7 ms·

How autism may stem from problems with prediction

142 points by akvadrako 9y ago

Erlangolem 9y ago
In Ayaya’s telling, her autism involves a host of perceptual disconnects. For example, she feels in exquisite detail all the sensations that typical people readily identify as hunger, but she can’t piece them together. “It’s very hard for me to conclude I’m hungry,” she says. “I feel irritated, or I feel sad, or I feel something [is] wrong. This information is separated, not connected.” It takes her so long to realize she is hungry that she often feels faint and gets something to eat only after someone suggests it to her. This sounds more like a failure to integrate sensory information than a predictive error. That also fits with existing theories of autism relating to sensory processing.
- s_m_t 9y ago
  Isn't that sort of the same thing? To what end does one integrate sensory information other than to make predictions or classify things?
  - lactau 9y ago
    "Making predictions" sounds too broad. Everything humans do is basically pattern matching and prediction making.
  - Erlangolem 9y ago
    The idea that there is a conflict of prediction vs. reality, and a simple failure to connect disparate sensations into a whole are nothing alike. The former is a characteristic of something like motion or VR sickness; your body expects one thing, but receives conflicting information. Integration failure doesn’t require prediction, just different sensations not creating a whole impression. The author describes experiencing hunger as a bunch of disconnected sensations, that don’t add up to one thing. She feels pain in her stomach, irritability, tiredness, but doesn’t integrate that into “I’m hungry” and just experiences them as different incidental feelings indicative of nothing in particular.
  - c3534l 9y ago
    It's the difference between knowing you're hungry and knowing you will be hungry. I can tell you that if I drive a car far enough it will eventually run out of gas, so I should probably go to the gas station before a big trip. But that's a very different problem from having a gas gauge that's broken entirely.
- gt_ 9y ago
  Speaking from personal experience with the exact conundrum described in the quote, I could not agree with your comment more.
- zukzuk 9y ago
  There's a medical term for this — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia. Alexithymia can overlap with ASD, but it can certainly occur in individuals who do not otherwise meet diagnostic criteria for ASD.
  - bitcoinboi9 9y ago
    It's quite a different thing. Sensory information like the limits of your body, vision and sound input. http://carlysvoice.com/home/aboutcarly/ http://carlysvoice.com/home/aboutcarly/ I believe the woman above described that she does not feel the limits of her body and needs constant jerking and slamming of the body parts on the walls to find comfort.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    When I'm using ADD meds, I have to set a clock or I forget to eat, because I don't feel hunger. I feel every other symptom surrounding hunger, like becoming light-headed due to low blood sugar, or getting more sluggish when working out problems. However, it all happens without feeling a desire to eat (which is what hunger is, no?) I have to make a rational decision to act on the signals and put nutrients in my stomach. And I chose that description for a reason: once I do eat, I taste the food just like I normally would, but it doesn't trigger any emotional response. The satisfaction of eating something tasty, or filling up an empty stomach is absent. To be clear: the medication does not make me a robot, I still feel emotions in general at this stage and I do expect them to be there. Normally, not enjoying food that you like is basically the body's signal that you've eaten enough, just before feeling nauseous due to overeating. Except that I'm starving. So eating a meal is like forcing food down my throat. It also means that I have to guestimate the proper meal size, because the normal cues for having had enough food are absent. My emotional workaround is focusing on the the fact that after eating, I will have energy again. So I try to find emotional joy in anticipating the consequence of eating a healthy meal rather than the taste of the meal itself. Is that the same phenomenon, or something different?
    - ClassyJacket 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, can I ask which ADD meds you use? I find Dexedrine incredibly useful, and I expected it to lower hunger as a side effect, but didn't really find it did anything in that regard.
- taberiand 9y ago
  This sounds like she needs to set up an eating schedule.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
IMO,autism tends to effect high-level cognitive domains because those domains depends on a lot of neural machinery. The particular neurochemical pathways that disrupt those high-level cognitive domains will differ between individuals though, and the gene-environment interactions involved seems to be a total mishmash of mutations in genes and environmental factors regulating the brain...If more genes are affected relating to attention, we might give a diagnosis of ADHD. It IS a spectrum. So when a title says Autism stems from problems with prediction, I would rather say that prediction and balance between prediction and stimuli sensation are frequently disrupted because they are high level forms of cognition that can get disrupted in a number of ways. I am still new to Autism research, but in my own work and others, I am seeing that ASD is related to a reduction of neuro-typical sex differences. However, I do not think I'd say that Autism stems from reduced sexual differentiation. I'd characterize it as a piece of the puzzle, and that disrupted neural machinery will likely disrupt the processes of sexual neuro-differentiation. I try to be very humble about making claims about Autism, because I have begun to see how truly complicated and multivariate the disorder(s), an dmainly want to focus on my efforts to aspects of the disorder that affect quality of life (and certainly not extinguish all neurodiversity).
