6 ms·

Autism Theory 25 Years in the Making

62 points by edward 6y ago

thornjm 6y ago
I have no evidence to support this, but to me, autism seems like a poor label for a broad and diverse set of traits we don’t fully understand. Over time I think the number of things autism describes will shrink and eventually the term will disappear as we correctly understand all the underlying conditions / factors.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  That’s virtually what the article suggests.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  That seems like an odd response to an article identifying a clear set of commonalities across the ASD spectrum.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I get barked at for this but autism isn't a disease it's label. The reason I believe that is my brother and his friends who all have a couple of mild to bad cognitive issues. Thing is they have different set of issues. And over time the severity of those issues has lessened as they learn to compensate. My working theory is different parts of the brain are primed developmentally to handle certain cognitive tasks. If something goes sideways then you get a deficit. It's harder for the person to learn or perform that task. You get delays and impairments. Some of those can cause socialization issues. Others don't, like dyslexia. What's the underlying cause, huge numbers of things probably.
  - bluSCALE4 6y ago
    You're right in that it's not a disease but it's also not a label. It's an identity. You can stop being poor, but you can't stop being black. Just like you can learn to compensate if you are autistic but never stop being autistic. I mean, there are documented shifts to becoming nuero-typical but of the few I'd read about, the change was bitter sweet.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      This is why the autism "treatments" are so dangerous; they cause serious mental damage, not to treat or "cure" autism, but to force people to mask it, to pretend they're neurotypical. At least these treatments are being banned left and right. (brainfart, I can't think of the name of these treatments atm) Anyway, autistic people tend to have to learn how they're expected to behave, it costs them energy and analytical capacity, etc. In general they learn to manage, and you probably won't be able to tell someone is on the spectrum at first glance. This is especially true in women with ASD, who grow up with higher societal expectations. Same with ADHD really.
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    Isn’t this basically the meaning of the word ’syndrom’? There exist symptomps, which are standardized descriptions for biological issues. Then there are syndroms, which describe common collections of symptomps. Asperger syndrom basically means Asperger noticed a cluster of symptomps recurring together, and they looked a bit like a lighter variant of Autism. If we were sure they are always to be treated, and we had an orgaized idea about how, it would be a disease and not a syndrom.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  The modern understanding of ASD is that it's a cluster of traits, and generalized into the broader autism phenotype. I think this paper is taking some of those traits and understanding the selection mechanisms that increase their prevalence, and also builds upon earlier work suggesting that ASD could be caused by the amplification of typically attractive and useful traits by sexual selection. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23713510/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23713510/
  - dd36 6y ago
    I have a hypothesis: autism prevalence is up because of the “back to sleep” campaign, which babies hate because it massively decreases sleep quality. This reduced sleep quality adversely affects brain development.
    - h0l0cube 6y ago
      I didn't know prevalence to be up, or that an increase in prevalence could be easily disentangled from better diagnosis due to increased awareness of autism. Do you have data on this increase?
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  One of my therapists at one point described how the mental health community wanted to move away from labelling people into boxes (especially for Autism and ADHD). They're a series of traits which people can have at in different quantities individually. One of the challenges seems to be that health insurances work expecting a concrete diagnose, and this labelling satisfies this need.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
> “The (BAPCO) traits are not what people expect. They expect the traits to be about challenges or difficulties, but instead there are six main traits — increased attention, increased memory, a preference for the object world vs. the social world and their environment, increased nonconformity, increased differences in sensory and perception, as well as systemizing.” I’m very curious whether this theory is an opportunity to explore the high rate of overlap between ASD and ADHD. Most or all of these are common in my experience and my understanding of ADHD, including increased attention (despite the unfortunate name collision). This also reinforces my desire to look into an ASD diagnosis and hopefully better understand how my ticker brains.
