Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article is a refinement in the "autism is a neurological condition" theory. There is, of course, much debate about what exactly autism is. Various people will contend it's a medical problem, a neurological difference, or in some special cases, "doesn't exist at all." While much of this is semantics and depends on how many symptoms you decide are "autism," the fact remains that there is a neurological component to whether someone's autistic or not.
Our past understanding of neurological disorders is that a specific part of the brain might be damaged or malfunctioning. There are some really interesting cases of people with severed corpora collosa (singular: corpus collosum) being able to simultaneously draw two entirely different things, one with each hand. The corpus collosum is the part of the brain that connects the left and right halves. It's sometimes surgically cut to preserve a patient's life, such as when they suffer repeated, massive seizures.
There's also the story of Phineas Gage, the man who survived a railroad spike flying through his skull but suffered major personality changes as a result of all that brain damage. The part of the brain most affected was the prefrontal cortex, which is thought to contain our personality and some memory capabilities. Interestingly, it appears the personality changes may have been temporary. Presumably the wonders of neuroplasticity kicked in and his brain rewired itself as best it could. He lived another 12 years and apparently returned to at least some kind of normal life.
Instead of pointing to a specific part of the brain and saying, "there, that's what makes you autistic!" it appears that it's more a question of which parts are connected how well. This is a step forward from Dr. Grandin's discussion of the specific parts of her brain that are larger or smaller in her book The Autistic Brain. While individual differences absolutely exist, if the brain isn't well-connected to a specific part, it won't perform that part's functions as well as a neurotypical person's brain would.
I laughed a bit when I read, "Dr. Astle said that one implication of their work is that it suggests that interventions should be less reliant on diagnostic labels." Unless you're an insurance company or new/haven't been paying attention to this sort of thing, this is staggeringly obvious. To quote Dr. Stephen Shore for the umpteenth time, "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." Autism is a trashbin diagnosis, and it spans a lot of different people with a lot of different needs, symptoms, and personalities. Trying to insist on a treatment for a patient without regard for their actual symptoms is stupid.
At any rate, I was pleased to see this study, and hope further research will develop from their findings.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
Today's article is a refinement in the "autism is a neurological condition" theory. There is, of course, much debate about what exactly autism is. Various people will contend it's a medical problem, a neurological difference, or in some special cases, "doesn't exist at all." While much of this is semantics and depends on how many symptoms you decide are "autism," the fact remains that there is a neurological component to whether someone's autistic or not.
Our past understanding of neurological disorders is that a specific part of the brain might be damaged or malfunctioning. There are some really interesting cases of people with severed corpora collosa (singular: corpus collosum) being able to simultaneously draw two entirely different things, one with each hand. The corpus collosum is the part of the brain that connects the left and right halves. It's sometimes surgically cut to preserve a patient's life, such as when they suffer repeated, massive seizures.
There's also the story of Phineas Gage, the man who survived a railroad spike flying through his skull but suffered major personality changes as a result of all that brain damage. The part of the brain most affected was the prefrontal cortex, which is thought to contain our personality and some memory capabilities. Interestingly, it appears the personality changes may have been temporary. Presumably the wonders of neuroplasticity kicked in and his brain rewired itself as best it could. He lived another 12 years and apparently returned to at least some kind of normal life.
Instead of pointing to a specific part of the brain and saying, "there, that's what makes you autistic!" it appears that it's more a question of which parts are connected how well. This is a step forward from Dr. Grandin's discussion of the specific parts of her brain that are larger or smaller in her book The Autistic Brain. While individual differences absolutely exist, if the brain isn't well-connected to a specific part, it won't perform that part's functions as well as a neurotypical person's brain would.
I laughed a bit when I read, "Dr. Astle said that one implication of their work is that it suggests that interventions should be less reliant on diagnostic labels." Unless you're an insurance company or new/haven't been paying attention to this sort of thing, this is staggeringly obvious. To quote Dr. Stephen Shore for the umpteenth time, "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." Autism is a trashbin diagnosis, and it spans a lot of different people with a lot of different needs, symptoms, and personalities. Trying to insist on a treatment for a patient without regard for their actual symptoms is stupid.
At any rate, I was pleased to see this study, and hope further research will develop from their findings.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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