgstair]

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.

Well obviously he developed a form of organic water-cooling. This probably allowed him to overclock his brain to much higher speeds than those available by conventional cooling methods!
-Stephen :)

Makes sense to me...

[Two99Point80]

Being autistic, for me, means having to analyze social situations and interactions on-the-fly. Emulating intuition, I suppose. But having to be analytical also means getting to be analytical, looking beneath the surface to gain understanding of what's going on and why. Tools to achieve this will vary depending on one's ability to process complex material, but having a sensible explanation makes it much easier for me to be cooperative, appropriately social, and so forth.

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...

Re:Evolution

[murderlegendre]

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.

'Social skills'

[0123456]

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.

Re:'Social skills'

[SeekerDarksteel]

It is far more than lying and bullshitting. In a social situation, most people can talk naturally. They simply say what comes to mind. For someone with autism, they have little to no intuation. They literally have no concept of what to say or do. If it is severe enough, the only way they can perform in social situations is to observe how others act and react and mimic them when they are in similar situations. This is much more analytical than intuitive to do. If they can't choose a reaction they can't create one on the fly and will just freeze and say very little ("ah, i see") or nothing at all.

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.

Stop the presses!

[murderlegendre]

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.

Pertinent question

[why-is-it]

Professor Baron Cohen is also the cousin of Sascha Baron Cohen, AKA. Ali G.

Autism - is it good, or is it whack?

Re:pwn3d

[mfh]

And you smoke what flavor of crack now?

Seriously.

I was mostly joking around, but on another note -- crack comes in flavours now???

Re:Huh?

[smittyoneeach]

This looks like as good a place as any to mention the ecological fallacy.

The term comes from a 1950 paper by William Robinson. For each of the 48 states in the US as of the 1930 census, he computed the literacy rate and the proportion of the population born outside the US. He showed that these two figures were associated with a positive correlation of 0.53 -- in other words, the greater the proportion of immigrants in a state, the higher its average literacy. However, when individuals are considered, the correlation was 0.11 -- immigrants were on average less literate than native citizens. Robinson showed that the positive correlation at the level of state populations was because immigrants tended to settle in states where the native population was more literate. He cautioned against deducing conclusions about individuals on the basis of population-level, or "ecological" data.

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.

Re:pwn3d

[op12]

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!

This effect is now known as Slashdautism.

Re:Finally!

[Ignignot]

While the article does say that people with highly analytical brains tend to have more Autistic children, it does not say that people with poor social skills tend to have highly analytical brains. I think it is a common fallacy around here that not knowing how to interact with other people well is some kind of badge proving how smart they are. Or to put it the slashdot way, even if you have a really fast Athlon 64 system, if you are connecting to the world with a dialup you aren't going to be able to play an online FPS well.

Re:Evolution

[E 99]

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.

But try to avoid the phrase "asthetically pleasing" when complimenting her.

Re:Evolution

[George Tirebuyer]

Early human tool development stayed stagnant for an amazingly long time. Could it be that the same genes that cause autism today also spawned technological innovations like Clovis points. The genes may have been a mutation so rare that until human populations increased sufficiently it would be missing entirely for generations. Perhaps the rise of civilization itself is the result of the genes remaining present in the populations in Sumeria, the Indus Valley, and China which simultaneously (compared to the rest of human history) developed.

Re:Evolution

[E 99]

Again the "you can't have it all" fallacy? Even if it's impossible with today's genes to be both brilliant, handsome and socially capable (which I doubt), it's not at all impossible that, over time, genes will mutate and spread so that one can be all of these.

It's not a fallacy, it's an inevitability. The things you mention, intelligence, good looks, and social skills, can only be meaningfully measured in comparison with the societal norms. To quantify, I would throw out that the terms brilliant, handsome and socially capable, are applied to say, those in the 98th or 99th percentile of those categories. Regardless of how humanity evolves in the future, the likelihood of the same person being in the high percentile in all three is necessarilly extremely low (myself being the obvious exception :-)). Maybe some future society is full of nothing but beautiful geniuses, relative to our standards. Or maybe we're that society relative to some pre-historic version of ourselves. It doesn't really matter, as people are judged by the standards of their own societies, which will always have a high end and a low end in any given measure.

Wrong Line of Research

[randall_burns]

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.

Re:pwn3d

[JourneyExpertApe]

Don't worry, it won't happen until they perfect male pregnancy.