- armada651 6y ago
  You are probably right that it's two sides of the same coin. As societal preference has shifted towards people with longer attention spans it exposes the group that has stayed behind. People who already had short attention spans are now even further from the norm and are forced to function in a society increasingly designed against them.
  - andai 6y ago
    My (Asperger's) attention span is strange: it's very high (10-15 hours of work at full concentration with hardly any breaks) when I care, and abysmal (0-0.5h of useful work despite exerting my best effort) when I don't care about the work -- despite external consequences like pay -- and even when I really need the pay! I heard a similar experience from Jonathan Blow (paraphrasing), "I was doing this contract database work I just didn't care about, and my whole motivational structure just shut down and I stopped working. They were paying me money to do it, so I felt guilty about not working, but that didn't actually help me start working again." He didn't become truly productive until he went all-in on his interests and luckily that worked out for him (in the end).
    - throwaway2552 6y ago
      Oh gosh - this is me 100%. I got an official Asperger Diagnosis in 2008. And one thing it finally explained to me: why for certain contracts ($BIG_BANK_LTD SQL) I just stopped working when I had no interest in the project. And it's crazy - I was on £££ per day and just COULD NOT do the work from lack of interest. Insane. I had to resign even though I knew this was an irresponsible thing to do. For a year or two I actually switched to working as a care assistant in a home for the elderly. Then when I started a shift I just had to do my 12 hours shift - no scope for just freezing and not doing the work.
DudeIsJammin 6y ago
Their hypothesis doesn't really ring true to me. If the "assortative mating" hypothesis were correct it would mean that in the past people with ASD would have been having children with normies, for lack of a better word, and then due to some vague advancement in society are now instead choosing to mate with people who have more similar traits to themselves. Doesn't really make sense to me tbh
- ainar-g 6y ago
  > normies, for lack of a better word You may be looking for the word “neurotypicals”.
  - thotsBgone 6y ago
    Or, more specifically, "allistic".
- tapland 6y ago
  Yes, it say so and it explains why in the article.
  - DudeIsJammin 6y ago
    They explained it, but I guess it just doesn't ring true to me. They said: "In societies where people do not have freedom to pursue their interests and passions, where meritorious education is not valued, where men and women do not have freedom to choose their careers, and where nonconformity is not tolerated" I have a hard time seeing how these types of advancements would have such a drastic difference in mating habits.
- thatcat 6y ago
  If the dating pool was sufficiently small say below dunbar limit (150) then expanded, there would have been very few ASD (1/52) in the population to mate with. As it expanded that would obviously change and allow assortive mating.
- konschubert 6y ago
vlovich123 6y ago
Is the theory that partner freedom was more restricted even in Western society? Or is it that math & science wasn’t as valuable/of well-regarded utility and it wasn’t until the 50s with the space race that people with abilities in math and science started to seek out each other as partners (& thus the traits that might make you successful in those fields suddenly started appearing in newer ways).
antibuddy 6y ago
>>Summary: New autism theory is consistent with the current science on the genetics of the disorder but shifts the focus to the positive traits of ASD and historical events that altered the prevalence of autism in society. Step 1: Redefine term (so autism is a trait); Step 2: Based on that definition make a research; Result: Devoid the original meaning of the term Autism was a disorder and now it is a trait. Instead of a disorder with certain obvious/extreme traits. >>McDonald’s theory, titled ‘The Broader Autism Phenotype Constellation-Disability Matrix Paradigm (BAPCO-DMAP) Theory,’ is consistent with the current science on the genetics of autism but shifts the focus to positive traits of autism and to historical events that changed the prevalence of autism in society. Let me define the "The Broader Schizophrenia Phenotype Constellation-Disability Matrix Paradigm" and redefine Schizophrenia as being moody and day-dreaming kind of person. It also stands for creativity and thinking out-of-the-box. >>McDonald’s theory also highlights how the prevalence of autism has increased in higher income countries due to societal changes that increase freedoms in education, employment and other opportunities for both men and women. Now I go on and explain why it is more prevalent in higher income countries, where the meaning of autism is different and is researched to oblivion. >>McDonald said she now knows what causes autism but it is not something that could be cured and, honestly, she wouldn’t want to do that. We usually (medically) treat disorders (not cure them) and we certainly neither treat nor cure traits. In that context it makes sense, but one has to see the shift of disorder to trait.
