my unified theory of autism

[gusl]

There's a lot of research supporting the idea of 'underconnectivity' in autistic brains. On the cognitive side, there are those who talk about "weak central coherence", supported by the fact that autists seem to be very good at certain local perceptual tasks like formal logic, musical pitch perception¹, and geometrical pattern-finding (there's no interference from the other brain parts!)... but bad at putting them together in a productive way.

Another very broad idea, which I think is one of the essential things about autism is executive dysfunction: a difficulty of revising plans, changing one's mind, multi-tasking, etc. This is also what gives them the literal-mindedness: they find it hard to disconnect from the initial, salient interpretation (which is almost always the literal one), and it also explains motor awkwardness (poor planning, coordination), and maybe their tendency to get overwhelmed (inability to multi-task). As far as I know, the only neurological evidence for this idea are studies that show lower frontal activation.

It's not clear how these two pictures of autism are related. Maybe the "central coherence" is necessary for executive function to work well: when the manager is weak, the specialists will work independently from each other.

Symptoms not explained by the above pictures:
* stimming

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^{1 Pamela Heaton - Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism}

Comments

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

You might have it backwards...

Consider the othr side effects of brain rewiring. Why are some people very very good at chess? Etc.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I don't follow your objection.

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

Autism is a collection of problems, loosely connected. The source of the problems might be completely unconnected in fact.

The brain can have many problems that manifest themselves in what we call autism. And it might manifest itself in something unrelated.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

The fact that all these traits ("problems") tend to cluster together (into what we call "autism") means that they must be causally connected somehow.

Is your point that what we call "autism" could in fact be several different disorders (whether clusters, or forming a continuum) that are indistinguishable to our current scientific instruments? If so, the fact that these disorders are similar to each other means that they are causally connected.

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

That does not follow. You are treating biology as if it is computer science. And even in computers, this is not always true.

Blindness can be caused by diabetes, a poked out eye, cataracts, etc. None of these have anything to do with each other, but we call them all “blindness.” If we test for it we find people bumping into objects, not recognizing loved ones, etc.

Arthritis is a term we use to describe pain in the joints. It can be caused by inflammation of the points, nerve damage, etc. They all have absolutely nothing to do with each other, it is a catch all word.

Laryngitis is a word which roughly means, “your throat does not work as expected” the causes can be viral, bacterial, and physical trauma. They have nothing to do with each other.

So if you are trying to say that autism has something to do with the brain, as opposed to the big toe on the left foot, then I guess I am forced to agree with you. You have clearly identified the area of the body this magical “autism” emanates from.

If you are correlating the weak connections of the brain to Autism, then you have effectively told me that your propensity to knock into objects is clearly caused by some sort of blindness. I can add to your research and tell you that I have been both diagnosed HFA, and that I have a weak connection between my left and right hemispheres. This also manifests as a group of neurosis such as intolerance to noises (clicking tapping and random sounds). The fact is, autism in my case is probably no more accurate than the three words I gave you above.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

So yes, blindness can have different, independent causes. Yes, there are many ways for something to break. Maybe this is also the case for autism (in this case, one or more brain functions are broken).

But there is a sense in which the cause doesn't matter, because all people we call "blind" have a lot in common: namely they can't see, and suffer all the consequences that come with it. So "blindness" is a functional description, rather than a developmental one.

One difference between blindness and autism is that autism is a developmental disorder. But it could still be the case that different things caused it. The important difference is that we mostly understand how blindness causes its symptoms. We all agree that:

not-seeing --CAUSES--> bumping into things

even if there may be multiple and mysterious causes for not-seeing. In fact, we diagnose blindness on one sole factor: whether or not you can see! This variable (i.e. whether or not you can see) is what I would call the "fundamental cause" of blindness (if we understand "blindness" to mean not just blindness itself, but everything that goes with it... I realize that I'm shifting the meaning here).

But for autism, we have no such thing: we have not yet found the "fundamental cause". This is because, unlike "blindness", this variable is something about the brain's development, which is hard to observe. (You can easily test with 100% certainty whether someone can see through behavioral tests; but you can't easily test whether a person is autistic with 100% certainty: you don't even know what variable to test for.)

We (everyone) have a unified theory of vision, with which we can easily explain why the following traits cluster together:
* bumping into things
* owning a dog
* having a developed sense of hearing

The explanation is: these people can't see!

But we (not even the best scientists) don't yet have a unified theory of cognition, with which we can explain why autistic people behave in autistic ways (i.e. we can't explain why those symptoms tend to cluster together).

We can try to connect some parts, to understand how some traits may be caused by other traits. This is what my "unified theory" tries to do.

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Thanks for sharing your data point. How did you get your inter-hemisphere connectivity measured, and why?

Which 3 words did you mean? Did you mean the 3 facts: diagnosis, connectivity, neuroses?