Study: aspies superior to controls for creativity

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I'm glad I never stopped drawing... xD

I'm not sure if this applies to "all" people with Aspergers.

It's like that report that claims people with Aspergers may better understand math, but I'm awful on that subject.

I love art, but my creativity is at an all time low. I can only sketch and copy what I see. Trying to draw from imagination is very difficult for me and after over three years I'm still struggling with it.

This is a personal opinion though =x

I agree. Some aspies are highly intelligent and some are extremely creative, but there are also many (most likely the majority) who aren't particularly gifted. But we all have one thing in common: Our condition makes it much harder for us to succeed in life.

The same could be said about most groups of people with certain disorders and differences. Stephen Hawking is a genius and his health condition is probably one reason why he developed his intellect more than most people do. But does that mean ALS should be seen as a gift? Is schizophrenia a good thing because John Forbes Nash Jr. was a great mathematician and scientist, whose contributions to evolutionary psychology in later life would never have been made if he didn't suffer from a mental disorder?

In my opinion, a neurological problem is always a problem and not a gift, even if it inspires some affected individuals to greatness. For every talented neurodiverse person who succeeds against all odds, there are countless others that are much worse off than the neurotypical majority and have no special talents to make up for their handicaps.

This news just in: people with AS prefer to do stuff that interests them more than the controls.

As for the study, I think that 16 individuals are an awfully small sample group. And I don't think that the creativity of children with AS translates to adults. ASDs are characterized by neural overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested brain growth in childhood, and neural shrinking between adolescence and middle age (source).

This explains why children with AS often appear ahead of their chronological age and have a very advanced vocabulary. But this changes during puberty, when the most severe social problems manifest themselves. The results would probably be different if this study was repeated with a large sample group of a few hundred adult aspies.

They said the IQs of those in the study are all around 85. I don't think that gives quite a complete picture.

Also, where they following individuals for years, or just taking snapshots of different individuals brains who were at different points in life?

One last thing, different regions of the brain were mentioned as the ones that were actually thinning. How does the size of various brain structures compare to the control?

I need these guys to be wrong. I don't want to go into dementia in a year.

I haven't looked into their methodology yet. As for dementia, I don't think that the shrinking brain volume leads to anything severe like that. They write "By midlife, the brains of people with autism are slightly smaller than average". A slightly smaller brain size than average is nothing to worry about, imho. And "...shrinking between adolescence and middle age" suggests that this process doesn't continue after age 35-55, or however middle age is defined.

Your question regarding size differences in different brain areas reminds me of something I found when I googled for "Asperger's brain shrinking":


Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_sign ... s_Syndrome
I guess that explains why social anxiety is so common among aspies. My social anxiety did get worse over the years, to the point where I'm pretty much a shut-in and can't work anymore (I'm 40 now). But I don't have any cognitive or memory problems, so I wouldn't be too worried about the long-term prognosis.

Well, if there is NO cognitive decline due to the shrinking then I guess I could live with it.

Regarding the creativity study, all it seems to prove to me is that Aspies like to draw about what interests them, and they are good at that.