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

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Dang! My message was larger than the text box, so I accidently knocked that out on the copy/paste of a different sentence. Yes, I was agreeing Sorry!

As I always say...if specialists have discovered that AS is neurological, then why is diagnosis not done by a neurologist, and with scientific testing? If it was proven scientifically for one brain, then surely they can prove it for mine too, instead of me having to make enormeous efforts to be as NTas possible, ie as persuasive as possible to NT minds, to convince a therapist that I have AS? If I have a neurological difference, then why can't that difference be checked with a neurological exam?

I think it's because they haven't yet mapped out a standard set of differences that can be used as diagnostic criteria. Each research project comes up with something a little different and the results are still pretty patchy. My daughter's MRI was normal/neurotypical and her neurologist went by behavioral criteria. (Her neurologist didn't make the diagnosis, just agreed with the psychologist's diagnosis based on behaviour.) They have to get this down to the point where they can say "X=AS" and "if X isn't seen, it's not AS". They aren't there yet.

Autism is a polygenetic condition, it is more than one single gene that causes it. The genetic requirement to develop autistic traits is typically recessive and requires environmental factors or the lacking presence of a dominant trait to replace it. Autism is the general term for a whole bunch of different possible combinations of genetics resulting in recessive genes being used to guide development. Specific different genes being present and specific different environmental factors and specific differences in parental training and formal education and foods that are eaten and bacterial infections experienced and so on and so forth all play their role.

My apologies for not having good studies to link to immediately for all of this, my friend who is in med school is busy becoming a doctor so I have to wait until I get a hold of him to have him run a MedLit search for me to track down studies. I'm left to wander the halls of google trying to find the tidbits not locked behind the wall of pay to play. I'm not prepared to start dropping thirty bucks per study I want to read so I can get the PDF, and if I did and then linked you all to my PDF or handed it out, I'm at risk of a civil suit for violating copyrights. Recent studies tend to still be locked behind the "For Medical Professionals Only" wall of being in medical journals. Even when I can get access to them, I'm only allowed to post excerpts legally.

Diagnosis absolutely IS done using neurobiologic brain scans every single day. Psychoanalysis is Old and Busted. It is Old as heck in the sense that it is so caught up in the cult of personality of a dirty old man it is having a hard time figuring out how to just admit he was full of crap about a bunch of things and recognizing where he was wrong doesn't suddenly undo the things we proved him right in. It is Busted because we have actual science proving lots of things psychoanalysis holds as inalienable truths to be just complete horse manure. Utter trash, baloney, Bad Science. I hate Bad Science, I would stab it with my Spear if I could but find its Heart.

I care about Good Science. Psychoanalysis is chock full of Bad Science. I'm not trying to disrespect the entire profession, my mother has a psychology degree herself though she chose to become a business administrator instead of a psychologist with a practice. Neurobiology is The New Hotness though.

It is the New Hotness because it is performing more Good Science. It is establishing empirical facts using observations predictions and the testing of those predictions for ability to accurately reflect outcomes. Proper diagnosis of autism should be a joint effort of a Pediatric Psychoanalyst whether they be psychologist or psychiatrist, and a Pediatric Neurologist. Or a NeuroPsychiatrist.

Last edited by Crassus on 15 Jul 2009, 8:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

What they have is significant differences from a group of AS to a group of NT. What they don't have is differences that are actually predictive of AS and NT.

When you look at the groups of AS and NT, their brains, on average, will differ significantly. But there is enough variation within those two groups that it is possible for some NT brains to look more AS than some AS brains. And the differences are not specific enough to say "AS" specifically.

Dyslexia, ADHD, and stuttering are neurological too. Those are all diagnosed by psychologists and psychiatrists. They are also detectable as average differences on brain scans, like autism is, but nonspecific enough not to be diagnosable exactly.

Fact is, the best resolution we can get on human brains is about 100 neurons, and that's when you actually open up the skull and poke around with the very newest experimental microelectrodes. With fMRI scans, the resolution is a lot worse--about a million neurons, IIRC, about 2-3 mm per pixel on the scan. If autism and other nonspecific "we know these brains are different but not enough to predict exactly how this will show itself" conditions are expressed in the small structures, we'd never know about it.

Incidentally, there are even more impressive examples of behavior differences overriding brain differences in diagnosis... It is actually possible to have a brain that looks like end-stage Alzheimer's, but not have a single symptom of Alzheimer's. Research "asymptomatic Alzheimer's." Seriously.

This either suggests that we aren't hard wired to be autistic or that our diagnostic tools (fMRI, etc) are woefully inadequate to even have a clue as to what's going on in our heads.

But then, how can they claim it IS neurological, if they don't have any conclusive neurological evidence as you guys say???

By the way, not that it means much, but wikipedia says it's not known yet whether it's neurologically-based or not.

apart from the studies which are all boring and inconclusive, i can see it is hard wired through simple deduction.

people who have down's syndrome are evident at birth. as soon as they are delivered there will be an "oh dear" said somewhere. they are hard wired.

people with clinically significant autism will be noticed to be different even at 1 month old.
there is no time for the degrading influence of unfortunate nurture to have an effect at that age,
so it is believable that the difference between autistic babies and nt ones is not an environmentally inculcated one.

all other psychological disorders become apparent only after a number of years, but autism can be spotted in newborns (i was a "sack of potatoes" as a new born and i was dropped all the time because i felt like a limp dead mass).

i also have read many articles on autism, but i prefer to quote from my spontaneous mind rather than from my memory of what i have read.

