Why do we believe autism is "hard-wired"?

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Seconded.

And - we call it all AD(H)D.

If we'd stop calling it all AD(H)D, then would AD(H)D crease to exist or would one lucky or unlucky one of these causes be labelled with AD(H)D?

What exactly does the brain look like for it to be autism? What brain that currently comes under the label of AS or classical or PDD-NOS will never be called autism again in the future because one or several details are different from 'the real autism'? Or will the term autism be done away with completely to be replaced by brand new labels once all causes of what we currently call ASDs are known?

Excellent point. I wonder if, in cases where we can detect this brain architecture difference, we shouldn't just call typical architecture Brain Architecture A and this more autistic architecture Brain Architecture B. Then you could say that Brain Architecture B often (but not always) causes autism (the traits).

To suggest that autism is the cause of autism is a bit of a nomenclature clash (not to mention kind of confusing). Also to say that "it's all autism" isn't a helpful statement, either. I assume what is really meant by this statement is that the neurological differences in some cause a range of developmental traits commonly grouped together under ASD.

It IS a nomenclature clash that we are living out in our lives. It IS confused, a confusion we live out with our lives. People ask "What is Autism?" people ask "What makes these things autism?" Well according to who? You ask a question and I have a compulsion to seek your answer. Define your terms. Which Gospel dost thou name true? Do you want me to put on the psychoanalyst hat or the neurologist hat? Do you want me to pretend I went to med school in 1956, 1982, 1996 or 2005? Do you want me to just explain my own personal flavor of understanding how it all interconnects?

That is what I've ended up doing because nobody is defining the system, so I define it for you. I give a rationally complete statement and people slowly go well yes that is true and that is true and that is true, but what about this conflict? Well I understand that conflict to be resolved via these inductive-deductive principles. My intuition is This, and my logic supports it Thus. Then I wait for somebody to poke a hole, and figure out how we patch that (w)hole 'up', do I discard my prior axiom and establish a new one or does a rigorous support of my axiom end up with others discarding their axioms and moving to mine.

Through the thread of discussion we come to a common set of axioms we postulate, and then we reason out meanings those axioms require to be true.

It seems like a giant joke to me too, but if you are talking about the majority of medicine that is still caught up trying to understand that the DSM-IV TR version of autism exists, let lone that it has already been obsolesced.... The things we thought were true a decade ago are always Old and Busted. The latest science coming out of labs and the most complete rational understanding of that science will always be The New Hotness.

I don't really care if somebody doesn't want to admit they are hanging out in old and busted land, sometimes there is still a lot of useful things to be done by old and busted techniques that still have useful predictive power. Even if what they are basing the prediction on is flawed. Which makes them Busted. Even if they are covered in the dust of accepting them as traditionally true and not questioning that. Which makes them Old.

Ever wonder how the DSM came to be what it is? A bunch of people sit around a conference table doing what we are doing. They like to put on white lab coats a little more often than I do, but none of them have ever told me it is not possible for me to be on equal footing in that discussion. They explicitly say to me that I AM on equal footing in that discussion once they get tired of trying to find excuses why I'm not allowed to be more right than they are about something medical. "Your guesses are as good as mine, and your arguments are worth as much as mine if we are guessing and arguing from the same set of data."

I don't have any formal training in medicine. I have a special interest in understanding why things work like they do. You can't figure out why if you don't know how. I don't need to be able to hold all the formulas and equations in my head to know the most rationally complete understanding of the data. Analysts interprate the data into a form I can handle, I read the abstract they provide for a hundred different studies and via the abstract I see the shape of what the finger points at.

I see what mechanism psychoanalysis is using to divide things based on, I see what mechanism neurology is dividing thigns based on, and I see what NeuroPsychiatry is dividing things based on, all in the general sense. What does any particular member of those three groups do? some variation of those three ways, or some innovative fourth way. Who's answer are you looking for? We haven't figured out which one is more scientifically useful to everybody, so everybody uses the one they decide is most scientifically useful to them.

