neobluex wrote:
A cure will improve your social skills and your cognition. It will be easier to develop cognitive empathy (ToM), and you won't be "overstimulated" so easily. You will still have your "special" interests, but they'll be less obsessive.
We already have that. It's called "therapy". Also, "growing up".
There's really nothing more effective for treating autism than simply learning useful things. When you learn something, you physically change your own brain. That's why you are a different person now than you used to be when you were small. It's why your autistic traits as an adult are probably milder than they were when you were a toddler.
Treatments that help you learn might be useful. For autistics with ADHD, for example, stimulant medication can make it easier to learn.
But forcibly re-wiring a person's brain is a different thing. Instead of shifting things around to make room for new stuff, things would have to get destroyed. Anything that forces it to go faster than "learning speed" for you would mean destroying parts of who you are.
Now, if you're talking about improving autistic symptoms, we already have that. That's treatment. Some medications and many environmental changes can make it easier to learn. There's no substitute for the natural brain changes that come with acquiring new skills, and there never will be unless we learn to force those changes to happen too quickly to preserve your identity the way natural learning does.
By the way, d'you know why you can't remember much from before you were two years old? It's partly because your brain was changing too fast to keep a hold on old memories. When you were four, you were probably able to remember what happened before you were two, but by now, you can't. If you were to change someone's brain even as fast as it changes in infancy, the same thing would most likely happen... So there's a limit to how fast you can make changes, and that limit is not too much more than the learning you are capable of now, as you are.
06 Aug 2013, 10:59 am