- drieddust 9y ago
  Exactly I too believe everything is being classified as Autism nowadays. Instead of focussing on improving the life for those who truly struggle.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    Your first point is not quite what I meant, but the spectrum part of Autism is real, and so an expansion of what is diagnosed as Autism is probably justified until such time (hopefully soon!) where we can really fulfill the dream of identifying separable phenotypes of autism.
    - drieddust 9y ago
      Perhaps then I respectfully disagree. Classifying everything as Autism means huge medical spend which could be used better. Trying to classify every deviation from the narrowly definition "normal" is just lazy.
OrganicMSG 9y ago
Or possibly, how problems with prediction may stem from autism.
- callesgg 9y ago
  That seams like a very good question. Why would they not mention that in the article? seams odd edit: But on second thought... If something is caused by autism it would be part of the definition for the behaviors that we call autism.
  - OrganicMSG 9y ago
    I should thank Michael Crichton for getting me in the habit of looking out for potential "Wet Streets Cause Rain" articles.
    - roywiggins 9y ago
      The article gets into that near the end, that maybe social issues make it harder to learn how to make predictions rather than the other way around.
petercooper 9y ago
Definitely some interesting bits and pieces. I was recently diagnosed and the focus on predictive ability reminded me of a particular weakness I have: inability to follow plots. I can't figure out what's going to happen in most movies and usually I load up the Wikipedia entry to follow the plot if things aren't explicitly mentioned in the dialogue :-D
- gt_ 9y ago
  I work in film and visual art, and have always, odd as it is, associated my difficulty following film plots with my intrigue or indiosyncratic relationship to the art forms. I am also diagnosed. Film editing offers an interesting boundary of sorts in thinking about scope of perception or hierarchies of attention. I’ve always had a hard time just watching a film as a story experience but I find and appreciate plenty of elements about films to be plenty intrigued by almost any of them. I got very interested in media affect as a result, that is the experience of media intake. I have come to believe my (seemingly) unique sensitivity to aesthetics is somewhat undermined by a lack of sensitivity to poetics. This conclusion was painful to reach, but so far the realization has paid off in the way of understanding the limits of my abilities. On a more related note, I tend to experience poetics from the outside in, which causes me to miss out on much of the human experience, including the way many people enjoy films.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tzakrajs 9y ago
This article reminded me a lot of my struggle with ADD. Noises that are repeating and usually filtered out by most people are the thing that keeps me from being able to focus on a single thing. I was never diagnosed with ASD, but I can commiserate.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  Diagnosed with ADHD and ASD over here. My Dr. says there is some thinking that ADHD is potentially on the lighter side of the same scale of "thing" and the symptoms often exhibit together. I was diagnosed with ADHD first and the ASD thing came much later. It really helped put some of the pieces into place for me. I definitely see their relation.
reilly3000 9y ago
Prediction is the one thing a AI excels at at this point. I wonder if someone could devise an apparatus to assist with such a disability.
- invertor 9y ago
  Shit HN says.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/
- mercer 9y ago
  Ha, I'd say we already have such an apparatus: a computer. Throughout my life I've used computers in various ways to 'assist' me, but only in the past year or to have I been setting up 'systems' and tools specifically to help me with the things that are unusually challenging to me. So far it's already helped a bunch. However, I think one problem of AI as a solution is that while the AI might do a decent job 'predicting' the needs of someone on the spectrum, the resulting unpredictability inherent in such an AI might make someone with ASD not want to use it.
debacle 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test
nautilus12 9y ago
Came out of the other end of this article totally convinced im autistic. How much of this like hearing your own voice echo is part of everyday experience to lesser degree?
rdlecler1 9y ago
I found this interesting. I’m diagonsed with ADD and carry all of the tell tale signs. My mind is geared to constantly fill in—like I need to over predict and guess what someone is going to say. When I watch a movie I am constantly hunting for the plot twist even if there is not one. I also have a higher than normal error rate because my mind tends to come to a resolution on scant evidence and I need to slow myself down and often double or triple check. I’ve often felt that autism was on the other end of the spectrum. Everything needed to be explicit, complete, and literal.
- forgotmysn 9y ago
  I relate strongly to your comment, specifically about the need to over-predict and be wrong. With my ADHD, I think my lack of a verbal 'filter' also contributes to that error rate, where my brain has a tendency to express the first thought that pops in it, rather than the best one :/
jrs95 9y ago
At first I expected this to be something about the process of synaptic pruning, which doesn’t seem to work for people with autism and could be a big part of how autism works. I guess in retrospect this is only somewhat related to prediction in that the brain has to predict which pathways will be used and which won’t in the future, and eliminate the less used (and less valuable) ones. That’s really a key process to learning and associating things, which sort of ties into what’s described in this article.

