A low-cost tool accurately distinguishes neurotypical children from children with autism just by watching them copy the dance moves of an on-screen avatar for a minute. It can even tell autism from ADHD, conditions that commonly overlap.

[u/mvea]

https://newatlas.com/adhd-autism/autism-motion-detection-diagnosis/

[u/ZoeBlade]

I stand corrected, thank you. So it was a phrase Lorna Wing made up to differentiate a subset of autistic people, and she named it after someone who, it turned out, was a Nazi whose job was to determine which autistic people were profoundly enough affected to be sent to concentration camps and which were mildly enough affected to be merely "rehabilitated to become useful to the German Volk".

So it sounds like she was helpfully pointing out that more-or-less level 1 autistic people also existed, and to a lesser extent are also struggling... and in hindsight, just picked a bad name? That sounds like a step in the right direction, name aside.

The levels are indeed still very vague. You could totally have a much more specific list of someone's particular traits and needs with something more akin to the astronomy code, bear code, and geek code. But such a thing would get very personal, and it would have to be up to the individual how much of that they'd be willing to divulge to any given person. It's also not something most people would recognise. Suffice it to say that autism has a very dynamic range of how profoundly it affects people.

[u/book_of_black_dreams → u/ZoeBlade]

Yeah she didn’t know that Hans Asperger was a Nazi. Also, the issue is that “autism” as a very wide concept didn’t exist back then. They genuinely believed that these different phenotypes were actually different biological entities. And they might be right about that, we still don’t know if “autism” is a real unitary entity. There’s a certain level of arbitrariness when it comes to constructing diagnostic frameworks, because there are no real biomarkers for autism. I would recommend a great lecture on YouTube called “Rethinking Autism Diagnosis” by ASF.

[u/ZoeBlade → u/book_of_black_dreams]

Thanks, I'll check that out! Yeah, I'm aware of how nebulous autism is, and so there's no objective, foolproof way of diagnosing it with certainty. It also seems to cluster with a lot of other stuff (ADHD, APD, synaesthesia, etc).

I gather autism is just the current term for what we believe is too many neural connections all over the place, which can have multiple causes, and complete opposite traits. There don't seem to yet be any neat distinctions or cutoff points you can make. Even though some traits are opposites, any combination's possible. So it's not like you could even differentiate senses-all-too-strong autism from senses-all-too-weak autism, as each individual case will be a unique combination of some senses being too strong and others being too weak and others in a comfortable middle ground.

That's why, just looking at the traits alone, you'd need a whole geek code type list of each person's individual combination of neural settings... and that's before you even try to get into the complexity of looking for the different causes for different people. I know enough to know there's no single autism gene, for instance, it's a complex interplay of probably many genes and many environmental factors (prenatal hormone levels, etc).

The whole thing's a big mess, but, y'know... that's nature!

[u/book_of_black_dreams → u/ZoeBlade]

Yeah the science of autism is one of my special interests! It’s such an interesting topic with so many unknowns, and there’s so much to study. Childhood Disintegrative Disorder was merged into ASD in 2013, and then years later some studies came out showing it might not even be part of the autism spectrum at all. I imagine that our concept and knowledge of autism will be completely turned upside down 30 years from now.

[u/ZoeBlade → u/book_of_black_dreams]

Yeah, I sensed we might have a bit of overlap in interests there! Huh, I didn't know about Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, that's interesting. I heard it used to be thought waaay back that autism was childhood schizophrenia. I'm hazy on how much they correlate, but I can see there's this whole overactive-brain cluster including those, OCD, etc.

I get really hazy on the science side of autism, though. I did start to do a reasonably deep dive on how the thalamus sends sensory input to the prefrontal cortex, which can tell the globus pallidus to make the thalamic reticular nucleus inhibit bits of the thalamus as required, which sounds like it doesn't work so well with many autists... The superior temporal sulcus sounded possibly like something that could cause face blindness and issues encoding and decoding pragmatics when it can't do its job properly... But I'm not at all confident in that, I think I inevitably got distracted into deep diving another topic before I got very far.

[u/book_of_black_dreams → u/ZoeBlade]

I think one of the issues with autism research is that it’s so heterogeneous that all of the “noise” kind of obscures findings. For example, they did this study a few years ago where they loaded a bunch of brain scans from a large number of people with different disorders into an algorithm that would form clusters based on brain structure and patterns of connectivity. The autism brains didn’t cluster together - some autistic people were even grouped with typically developing kids who didn’t have any disorder at all.

[u/book_of_black_dreams → u/ZoeBlade]

This is really interesting, but scientists know that the repetitive behaviors found in OCD affect a different part of the brain because medication that works for OCD doesn’t have any effect on the repetitive/obsessive behaviors of autism!