If the problem is that people are taking the word Hard to mean without malleableness, then perhaps the problem is easy to solve. There is no such thing as Hard Wiring is you think Hard implies Unchanging. Hard Wiring means the things that don't reset every night during the REM process. The Soft Wiring is the active space that empties out during the REM process and integrates into grey matter space. Everything not the active Now area of brain activity is Hard Wired. Hard Wiring will change due to the neural pruning process, which is directed by the stimuli of the Soft Wiring. Soft Wiring will be stimulated based on the epigenetic influence of environment upon the underlying DNA of your nature. Psychology in the form of psychoanalysis is also known as "the talking cure" and it is a form of changing the stimulus that your active space is receiving to teach your hard wiring to take a different shape. It absolutely changes peoples hard wiring every day.

Assuming that means everybody has a soft wiring in a state prepared to accept the talking cure you are prepared to hand out is asinine. Just because the last ten kids you called autistic responded well to you talking about how they need to just accept responsibility for their social issues and figure out a way to cope, doesn't mean that has any way to make any sense to the eleventh boy that sits in front of you. If you assume they are just being stubborn because they don't get it, YOU are the one being stubborn, YOU are the one who fits the clinical diagnosis of insanity. You induce that this cure is capable of working, so you deduce it will work every time, and when reality proves you wrong, you try and force reality to take it back.

What exactly does the brain look like for it to be autism? It looks exactly like a human brain, only it is autistic.

Okay after posting that I just had a realization. People don't realize what autistic means in the sense of They don't Realize what the etymology of the word autistic is. It means not in conformity with tistic averages. Au, as in atypical presentation, tistic as in data point, you have the statistical average of humanform neurology which is called NeuroTypical and you have The Au(atypical)Tistic(presentation of a data point) Autistic, that which is not in conformity with the general rule. Does this help?

I thought the root was "auto" as in "self." Wasn't the original idea that they were "stuck" in their own world and couldn't relate in some way to the outside world?

Autos being self, mind, representations of self, particular masks, fingers that point. On a mathematic chart, the unusual ones we are pointing out. The statistical range of human minds, that is outside of the norm. That which is not a statistically typical presentation of self. Why does every other brain relate to the outside world this way, and this tistic sub set of minds is an atypical presentation of autos. Those Autistics. These Autists. That which we are dividing from the other in order to label and name and take power over.

In the most basic sense the word comes from the greek word for self autos and the greek suffix for states thereof, -ismos, autismos, a state of self. We have the Neurotypical presentation of autismos, and we have the autistic, the a-tistic autismos. Why are we pointing out this particular autismos? Because it stands out against the background of the typical. Autistic Brain. Add up enough behavioral issues and you realize they are all pointing at the neurology.

OK, I agree that there are fundamental differences between the Autistic brain and an NT brain. These physical differences remain throughout our life as if we were born stroke victims.
HOWEVER, I say we can change our "selves" so that we no longer exhibit most of the Autistic traits.
For instance, I became aware early on that I has eye contact avoidance, as do most of us. I have worked very hard at not thinking about how the person talking to me has Dracula Eyes. I now don't have to consciously think about it, I make 'normal' eye contact.

Admit it, you were one of them at the time you posted this….
Quite forgivable, but in the interests of accuracy is it not better to admit that the above text was a complete mistake so those who may not know the etymological history are not confused by it?

Not at all, and in fact unlike the rest-of your comments in this thread, I would go so far as to label it counter productive.

Everything I have said in this thread and others about what autism is, has been from the understanding that autism is the things that are not neurotypical. Then people describe something that is not neurotypical and want to know if it makes somebody not neurotypical. Well not being neurotypical, in one specific trait instance, is neurotypical. The specfic individual way that a specific individual neural presentation is different from the typical range in that area, is Autism. If you have enough autistic traits that it becomes a behavioral issue, you have a behavioral diagnosis of autism.