You are trapped in a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be a binary choice. It is more complex than an on off switch. It is a million on off switches that each have specific stimuli that flip them on and off and the specific combination of on off switches define the physiological basis the lifeform develops from, and then additional stimuli flip yet more switches on and off and this process continues throughout your entire life.

They have found a scientific basis for the belief that your mom having a viral infection while you are gestating can lead to the activation of dormant genes that lead to 'autistic traits'. There are other studies demonstrating a scientific basis for the belief that other autistic traits are the result of a flooding of testosterone during gestation. If this excess testosterone happens to somebody that doesn't have a couple specific chromosome contents, then it might not have any real affect, but if they have the right set up they develop better sensory acuity. Or they develop a brain structure that lies dormant until they have a seizure, and then they develop schizophrenia and sensory acuity. Or nothing happens until they catch a spirochete infection, and it leads to the activation of all kinds of crazy dormant brain structures.

Apparently my copy paste function broke for all the articles I managed to dig up for my last post. How annoying. Editing out the links now. Spend some time googling autism and schizophrenia and ocd and the links between them and the neurobiologic basis for them each, you are sure to find some interesting things. Check out NeuroPsychiatryReviews.com and read through the articles about the disorders from 2008.

There's also the drastically increased risk in twins and in siblings, so there's a huge genetic component.

The fact that autism is present from so early on does point to a neurological difference.

The fact that brain scans are different--both physically and in the activation of the neurons--between AS and NT points to neurological differences.

We already have a name for psychologically (i.e., learning/cognitive) based social skills deficits: Reactive attachment disorder. It happens in severely neglected kids. It's different from autism.

We already have a name for non-disabling preference for solitary activities: Introversion. We have a name for extreme introversion: Schizoid personality disorder. Both of those are different from autism; the existence of many extroverted autistics points to that difference.

Neuroscience is not as much of a "hard science" as people seem to think it is. It's based mostly on statistics, and the brain it studies is hard to access and differs from person to person. It's a baby science, newer even than psychology, which is pretty new all by itself. Wanting deterministic black-and-white answers about exactly what autism is and how it presents itself is a desire that's not going to be fulfilled for years yet, if ever.

That holds true... except when it doesn't. There are many cases of people diagnosed with AS who were perfectly normal infants and toddlers.

"Perfectly normal"... or, "not yet subject to developmental demands to perform the way NT children do"?

There are plenty of things that are considered "normal" for NT toddlers that are not considered normal for NT children. They expect a lot more of you once you reach school. NT toddlers have even been known to rock, handflap, and have meltdowns...

Autism is stress-responsive; we all know that. There are few conditions that aren't stress-responsive. The stress of the toddler years often seems to make it more evident; so does going to school for the first time at six, and puberty at eleven to thirteen years.

I meant that they are perceived as perfectly normal, i.e. you would simply not be able to tell by interacting with them. Sure, some AS babies have difficulty with balance, or maybe they always fall to one side. Others don't. The differences may not be perceivable until they get to be a little bit older, when the pressure to interact with peers becomes greater.

are you talking about self diagnosed people ?

if their personalities were ruined by some "unsatisfactory process of events" in their lives, then they are whatever they are as a result, but they do not turn into AS people as a result of their failures that are unrelated to autism.

I think that's how the vaccine hypothesis got its foothoold. So many babies and toddlers seemed rather similar to other babies and toddlers ...until they didn't. Many parents report the difference didn't become noticeable until later toddlerhood. The MMR vaccine is given in later toddlerhood and the rest is history.

My own daughter seemed different from other babies only in that she cried considerably more than any other baby at the playground or in the family (or in the hospital initially, for that matter). But babies cry for many reasons. The catch-all term was "colic" which meant "this baby sure does cry a lot and really hard and we have no idea why". With 20/20 hindsight I can see it was sensory issues and sensory overload. Too much world to take in. Constant crying is hardly diagnostic since it can happen for so many reasons, but retroactively it does look like a neurological difference present from birth. At the time she was simply too young to say "the lights are too bright and the noise is too loud and the feelings are too intense and why does everybody pick me up and look at me?" But that difference was there from birth.

No.


So the differences might be there from birth, but not all of the differences are going to be apparent from birth. I've also heard that the differences may not, in fact, be there from birth. Studies have indicated that rate of brain growth may have something to do with the onset of autistic symptoms. Some babies seem to be perfectly normal until the rate of their brain growth increases more rapidly than is typical (somewhere in the second to third year). Scientists are a long way from proving that atypical growth rate of the brain is a contributing cause of autism, but there at least appears to be a relationship that warrants further investigation. It's possible that autism causes atypical growth rate of the brain, too.


Ugh. I wish people would understand that correlation never implies causation.