This is getting annoying, really annoying.

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How can you make a statement like that based on what he said?

To clarify, I didn't mean I actively attempt to behave like a child, nor that the passing I was talking about was a deliberate attempt to fit in. I meant that many of my oddities are more acceptable as oddities in children rather than adults. (Although, never acceptable to other children, whose standards are incredibly stringent.) For instance, one thing I recall vividly is people thinking it 'cute' (even though definitely unusual) when I curled up into a ball at one age, 'pathological when I curled up into a ball three years later and people were trying to figure out why I did things like that as if it was some kind of catastrophe. My actions in that case did not change a single bit over those three years, but other people's expectations that I grow into 'the type of person who does not do things like that' changed massively.

(This is also, I think, what happens in some cases where parents see 'regression' in infants. What they often are really seeing, are for instance, lack of speech and language comprehension in an infant who isn't expected to respond that way, and then lack of speech and language comprehension in a toddler who is expected to respond that way. Calling that a regression is like walking past a house and claiming that the house is moving past you, but a lot of people honestly don't notice that someone's simply failing to change in a certain area, rather than actually losing anything.)

Who says this? Mental age has always been presented to me as pure statistical abstraction, not an actual stopping of brain development in some area.

anbuend, got you.

I know some people attempt to behave like a child in order to fit in, as they find that it creates a way for them to receive attention, and said attention [which is usually positive] is far better than what they received before. So, they'll continue this; it makes sense for some people to do this.

Mental age, which would best be seen as emotional maturity in relation to Autism, is littered around clinical papers. Of note, this is generally in appearances, i.e., people behaving like a child of a set age, and always behaving like that (hence, if one looks at it from the "damaged" perspective, one can say that the development stopped here; this is one side, however). Now, other parts in Autism seem to develop normally (again, this is if one sees Autism as "damage"), so there's parts that are far more mature and developed in relation to the emotionally immature behaviour.

On the surface, it makes sense, and it's good when professionals see it this way, as they then can see that expectations of us should be of how we behave, rather than our mental age based on an IQ score.

For me, I'm far closer to 7 than 27, and if someone expects things of me as if I were 7, then we'd all be happy. If people expected things of me as if I were "really" 27, problems arise, and no one is happy then. I also behave like I'm about 7, and I don't feel any differently now compared to then.

it is recognised that AS is a developmental delay. so to answer your question..."who says this" the answer is...Hans Asperger.

from this ,observations have been made and inferred of AS individuals' mental age being lower than their chronological age.

To add, this neurologist talks of it here in her speech on Autism (AS/HFA mainly):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgw8rYNTGno&feature=user[/youtube]

(It's around 14 minutes.)

No, classifying something as a developmental delay just means that a person does certain things, or appears to do those things, later than average. It does not necessarily mean a person is considered to actually physically have a piece of brain that is just like the average younger child's piece of brain.

Mental age has a very specific meaning within psychology. It is not literal. It refers to statistics, and particularly the statistics used in IQ testing. By that standard of mental age, the average of people diagnosable with AS would have one slightly higher than usual, since the normal cutoff for AS is a 70 IQ (whereas there's no bottom cutoff for "people in general"). (This is not a statement of superiority, it's just that when you average everyone between, say, 30 and 150, and then average another group of people who're all between 70 and 150, you get two different numbers.)

But it is now generally recognized that a 20-year-old with an IQ score saying they have a "mental age" of six, has a brain totally different from a six-year-old. Their brain is not stalled at the age of six, they just have certain skills in common with what is average for six-year-olds. A 6-year-old with a "mental age" of 20 is known not to have a brain at all consistent with what 20-year-olds' brains look like either. The "mental age" of six on an IQ test just means that if you took all the six-year-olds of any sort that you could find, then the average six-year-old would score the same. So would some three-year-olds (whose brains would not be the same as six-year-olds), so would some twelve-year-olds (whose brains would also not be the same as six-year-olds), so might some non-human animals (whose brains would not at all be the same as any six-year-old human anywhere), etc.

Because of this, "mental age" is a term that has been falling out of favor, precisely because people who don't know what it means have taken it literally and believed it means a person's brain is like the brain of someone of that age, rather than that they perform on a specific test the same as the average person of that age performs on the same test.

And because I'm aware of that, as well as being someone who keeps up on more autism literature than most people (and have never once seen anyone claim that an autistic person's brain is physically divisible up into parts that develop like the brains of people of a whole lot of different ages -- I have only seen that sort of thing claimed as an extremely abstract way of discussing skill unevenness, never actually an assertion about brains), I am really curious who says this, in the actual field of neurological research on the brain. (If it's actually said, I'll be interested to read it. Edited to add: I can't get the video to play. Can you cite studies that show brains developing in the manner I describe?)

Seconded. Since we're making this a matter of expertise, what is your own FLM? On what basis do you make this judgment? Would you mind sharing this seemingly invisible criteria?


M.

Last edited by Jenk on 04 Oct 2008, 7:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

What?

What are you trying to say really?

So I have no right to get just even a tad bit annoyed that people who aren't even sure or not that they have aspergers are going around misleading others?

