I summarize these kinds of studies as "Help, we don't know what the f, but everybody expects us to know what the f, quick somebody scribble down something" and they are all over the place.
How do you define a group as not having something that is not actually psychologically defined? There is no consensus on what a daydream even is, but somehow they have used a brain scan, I'm assuming fMRI, to determine the areas that are supposed to be active but are not. Active during rest periods. How was this rest period established? I don't know about any of you, but any time I'm being tested by doctors, at no point during this process am I anywhere near something I would call "resting" so what is the metric for a rest state and how did they induce this state in the individuals?
So I sought out a more comprehensive story about the study From Medicalnewstoday which has this to say:
Quote:
-- During their resting period. Their resting network was not at a high level, as was the case with the control group.
-- When switching to the Stroop test, the autistic subjects' resting network did not shut down, as was the case with the control group.
In other words, the resting network of autistic people does not fire up or switch off - it just keeps ticking over.
So bad science reporting is bad. This gem also leaps out:
Quote:
Kennedy said it is very hard to know what autistic people are thinking when resting, when the mind is allowed to wander.
I suggest one try starting with asking an autistic person what they are thinking when resting? It might, you know, help you know what they are thinking? Are we waiting for the Mind Reading Machine which we can program to tell us they are thinking whatever we want to claim they are thinking, what is the issue here? If you specified non-communicative autistic okay, yah, sure, but uhm, how do you figure out what NT people are thinking?
How one gets from a study that shows autistics are ALWAYS daydreaming to claiming they NEVER daydream is simply astounding.
Quote:
Writing in PNAS, the researchers led by Dr Duncan Kennedy, said: "We speculate that the lack of deactivation in the autism group is indicative of abnormal internally directed processes at rest, which may be an important contribution to the social and emotional deficits of autism."
We found some stuff, we really don't know what it means, but we're going to pretend like we have an idea. We the people that don't even believe in asking the autistic what they are thinking, preferring to just claim it is hard to know. Sign me up for what this dude is selling for sure! Let's try hooking some wires up to my rest network and see if by lighting me up I suddenly become a social and emotional person to the standards of Kennedy.