142 points by akvadrako 9y ago

In Ayaya’s telling, her autism involves a host of perceptual disconnects. For example, she feels in exquisite detail all the sensations that typical people readily identify as hunger, but she can’t piece them together. “It’s very hard for me to conclude I’m hungry,” she says. “I feel irritated, or I feel sad, or I feel something [is] wrong. This information is separated, not connected.” It takes her so long to realize she is hungry that she often feels faint and gets something to eat only after someone suggests it to her. This sounds more like a failure to integrate sensory information than a predictive error. That also fits with existing theories of autism relating to sensory processing.

s_m_t 9y ago
Isn't that sort of the same thing? To what end does one integrate sensory information other than to make predictions or classify things?
- lactau 9y ago
  "Making predictions" sounds too broad. Everything humans do is basically pattern matching and prediction making.
- Erlangolem 9y ago
  The idea that there is a conflict of prediction vs. reality, and a simple failure to connect disparate sensations into a whole are nothing alike. The former is a characteristic of something like motion or VR sickness; your body expects one thing, but receives conflicting information. Integration failure doesn’t require prediction, just different sensations not creating a whole impression. The author describes experiencing hunger as a bunch of disconnected sensations, that don’t add up to one thing. She feels pain in her stomach, irritability, tiredness, but doesn’t integrate that into “I’m hungry” and just experiences them as different incidental feelings indicative of nothing in particular.
- c3534l 9y ago
  It's the difference between knowing you're hungry and knowing you will be hungry. I can tell you that if I drive a car far enough it will eventually run out of gas, so I should probably go to the gas station before a big trip. But that's a very different problem from having a gas gauge that's broken entirely.
gt_ 9y ago
Speaking from personal experience with the exact conundrum described in the quote, I could not agree with your comment more.
zukzuk 9y ago
There's a medical term for this — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia. Alexithymia can overlap with ASD, but it can certainly occur in individuals who do not otherwise meet diagnostic criteria for ASD.
- bitcoinboi9 9y ago
  It's quite a different thing. Sensory information like the limits of your body, vision and sound input. http://carlysvoice.com/home/aboutcarly/ http://carlysvoice.com/home/aboutcarly/ I believe the woman above described that she does not feel the limits of her body and needs constant jerking and slamming of the body parts on the walls to find comfort.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  When I'm using ADD meds, I have to set a clock or I forget to eat, because I don't feel hunger. I feel every other symptom surrounding hunger, like becoming light-headed due to low blood sugar, or getting more sluggish when working out problems. However, it all happens without feeling a desire to eat (which is what hunger is, no?) I have to make a rational decision to act on the signals and put nutrients in my stomach. And I chose that description for a reason: once I do eat, I taste the food just like I normally would, but it doesn't trigger any emotional response. The satisfaction of eating something tasty, or filling up an empty stomach is absent. To be clear: the medication does not make me a robot, I still feel emotions in general at this stage and I do expect them to be there. Normally, not enjoying food that you like is basically the body's signal that you've eaten enough, just before feeling nauseous due to overeating. Except that I'm starving. So eating a meal is like forcing food down my throat. It also means that I have to guestimate the proper meal size, because the normal cues for having had enough food are absent. My emotional workaround is focusing on the the fact that after eating, I will have energy again. So I try to find emotional joy in anticipating the consequence of eating a healthy meal rather than the taste of the meal itself. Is that the same phenomenon, or something different?
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, can I ask which ADD meds you use? I find Dexedrine incredibly useful, and I expected it to lower hunger as a side effect, but didn't really find it did anything in that regard.
taberiand 9y ago
This sounds like she needs to set up an eating schedule.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

IMO,autism tends to effect high-level cognitive domains because those domains depends on a lot of neural machinery. The particular neurochemical pathways that disrupt those high-level cognitive domains will differ between individuals though, and the gene-environment interactions involved seems to be a total mishmash of mutations in genes and environmental factors regulating the brain...If more genes are affected relating to attention, we might give a diagnosis of ADHD. It IS a spectrum. So when a title says Autism stems from problems with prediction, I would rather say that prediction and balance between prediction and stimuli sensation are frequently disrupted because they are high level forms of cognition that can get disrupted in a number of ways. I am still new to Autism research, but in my own work and others, I am seeing that ASD is related to a reduction of neuro-typical sex differences. However, I do not think I'd say that Autism stems from reduced sexual differentiation. I'd characterize it as a piece of the puzzle, and that disrupted neural machinery will likely disrupt the processes of sexual neuro-differentiation. I try to be very humble about making claims about Autism, because I have begun to see how truly complicated and multivariate the disorder(s), an dmainly want to focus on my efforts to aspects of the disorder that affect quality of life (and certainly not extinguish all neurodiversity).

drieddust 9y ago
Exactly I too believe everything is being classified as Autism nowadays. Instead of focussing on improving the life for those who truly struggle.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Your first point is not quite what I meant, but the spectrum part of Autism is real, and so an expansion of what is diagnosed as Autism is probably justified until such time (hopefully soon!) where we can really fulfill the dream of identifying separable phenotypes of autism.
  - drieddust 9y ago
    Perhaps then I respectfully disagree. Classifying everything as Autism means huge medical spend which could be used better. Trying to classify every deviation from the narrowly definition "normal" is just lazy.

