(Merry Christmas. Hope the holidays treat you well.)
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 deals with a form of social communication most people take entirely for granted: smells. This is kind of an odd study, but it's interesting, so bear with me. The researchers wanted to see how autistic people and normal people reacted to two specific types of scent communication.
For those entirely unfamiliar with this line of research, like myself, apparently fear has a smell, as does relaxation. The effect is measurable, but the scent itself is apparently not identifiable or recognizable by a casual sniff. People react to it all the same, however.
The subjects were exposed to two different sweat smells: one collected from people learning how to skydive, and thus laced with fear, and the other collected from people who were merely exercising, and thus calm.
While I would have expected the autistic participants of the study to be oblivious to the "scent meanings" in the sweat smells, something more interesting happened. Instead, the autistic participants received exactly the opposite message. The fear-laced sweat made the autistic participants calmer, and the "calm" sweat made them more nervous. The researchers suggest some pathways were somehow reversed in the brain development of autistic people.
This brings to mind some of the stories John Elder Robison wrote about, where he commented that he was a good person to be around in a crisis. While other people would get stressed out and angry or afraid, he stayed calm and did reasonable things, like calling the police, assessing how badly people were injured, etc. I now wonder how much of that ability to keep calm and be reasonable was because of this effect, the internal misreading of the smell of fear.
Naturally, it doesn't really matter: the people he helped were helped, regardless of why he was able to do what he did. And perhaps this tendency makes autistic people rather valuable in terms of emergency services and similar situations.
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 deals with a form of social communication most people take entirely for granted: smells. This is kind of an odd study, but it's interesting, so bear with me. The researchers wanted to see how autistic people and normal people reacted to two specific types of scent communication.
For those entirely unfamiliar with this line of research, like myself, apparently fear has a smell, as does relaxation. The effect is measurable, but the scent itself is apparently not identifiable or recognizable by a casual sniff. People react to it all the same, however.
The subjects were exposed to two different sweat smells: one collected from people learning how to skydive, and thus laced with fear, and the other collected from people who were merely exercising, and thus calm.
While I would have expected the autistic participants of the study to be oblivious to the "scent meanings" in the sweat smells, something more interesting happened. Instead, the autistic participants received exactly the opposite message. The fear-laced sweat made the autistic participants calmer, and the "calm" sweat made them more nervous. The researchers suggest some pathways were somehow reversed in the brain development of autistic people.
This brings to mind some of the stories John Elder Robison wrote about, where he commented that he was a good person to be around in a crisis. While other people would get stressed out and angry or afraid, he stayed calm and did reasonable things, like calling the police, assessing how badly people were injured, etc. I now wonder how much of that ability to keep calm and be reasonable was because of this effect, the internal misreading of the smell of fear.
Naturally, it doesn't really matter: the people he helped were helped, regardless of why he was able to do what he did. And perhaps this tendency makes autistic people rather valuable in terms of emergency services and similar situations.
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