Everything I have been arguing has been from this basic position, and I didn't realize that in itself is what people were asking about, it made sense to me over here and people kept saying well this seems confusing, but the way I was taught via brain scans to look at it was like that. I have a larger share of autistic traits than most individuals, and some of them they diagnose as specific behavioral disorders, but behavioral disorders are behavioral disorders because they present in a way that is atypical to the presentation of humanity. No matter what, I'm still a normal human being. I'm just my own personal flavor.

Autistic Spectrum, is the catch all term for pervasive developmental disorders, specified or otherwise, in common parlance.

Why is IQ such an important part of the dividing up within the spectrum? Because IQ is a metric of knowledge gathering relative to chronological age, based on the chronological age of Neurotypical brain development. Neurotypical children develop along a certain growth arc, within one standard deviation. If your arc in a category is more than one standard deviation away from the norm, it is an atypical presentation. It is useful to be able to see the difference between the ones who have a growth arc that just got stunted and will never progress beyond this point, no matter what we do they actually don't have the neural abilities we are expecting them to have because neurotypical humans have that thing. They don't have that thing, not having normal parts of the brain is what pervasive developmental disorders has always been about.

This is not the same thing as saying not having a normal or neurotypical part of the brain always means you don't have that part of the brain at all and it does not mean that you can't possible adapt the parts you do have to overcome and cope with challenges to an amazing degree. Saying that it is possible is one thing, explaining the actual mechanisms by which it is possible is another.

Maybe I learned the etymology wrong and made some mistakes, but rather than make a grandiose claim that the whole thing is wrong, why not focus on the individual parts that are wrong and move on? Why attempt to personalize it? Why turn this into an I was the person I was talking about thing, maybe I was and maybe I wasn't, are you actually making a point about something that was said that needs to be changed by pointing this out? What is the nature of the actual offense I gave, that I dared use the generic form people rather than explicitly state whether or not I was a member to the generic form?

I gave an incomplete explanation. Yes. I apologize. Every single post I make is an incomplete explanation. I have to start and end somewhere. I'm not bothering to get obsessed with tracking down the actual documentation I read that I base this stuff on, it quickly became too much, it's all too disparate for me to organize into a post without bogging down in links to giant gobs of medical jargon that require a specific mode of thinking to integrate.

I'm going to great lengths to present actual arguments for other people to challenge so I can respond to the challenges. I ask you to explain where the dissonance is between what ever you wish to suggest is the etymology, and the two, what I feel are complimentary, descriptions of the etymology I gave? I am completely wrong and at your mercy, I accept your position, now explain the right way. In the interest of accuracy, show me my mistake.

I have marked the calendar twenty five years. In the Neurotypical model of a brain growth arc, I'm more like 8. I have a really really high IQ because when they adjust for brain development arc of a chronological age I break the chart and have psychiatrists and neurologists tell me when I was the calendar age of ten years on earth, that I am an immeasurable genius. But I was like a toddler pretending to be a fourth grader, I am smart enough to fake it to deal with aversives, but the only reason I'm not a low functioning autistic might be because my parents just never forced me to do anything I wasn't ready to choose to do myself. I never got stuck in a rut, I always had two humans to make sure I didn't get myself killed and make sure that I got stronger and healthier relative to where I was the day before.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't just sometimes feel like a small child, scientific evidence says I AM a small child. Smart guys in white lab coats tell me I'm a smart child. I'm still a child. I just like trying to talk about things, it helps me get better at participating in the different things I participate in, I can't get better at it if I don't just dive in and say it. Why does everybody have to turn it into anything more than the discussion.

I'm sorry for going off topic, I just don't know where else to say this. This is what autism is. Who I am. I'm trying to learn as much as I can to understand as much as I can, to be the best person I can. Forgive me for when my I get carried away with my exuberance. It is but the words of a child, please take no offense. I really mean this literally, I hope that this is a proper forum where it is safe for me to expose this truth about myself. Just because most twenty five year olds have developed a physiological ability to do something, doesn't mean I have even reached the stage in my brain development where I begin to form that particular thing.

