The Autistic Me

The brain is amazing. It's both fragile and resilient. While researching written language and autism for my doctoral degree, I learned a small fraction of what scientists now understand regarding language cognition. The question I had, and one many others have, is why some autistics are good at written or symbolic language communication, but have either limited verbal abilities or are non-verbal? How can someone write and not speak? Why would someone prefer sign language or pictographs to speaking, especially if he or she can speak? The simplified answer: language is not one thing. Language that is seen is not the same as language that is spoken and heard. Symbolic language and auditory language differ. Braille involves yet another form of language cognition. Somehow, our brains manage to connect and decipher several different "languages" we experience. Most people can "read" postures, expressions, icons, symbols, colors, sounds, gestures, vocal tones, spo...

I've been sitting on this report for a month or two while I did a bit more research on the original sources and similar studies. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe autism is better described as "autisms" and that likely contributors include de novo genetic complications (sometimes called pre-natal genetic copy variation). In these forms of autism, genes replication introduces errors. This is not the genetic of heredity, a common misconception when the term "genetic" is used to describe some forms of autism. From CBS News: Children with autism have distinct facial features For the study - published in the Oct. 14 issue of Molecular Autism - researchers compared facial features in 64 boys with autism with faces of 41 typically developing boys, all 8-12 years old, with a 3-D camera system. After mapping out 17 points on faces, the researchers found significant differences between the two groups.  The study found children with autism had wider ey...

I'm glad research is finding evidence that supports my impressions of city life. This research could have implications for autism, as well. There is significant evidence that autism rates are higher in some settings, but we don't know how correlations relate to causation or other factors. Simply finding more autistics in a region doesn't mean something in the region causes autism. It could be that similar people slowly congregate. But, this study finds evidence that city life itself changes the brain. The implications are fairly important. Humans didn't live in cities of millions until recently. We did not evolve in groups much larger than a few thousand, and more often our social groups are under a thousand people. We're only emotionally wired to handle connections to 150 people or fewer. We deal with 1000 or more by connecting though our close connections. We connect beyond the 150, in other words, but we do so via networking. City Life Could Change Your Brain for...

I have written several times about the "visual" nature of my thought process. This same topic appears in various memoirs by individuals diagnosed with autism. We write about " Thinking in Pictures " and "seeing the shapes of numbers" after being " Born on a Blue Day " (to borrow from two book titles). But why do people diagnosed with ASDs think visually? How does this affect decisions and communications by autistic individuals? Brains of People with Autism Focus More on Visual Skills - US News and World Report MONDAY, April 4 (HealthDay News) -- The brains of people with autism concentrate more resources in areas devoted to visual perception, resulting in less activity in areas used to plan and control thoughts and actions, says a new study. The findings may explain why people with autism have exceptional visual abilities, said the researchers at the University of Montreal. They analyzed data from 26 brain imaging studies that were conducted over...

In Study, MRI Scan 90% Accurate Identifying Autism The full story cautions that this is merely one study, but it is interesting. From the story on CNN's website: Scientists are finding more pieces of the autism puzzle of with the help of MRI scans of brain circuitry, according to a study published Thursday online in the journal Autism Research. By scanning the brain for 10 minutes using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers were able to measure six physical differences of microscopic fibers in the brains of 30 males with confirmed high-functioning autism and 30 males without autism. The images of the brains helped researchers correctly identify those with autism with 94 percent accuracy, says Nicholas Lange, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and one of the study authors. "No one has measured what we measured," says Lange of the MRI test he and Dr. Janet Lainhart from the University of Utah developed. While previous studies using different ty...

Medical News: Autistic Children Slower to Integrate Multiple Stimuli - in Pediatrics, Autism from MedPage Today The combined responses of all the children exceeded the sum of the single responses -- an indication of multi-sensory integration. But the autistic children had less pronounced differences, the researchers said, suggesting their integration was less effective. As well, the multi-sensory integration took place within about 100 to 200 milliseconds of the stimuli in the typical children, the researchers found, but only occurred after about 300 milliseconds in the autistic children. It was a small pilot study, but once again there seems to be an indication that neurological differences are, eventually, going to be quantifiable in some forms of autism.