OrganicMSG 9y ago

Or possibly, how problems with prediction may stem from autism.

callesgg 9y ago
That seams like a very good question. Why would they not mention that in the article? seams odd edit: But on second thought... If something is caused by autism it would be part of the definition for the behaviors that we call autism.
- OrganicMSG 9y ago
  I should thank Michael Crichton for getting me in the habit of looking out for potential "Wet Streets Cause Rain" articles.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    The article gets into that near the end, that maybe social issues make it harder to learn how to make predictions rather than the other way around.

petercooper 9y ago

Definitely some interesting bits and pieces. I was recently diagnosed and the focus on predictive ability reminded me of a particular weakness I have: inability to follow plots. I can't figure out what's going to happen in most movies and usually I load up the Wikipedia entry to follow the plot if things aren't explicitly mentioned in the dialogue :-D

gt_ 9y ago
I work in film and visual art, and have always, odd as it is, associated my difficulty following film plots with my intrigue or indiosyncratic relationship to the art forms. I am also diagnosed. Film editing offers an interesting boundary of sorts in thinking about scope of perception or hierarchies of attention. I’ve always had a hard time just watching a film as a story experience but I find and appreciate plenty of elements about films to be plenty intrigued by almost any of them. I got very interested in media affect as a result, that is the experience of media intake. I have come to believe my (seemingly) unique sensitivity to aesthetics is somewhat undermined by a lack of sensitivity to poetics. This conclusion was painful to reach, but so far the realization has paid off in the way of understanding the limits of my abilities. On a more related note, I tend to experience poetics from the outside in, which causes me to miss out on much of the human experience, including the way many people enjoy films.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tzakrajs 9y ago

This article reminded me a lot of my struggle with ADD. Noises that are repeating and usually filtered out by most people are the thing that keeps me from being able to focus on a single thing. I was never diagnosed with ASD, but I can commiserate.

stuntkite 9y ago
Diagnosed with ADHD and ASD over here. My Dr. says there is some thinking that ADHD is potentially on the lighter side of the same scale of "thing" and the symptoms often exhibit together. I was diagnosed with ADHD first and the ASD thing came much later. It really helped put some of the pieces into place for me. I definitely see their relation.

reilly3000 9y ago

Prediction is the one thing a AI excels at at this point. I wonder if someone could devise an apparatus to assist with such a disability.

invertor 9y ago
Shit HN says.
- EGreg 9y ago
  http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/
mercer 9y ago
Ha, I'd say we already have such an apparatus: a computer. Throughout my life I've used computers in various ways to 'assist' me, but only in the past year or to have I been setting up 'systems' and tools specifically to help me with the things that are unusually challenging to me. So far it's already helped a bunch. However, I think one problem of AI as a solution is that while the AI might do a decent job 'predicting' the needs of someone on the spectrum, the resulting unpredictability inherent in such an AI might make someone with ASD not want to use it.

debacle 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

nautilus12 9y ago

Came out of the other end of this article totally convinced im autistic. How much of this like hearing your own voice echo is part of everyday experience to lesser degree?

rdlecler1 9y ago

I found this interesting. I’m diagonsed with ADD and carry all of the tell tale signs. My mind is geared to constantly fill in—like I need to over predict and guess what someone is going to say. When I watch a movie I am constantly hunting for the plot twist even if there is not one. I also have a higher than normal error rate because my mind tends to come to a resolution on scant evidence and I need to slow myself down and often double or triple check. I’ve often felt that autism was on the other end of the spectrum. Everything needed to be explicit, complete, and literal.

forgotmysn 9y ago
I relate strongly to your comment, specifically about the need to over-predict and be wrong. With my ADHD, I think my lack of a verbal 'filter' also contributes to that error rate, where my brain has a tendency to express the first thought that pops in it, rather than the best one :/

jrs95 9y ago

At first I expected this to be something about the process of synaptic pruning, which doesn’t seem to work for people with autism and could be a big part of how autism works. I guess in retrospect this is only somewhat related to prediction in that the brain has to predict which pathways will be used and which won’t in the future, and eliminate the less used (and less valuable) ones. That’s really a key process to learning and associating things, which sort of ties into what’s described in this article.