Books/materials with the basics about the causes of autism?

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P. Zombie
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Age: 30
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Today, 7:20 am

Do you know any good books, youtube videos/channels, scientific review articles or other sources? I know the basics about cognitive psychology and neuroscience, so they can be a bit technical, but not too much, so it's actually understandable :) I'm interested basicly in everything - brains, genes, psychological (cognititve) theories, developmental theories, prenatal factors, potential environmental factors etc. etc. I'm also ineterested in more general topics, e.g.:
- the reasons for changing diagnostic criteria;
- does it make sense to look for general causes of autism, or should we focus on specific autistic traits;
- is it possible to explain the whole variety of traits with a single mechanism, like monotropism;
- relations between theory of mind and double empathy problem...

For now, the best what I've found is:
- Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate - Sue Fletcher-Watson, Francesca Happé
There's also an interesting lecture by Francesca Happé on youtube, which covers parts of the book (but not much about causes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnU01HBN6zg
- The Autistic Brain - Temple Grandin, Richard Panek
- some materials from The Transmitter are good:
https://www.thetransmitter.org/autism-101/

Can you recommend some other stuff?


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Recently diagnosed with ASD, still skeptical.
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Either overthink or don't think at all - there's no middle way.


Fenn
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Today, 10:09 am

The basics about the causes of autism is that the causes of autism are somewhat unknown.

It is partly genetic and partly environmental.

That said my recommendation is:
Start with the Wikipedia but realize it may be incomplete or slightly incorrect in places. For something like autism I would expect the wikipedia article to be pretty good: collaborative authoring and fact checking in this case is likely to work well. Wikipedia page on a minor politician not so much.

Next use what you learned on the Wikipedia to read current research on google scholar. Use onelook as a dictionary meta-search engine for any jargon or unknown words. In the rare case where onelook cannot help with jargon turn back to good old google.

Pay special attention to “literature reviews” or “meta analysis” studies which will summarize many other studies.

With this context you can go to youtube or pop-science books and you will be able to spot exaggerations or fringe thinking or wishful thinking, activism is ripe with this kind of information. Activism has its place but context of actual hard science research helps to see that place for what it is: part, not all of the picture.


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ADHD-I(diagnosed) ASD-HF(diagnosed)
RDOS scores - Aspie score 131/200 - neurotypical score 69/200 - very likely Aspie


timf
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Today, 7:58 pm

Aspergers may simply be a neurological variant. A few years ago it was reclassified as a sort of autism. Classical autism was the result of brain damage or malformation. What is now called a spectrum may actually be a collection of disparate unrelated conditions.