Since I manged to learn to deal with violent tantrums and self harm tendencies, nobody feels like I actually need to take anti psychotics any more. Now they just let me sit in my petrie dish and grow. When I say I think I'm ready for a bigger petrie dish, people help me get a bigger petrie dish. Maybe it is just me projecting, but I'm pretty sure this basic methodology actually works for every living thing, human or otherwise. Provide the basic nutrients required to grow, and let it grow.

Do I need to keep following the bread crumbs backwards and talk about why the greeks used the word auto to mean self and the word ismos to be a state of being? Do we have to start talking about latin and hebrew before it counts as not a complete mistake? People who don't know how etymology works are already confused. Emanio Scientia est a Fossor Venatus.

In regards to the whole "social skills" aspect, don't forget that we can only learn to the extent of what to say. Beyond that, not really.

Every time I go into the cash office at work I can tell; i can tell all the NTs around me are sending a feel-good buzz or something to each other, and I'm just not "registering" it; it's as though I'm a 40-year-old stock broker getting information where a bunch of teenagers are hangin' out and talkin' about the upcoming Snoop Dogg concert. Well, not exactly, but you get my point.

The fact is, while I can learn the words, that vibe is never gonna register..'cause I'm Autistic. It makes about as much sense to me as if someone were to start insulting me in Arabic.

Is my decision to not bother wasting time dramatically improving my verbal skills my own choice? Yes. Is not being able to "register" the vibes I'm supposed to receive, or give off those vibes either my choice? No it is not.

Does it bother me? Well gee....considering half the folks in the cash room make the same cheezy sex jokes I heard when I was 16...I...I think I'm good, thanks!

Because you've presented this as a universal truth it can't only be wrong. Yes, some autistic individuals can mask their traits, yet there are there are others who cannot. These things must be decided on an inidvidual base by the individual and not be observers, because honestly... the observers have no idea at all. Many autistic individuals come on wrong planet saying they have mastered the art of eye-contact and assuming because they can, everyone else can. This could not be further from the truth.

It's like my colour blindness, i will always be colour-blind. Ironically i can hide the traits of me being colour-blind, by learning by rote the colours of certain objects, and remembering the likely-hood of certain shades being certain colours and using contextual clues to guess the correct clolour. But i will always be colour-blind, i will make mistakes at the best of times and in new situations i will be put bluntly... embarrassing. No matter how good i get at pretending i am not colour-blind, i will never be able to operate a train or fly a plane. When that big fat red warning light comes on, i would not see it. If the train really needed to stop, i would not know to stop it. If the plane needed to land straight away, i would not know this.

How would you suggest that someone who suffers from prosopagnosia, photophobia and mainly uses their peripheral vision would learn to make eye contact?

Forgive my bluntness, but there is no maybe involved.


That whole post is wrongness and full of untrue.Why not simply retract that one post with the potential to mislead and move on.

It’s rather mystifying that you prefer to produce all these words and pretend some personalization nonsense when all that-is asked is that you are clear for the benefit of others, that the contents of that one isolated post are mistaken, and just not true.

It’s an isolated incident, could happen to anyone, but intentionally being misleading about it’s accuracy to avoid admitting one rather little mistake, is, well, less than admirable. Surely you can see that? With great persuasive power comes great responsibility.


No, it was not incomplete it was wrong. It’s not that you left out stuff, it’s that what you stated is factually wrong and actively misleading. No part of the origins of the word autistic have anything to do with "atypical" or "data points". That’s not incomplete it’s flat out counter factual.


You claim that the initial segment of the word refers to atypical and the end segment to data points or some such. No part of the word refers directly to or derives from either of these words specifically, or the general concepts described by them.

The explanation in the latter post after someone else challenged you on the earlier inaccuracies, comes closer to the truth (without fully connecting with it), and might be acceptably described as merely incomplete, but the assertions in the earlier post are not incomplete, they are more simply just plain wrong.

