kraftiekortie wrote:
Have you studied Courchesne?
Bingo, that's it. That was one of the references I tried to google for, but did not hit the right keywords. Thanks.
Gene expression altered in postmortem autism brainshttps://www.spectrumnews.org/news/gene-expression-altered-in-postmortem-autism-brains/... Most of our neurons are born while we’re still in the womb. Excess neurons are pared away during the second and third trimester and soon after birth until babies have the final correct number. ... Courchesne says the findings suggest that the excess number of cells his group has recorded in the prefrontal cortex in people with autism is linked to both processes: cellular overgrowth and lack of proper pruning or programmed cell death. ...The new study from skin cells points more clearly to the excess of neurites. There are many pathways to autism: excessive number of neural cells, excessive number of neural connections (synapses, dentrites, etc.), stronger connectivity, decreased pruning rate, etc. When you go one step down into genomics, the situation turns even more chaotic. Autism is polygenic: there is no such a thing as "the" autistic gene. Once you understand that, you'll see that "renormalization" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization_group) is the only valid framework to understand autism. Whenever you have renormalization, you will have "universality" phenomenon. Renormalization is all about convergence to some final "fixed points" in the configuration space, regardless of where your start points might be. So, when some people keep saying "each child is different, blah blah blah..." I can only shake my head. The difference is at the level of the location of the dewdrops (meaning focus centers), which is governed by chaos theory. It's pretty much the same as trying to predict the location of dewdrops on a leaf: you can't. But, there is no difference as to the mechanism of autism: that part is completely universal. That part simply says: dewdrops will roll down the leaf and gather around its lower points. The fact that people cannot tell the two level of concepts apart is frustrating, and that is also why they can't reach the right solutions. I have one and only one tool to solve all the problems of autism: modulation. Autism, to me, is one single problem, with one single solution. Elementary, my dear Watson.
(In renormalization it is also a given that some interactions will be suppressed: those are known as irrelevant operators, while some other interactions will be enhanced: those are known as relevant operators. So, it's no surprise that autistic children often are less verbal or social. Those should have never been the focus of attention of people: we should instead pay attention to the enhanced areas of the children: their visual-manual skills, their special interests, their stims. If you understand renormalization, you will know that for the suppressed interactions, there will be the enhanced counterparts. People are all too short-sighted to focus on the shortcomings of these children, while neglecting to develop them from their strong points. We already have an analogy from the "Second Law of Thermodynamics": the entropy in closed systems can only increase. Water will flow downstream, air will expand into empty regions. There is one single direction of propagation. The funny thing is, all the "therapeutic" approaches towards autism want to work against this direction from the "entropy law." I mean, how much nuttier can people be?!)
25 Jan 2019, 3:23 am
