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Oxford Professor Taken To Task For Linking Internet Use To Autism
esocid writes with excerpts from a piece written by Ben Goldacre of The Guardian: "Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. ... Two months ago the same professor linked internet use with the rise in autism diagnoses (not for the first time), then pulled back when autism charities and an Oxford professor of psychology raised concerns. ... When I raised concerns, she said I was like the epidemiologists who denied that smoking caused cancer. Other critics find themselves derided as sexist in the media. If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening, and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed. ... I think these serious scientific concerns belong, at least once, in a clear scientific paper. I don't see how this suggestion is inappropriate, or impudent, and in all seriousness, I can't see an argument against it."
A disproportionate number of people who are obsessed with video games score high on the ASD. These aren't controversial ideas.
Causation is different, not so much for smoking and yellow fingers. Nutter's blathering aside, the real question is:
Are video games harmful to people who score high on the ASD?
although you might be tempted to apply that question to several other groups.
Its just plain nuts to pretend a link doesn't exist (although that hasn't stopped climate deniers), the important bit is 'what is the effect', 'how do we mitigate it', and 'how certain are we of the linkage'. The rest is for dingbats.
will be for a good decade or so, one of these illnesses that people will blame or all sorts of mysterious "evils" that we experience in every day life.
Lead in petrol, mercury in the sea, vaccines, internet, WiFi, video games, contraceptive pills, pesticides, radon, highway noise, electrical cables, plastic soft drink bottles.... There'll always be some crazy self-promoting dickhead trying to get some publicity for himself with his stupid theory.
It's a natural human response to want to find the cause of something. That's why gods were invented (it doesn't have to be a rational cause). It's also why these theories occur around illnesses that are down to pure chance or at least not currently explained. You don't see many people blaming their chlamydia infection on aluminium pots, because it's well established what causes that disease! So things like lupus, other autoimmune conditions, cancer (not lung cancer), autism, tend to attract these kinds of lies.
But just because it's human nature give Baroness Susan Greenfield a reason to abuse her position with crap like this. Shame on her. She should know better. I hope she loses her job for making up bullshit (and purposely difficult to disprove bullshit) like this. She's meant to be a scientist, not a self-promoting celebrity.
Tourettes syndrome FUCK YOU and similar FUCKETY fuck fuck problems. We all know FUCK that you know fuck face. Next thing they'll be saying the Internet causes FUCK problems with people's ability to interact in a FUCK face to FUCK face context. FUCKERS.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Dementia is no one single illness or condition, it is a blanket term used for any condition that affects normal cognitive functions. The way the original statement was made was just as scientific as the blanket statements about 'hysteria' in women at the end of the 19th century. I'm surprised that someone who holds such an esteemed position in academia would apply such a crude label to a problem, real or otherwise. Perhaps the Baroness will recommend which of the four humors need to be drained in order to cure this dementia, or if trepanation is in order to relieve the heat from the brain.
On a related note, there is substantial evidence to support the high percentage of insanity amongst the noble houses of Europe due to centuries of inbreeding.
Without reading the article, I reasonably expect this is the reason for "games, internet, or some other couch potato activity increasing autism..."
- Many people who we would usually call geeks or nerds have a topic fetish, by removing other distractions they can focus on that. Autistic individuals tend to do the same, they focus on specific topics and are rather anti-social in situations that have nothing to do with their topic fetish. -
But you see, you can classify pretty much everyone as having some autism spectrum disorder (oh god aspergers, absolutely nobody really has that) because they want a label and excuse to be dysfunctional and anti-social and remain on welfare.
On the latter half of the 60 minutes program with the Steve Jobs Biography stuff, they were talking about how iPads can improve REAL autistic individuals ability to communicate (they don't speak.) They showed near the end that the brain of someone with autism has a "kink" or "bend" near the base of the brain responsible for speech. You can learn to speak if this area is "broken", but the brain wires more "capacity" to it. You can't say games cause brain damage, hence autism, so directly linking it is absurdity. Autism is a genetic "programming" bug that mis-allocates brain neurons because of less bandwidth availability. Speech is apparently low priority on our ability to survive. An analogy is that a regular brain has a 64bit address bus to the CPU, I/O and RAM, but an autistic individual has only a 32bit bus to the I/O, so more latency is the result.
Autistic individuals can actually do work, they just require work that is "brain busy" like sorting/organizing things that fits their interests. Because they become distracted if their eyes are taken off the work, it has to be something that is easily focused on.
Or at least that is what I got out of the program. I'm not a doctor, and I don't pretend to be one.
Well I know anecdotes aren't evidence but my boys were practically born with a controller in their hands and an Ethernet cable in their laps, one is kicking ass in premed, has a wonderful GF, and is generally a hell of a great guy and the younger is trying to decide whether to go with his love of cooking or his love of computer art, helps out his elderly relatives,hates having a dime spent on him because he always thinks there could be good done with the money, and is also a hell of a nice guy.
Both of them have been on the net practically since they could walk (I had the PCs set to where they would only go to approved kids sites at the time of course) and both have been models of trustworthiness and never had any problems as far as autism or anything else. of course i treated them as intelligent human beings that deserve to be talked to and not down to and was more than happy to sit there with them and explain how things worked, from how data is turned from analog into digital and finally is drawn upon a screen to how a packet is formed and where it goes when they click the button.
And THAT, that right there, i think is the REAL problem. too many have turned to PCs, DVDs, game systems etc as cheap babysitters rather than as useful devices that can help their child learn. I would let the boys visit their friends growing up and when I would pick them up it always amazed and saddened me how many households didn't even have a single book in them, and the kids were given every kind of electronic junk they could possibly want as long as they left the grow ups alone and there was practically NO interaction between parent and child unless the parent had some order to bark at them like clean up their room.
So I don't think the problem is the machine per se, but the parents simply not stepping up and being parents. Parenting is a damned hard job but if you want a child to grow up into a responsible smart young person you just gotta put in the time. Hell I'm probably down about 3 years sleep and lost more than one GF because she gave me an ultimatum of the boys or her and I told her where the door was, but now that I see two happy young men starting out into the world i think it was worth it. The net is a tool, not a babysitter, simple as that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Let's get something straight -- she is not crazy, she is a MEDIA WHORE. Just like Andrew Wakefield before her, and many others. If she were crazy, I could just shrug my shoulders and move on. But this is sooo much worse than that -- a calculated, cold-hearted misinformation campaign that is designed to use irrational fears in parents to her advantage, most likely causing a lot of harm to children in the process.
There aren't many news stories that get me angry; this is one of them.
weinersmith