Isn't that something commonly brought up in autistic communities? False representation in the media oh but it's okay now because at least it's not someone from the other team.

Also what the hell does neurotypical really imply? I don't understand how someone can make up a word, apply a definition to claim all that aren't autistic are neurotypical because neurotypical, the word itself implies that those who have no problems whatsoever functioning in society or leading independant lives...basically normal.

When I think of neurotypical person, I do not think of someone who is bi-polar, schizophrenic, ADHD, Autistic etc...

When I think of neurotypical, I think of people who would label the labels above as freaks and outcasts.

P.S

If you decide to delete your comment, I will edit this comment to exclude yours but with brief comments so people will understand what I was responding to.

Last edited by Meowpurr on 04 Oct 2008, 7:37 am, edited 4 times in total.

i think your confusing the two an inference is made between developmental delay and mental age it doesn not mean the two are the same , but people will equate the two. i have quoted asperger as developmental delay means, in his studies that certain mile stones in development were not reached in his observations and there APPEARED to be delayed development in certain areas with no delay in speech.

for neurobiological development if it is of interest try : Autism vol 11 p. 557.
The smallest possible processing module of neurons in the cortex is called a minicolumn- a vertical arrangement of cells that seem to work in a team. small minicolumn are seen in people with Aspergers syndrome and autism which may allow for better signal detection and can explain hyperfocus in some individuals with AS.

Further reading can be seen from Witelsons work in 1998 who studied Einsteins brain and found that the parietal lobes were 15% wider than average giving it a more spherical shape. Einsteins parietal lobes symmetery lead Witelson to speculate that this brain structure may have been imnportant for spatial and reasoning skills.

For research into an ageing brain and the studies of age , build up of vascular damage and nero longevity try :
Neurobiology of aging vol 29, p1127.

if you want an explanation of heightened connectivity between different sensory areas in the brain try : Neuron vol 48, p.509.

for different theories on autism try Markhams work in Frontiers in Neuroscience vol 1. p.77

Markhams work suggests a fifth theory on autism and is of interest if you read a lot on the subject.

It is your perrogative to be upset about misrepresentation. I think you should address it to the individual. This thread inadvertently chastised undiagnosed individuals who attempt to relay their experiences to others. I wouldn't as it makes me too anxious, though I would not openly judge someone else for a poor portrayal and rally people to do the same (likely not what you intended.)

Last edited by Jenk on 04 Oct 2008, 8:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

anbuend,

They say that a breakdown in the connectivity of the brain (certain areas process certain things, and they're then connected to the frontal lobe for the final working out of), is a possible reason for Autism. Now, if parts of the brain don't actually communicate with other portions, they're then stagnate/disordered compared to those who have a brain that talks to each part as it experiences the world around it.

I don't have any links, but I doubt the journals and papers would be that hard to find (it's in neurology rather than genetics/psychology).

It's social immaturity that I mean, rather than that IQ thingy (which doesn't do much at all); if one has a part of their brain that controls social functioning (or multiple parts that come together, but since they can't, all of the information is sitting around doing nothing but confusing the person), and if this part can't send its information on for processing, it is going to manifest as immature/inappropriate behaviour.

Whether this is right or not, I don't know, but I know that people with ASDs are socially immature; it's one explanation.

SHOOT, I didn't get to respond to the version where you said "I basically read the thread and thought, their arguing over representation, when most people haven't ANY sort of conception of Autism outside of builds towers, rocks, doesn't speak and I praise their courage.". I will anyway, I think THAT was your point anyway.

I think some just don't want people to make it harder on them by upsetting the status quo. MANY here autism, and they figure EVERYTHING is a mess. A parent might have been pitied for his or her plight. The idea that autistic people would even communicate over computer systems would seem ludicrous. NOW things have been widened to where people have to ask. The child could be dumb, or a genius. They may be in either kind of special school. They may have NO selfhelp skills, or be outright fastidious to a fault. So autism doesn't have the connotation it once had. Some once thought autism was just a new way of saying MR! NOW, some think it is a new way of saying geek. It really is interesting how things change.

BTW I am not diagnosed with AS, but I HAVE personally met a few that are, and feel I have AS.

Last edited by 2ukenkerl on 04 Oct 2008, 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

I saw a psycho when...7 (20 years ago), and as soon as he found out that I had a high IQ, he just said that this kid doesn't want to learn. I was just as "Autistic" then, no eye contact, no emotional inflection, no facial expressions and gestures, a need for routine, no talking unless I was prompted, etcetera; since I didn't fit the definition of "Autism" then (MR and nonverbal after 6 or so), there was nothing wrong with me (even though I couldn't read and write).

Yes, things do change.

I can't be bothered going back through the ten pages of reading this thread.

However I would like to comment, before Attwood changed over to his current site, or maybe it was in one of his books, he comments that if people self diagnose it is quite likely they do have Asperger's.

Having said that it is quite a different experience between being self diagnosed and then going down the track of getting a professional diagnosis as an adult. It really turned the way I saw myself "upside down". I even went through some sort of "regression" as I have said on another thread.