The word autistic derives from the work of Paul Bleuler, (and was constituted around the Greek use of Autos to refer to self), and was used by Bleuler to refer to characteristics he was describing for schizophrenia (evidently he also coined that word too). The stuff you describe in your second post about NT Autos and Autistic Autos was not in any way relevant to the etymology of the word autistic either, although does have the benefit of not being as wildly inaccurate and baseless as claims the etymology has something to do with the word atypical and some fluff about data points.


What I did was quite truthfully point out the fact that the entire contents of one particular post are completely baseless and inaccurate (this seems a reasonable and non personalized element of reasonable discussion and exploration to me) and you responded to this by accusing me of personalizing the-issue, asking me what offense you had committed, claiming to be at my mercy,etc, before rather perversely asking why others than yourself cannot just stick to the discussion. I respectfully submit that it is you who have chosen to personalize my comments in your own perception and it is you who is choosing to go beyond the discussion with all this nonsense.


Exuberance is fine, some might argue few things are finer, but it does not prevent you from saying “woops, got that one wrong, I retract the content of that one little post” does it?


Crassus you are being dishonest in making such a statement. You are posting as though the contents of your initial post about the etymology were incomplete rather than actively making claims that are factually wrong. The etymology of the word autism has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the word atypical, and claiming it does, is not incomplete, it’s just plain wrong. Refusing to admit this while making none to complimentary and utterly baseless accusations about me personalizing the issue in an attempt to cover up your error, does you-no credit whatsoever.

Straw-man bashing ill becomes you and denigrates us both.As for people being confused, intentionally spreading misinformation just to avoid admitting an error will not help resolve that, which brings us right back to my initial concern.

I have to agree with Pandd on this one, Crassus. Arguing that "autism" is related to word such as "atypical" and "tism" is sort of like arguing that "pedophile" has is related to words like "pedestrian" because children use their feet to walk because they don't know how to drive. You can make the argument, but I can guarantee you that the original application of the word "pedophile" had nothing to do with driving.

Anyways, let's move on, please. Too many great points have been made for this thread to stall out over something like this.

it is easy to correctly deduce the etymology of "aut-ism".

you did not report that your statement was a "deduction of your own".
you reported it as if you had learned it from an infallible source.
you may think that your deductions are infallible, but i am surprised at your absence of simple recognition of roots of words in light of your purported learnedness and intelligence.

but i thought you may be aware of something i am not, so i googled '"au" prefix' and "au atypical" and "define au" etc and found no trace of reference to "au" being associated with atypicality. likewise, i found no reference to "tistic" being associated with "data point".

if there is any logic behind your reasoning that "tistic" has to do with data, then it may come from associating the second syllable of the word "statistic" with the meaning of "data".
if that is the case, then it is also incorrect at a superficial level because "statistic" is not an adjective of the non existent noun "statism".
"autistic" is an adjective of the noun "autism". "statistic" is a noun.

you must have seriously underestimated the intelligence of the members on this site to post an unresearched and clueless assertion of yours as if you were quoting gospel fact.

it is possible that you associate with people about 10 IQ points below you (just a figurative way of saying "slightly less bright" in this context) and you dazzle them with your verbiage.

i will be interested to watch how others here will "check" (as in chess) you at every ill considered turn in your transcripts.

i myself can not be bothered, but even i was astounded at the silliness of your post that i quoted.
it was spectacularly humiliating for you i guess. maybe as you tried to back pedal, you found the grip on your tread was not sufficient to halt your self imposed momentum in the direction of your erroneous and rash assertions.

"conclusion" must precede "conviction". if it is the other way around, it is madness.

b9, no need to beat up on the guy. We all have our areas of strengths and weaknesses. He made an honest mistake, even if he is reluctant to admit it. Who likes to admit that they're wrong?

Let's please just move on.

I don't know if you all realize this, but Crassus seems to speak mostly in metaphor. I don' think he was providing us with a literal etymology, but rather giving us, if this makes any sense, a statistical definition. It didn't really bother me.