MRI Scan might diagnose autism with 97% accuracy

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I cannot think of anything more wonderful and peaceful as hugging my kids.

I love to give and receive hugs. I wonder if that part of my brain would light up or not.

People actually hug me on a daily basis. I absolutely hate it but I oblige in a manner that (hopefully) deceives them.

This is a problem.

That is not only very funny, it is not funny too...

I hope the author will not object to me transferring her/his post here from a 2010 thread on the same topic:

nbuend
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Joined: Jul 06, 2004
Posts: 5482

11 Aug 2010, 8:39 am
Too small a group to make any such claims. And any one study needs replication many times to be sure. Irresponsible science reporting as always. (And 90% even if true leaves 1 in 10 not detected.) Also wondering which subset of autistic people are and are not represented in the study (20 people is not nearly enough for a representative sample of all known causes and types of autism. Also wonder how many women represented. AS, autism, CDD, PDDNOS, essential, complex (and how many genetic syndromes represented), standard functioning labels... even these most official categories cannot be represented in 20 people let alone more accurate categories) Really bad science reporting. Yecch. And people will believe this too. Ew. (End of quote from 2010).

I agree with that post. The standard of reporting is so deficient as to be a mockery of good science reporting, and so misleading as to be journalistically incompetent.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams

One useful thing Baron-Cohen has done in the last few years is this:

In their latest study, Baron-Cohen's team used MRI scans to look for differences in the volume of brain regions in 120 adults, split into four equal groups – men and women, with and without autism. The researchers first compared the brains of males with and without autism, then did the same for female brains. They then compared these two differences. "If autism manifests the same in both genders, these two differences should be alike," says Baron-Cohen's colleague at the Autism Research Centre Meng-Chuan Lai, "but if not, they should be different – and this is what we found."

Less-gendered brains

Some of these differences were in the size of certain areas. [b]The researchers also found that autism affected almost completely different brain regions in men and women.[/b]

The MRI claim is founded on a prejudice that all "autistic brains function is identical ways". It's piffle.

Second this. Anyway, I find this fascinating not for it's use as a diagnostic tool, but what it means about the psych. I for one don't imagine myself being hugged when I think of hugging in the abstract.

Public preconceptions about fMRI as a research tool to discover the truth about human behaviour are overconfident and ignore its limitations as an experimental tool:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013 ... uroimaging

This is where "Aspergian" traits are useful.

In order to reap results from neurological research, there must be scientists whose "special interest" is neurological research. They have to sift through mounds and mounds of seemingly unrelated data, and make sense out of it. It takes a singular focus.

This is why autism could be a useful "condition."

There are those scientists and there is a lot of debate going on in science about the limitations of fMRI and its overhyping, as it seen by that group as reductionist in extremis, and "the new phrenology". (History should alert us to that danger).

The opposing view is that it reveals answers that were inaccessible before. However those proponents ignore the challenges of reductionism and in fact most ignore the limitations altogether, even when reporting their results and discussing them.

http://develintel.blogspot.co.nz/2006/0 ... -fmri.html

That would be the death-knell of research if it's seen as being the "new phrenology." The "old phrenology" had lots of snake oil in it. People would actually knock you on the head to try to obtain a "diagnosis."

I don't agree with this. The mind is a product of the functioning central nervous system. Unless you think the mind is a supernatural thing.

My experience of Alzheimers, watching it erase my mother's mind as it ate her brain, is convincing evidence to me that the mind is a product of the brain. The comparison with phrenology is ridiculous. That was pseudoscience, but modern neurobiology is anything but. The neurobiologists whose work I have read do not think in the simplistic way critiqued here.

So this thing is based on hugs? I've known kids on the spectrum okay with hugs and stuff. I really like being hugged by my dad or cousin when I'm having anxiety. But mostly don't like to be touched at all. I mean I recoil from it. Little more dramatic than just not liking hugs. I'm sure there's plenty of NT men who wouldn't hug anyone outside of a girlfriend or wife.

You can (if you wish) consider the merits of the phrenology simile here:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/ind ... ience.html

The big issue is what, exactly, fMRI's are essentially measuring and if it was the measurers think it is measuring....

this is the actual quote re phrenology:


If we are not careful, says Marcus Raichle, considered to be one of the world’s experts on brain imaging, the technique might be viewed as modern day phrenology, (the theory developed in 1800 that claimed personality traits could be localized by bumps on the head). Already, the psychologist William Uttal wrote a critique of fMRI in his recent book called, “The New Phrenology.”

IT's a very long, woo filled jump from "the brain is more complicated and less localized than bad popular writing about fMRI would have you believe" to the mind being some mysterious "other" that doesn't really run on the brain.

A critique of excessive enthusiasm about possible applications of fMRI in the popular press does not negate useful study done with fMRI. The way this argument is constructed reminds me of the reams of twaddle written about quantum effects meaning we can have gods, wizards and magic.