- zadokshi 6y ago
  If autism is defined as having a slightly different brain structure which leads to differences in how stimuli are processed. Do we call this a disorder or a trait? Is having a brain structure outside of the median set of types a disorder? Depending on the level of differences in the brain, one may be labelled as “Aspergers” and appear externally like everyone else, or on the other end of the scale, may need assistance with every day living. Neither disorder or trait captures nearly both ends of the scale. It’s probably also unhelpful to label someone with ‘asbergers’ as disordered. They have traits, some that are beneficial and at the same time some that create problems functioning in every day society.
  - 6y ago
hackpert 6y ago
While this certainly seems to be redefining ASD as other commenters seem to suggest and we can debate if that is a good thing or not, it seems like it would be relatively straightforward to test the validity of this theory (perhaps not easy but straightforward.) Simply look at autism occurrence rates in countries where partner choice is still socially determined such as India/Pakistan/parts of the Arab World(?) etc. and see if there is any correlation between some arbitrarily defined scale of partner choice freedom and ASD rate, after factoring out individual genetics :S. PS. I haven’t read the actual paper yet so I don’t know if they have already done this.
skissane 6y ago
> but a theoretical model published in the journal Medical Hypotheses Medical Hypotheses is the very opposite of a prestigious journal. It intentionally rejects peer review, and is infamous for publishing AIDS denialism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses Press release talking up a speculative theory published in a dubious journal.
- car 6y ago
  Agreed. My thesis was on the genetics of schizophrenia. A genetic contribution has been shown through twin adoption studies. Researching the literature, it turned out that there are hundreds of theories on the etiology of this psychosis. This was two decades ago. Hard biology eludes us to this day.
- est31 6y ago
  > AIDS denialism WTF first I thought this was a typo and you meant ASD denialism or ADHS denialism or something, but no, it was right. It really exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism I am ok with different scientific opinions on a topic when there is strong evidence for multiple theories, or no evidence at all on any theory, but at this point the relationship between HIV and AIDS is crystal clear, just like with climate change.
sdwr 6y ago
Interesting and plausible take on autism. Feels like a Hegelian leap in understanding: 1. Thing - people disabled or shunned for autistic traits 2. Antithesis - people living successfully with similar traits (who escape medical judgement and classification) 3. Synthesis - Smash the two groups into each other at high speed and filter out a new perspective As an aside, I wonder if autism as a word has any connection to "ought", as in "the way things ought to be". Lines up pretty nicely with mental rigidity and overmodeling to me
- JacksonGariety 6y ago
  It is indeed a Hegelian perspective shift. The prefix is 'auto,' though, which means 'self.'
rtx 6y ago
One of the points made in the article talks about us being attracted people with similar traits. We have some data against this in India, where most of the marriages are arranged. We are see same rate of increase in Autism numbers.

62 points by edward 6y ago

I have no evidence to support this, but to me, autism seems like a poor label for a broad and diverse set of traits we don’t fully understand. Over time I think the number of things autism describes will shrink and eventually the term will disappear as we correctly understand all the underlying conditions / factors.

vermilingua 6y ago
That’s virtually what the article suggests.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
That seems like an odd response to an article identifying a clear set of commonalities across the ASD spectrum.
Gibbon1 6y ago
I get barked at for this but autism isn't a disease it's label. The reason I believe that is my brother and his friends who all have a couple of mild to bad cognitive issues. Thing is they have different set of issues. And over time the severity of those issues has lessened as they learn to compensate. My working theory is different parts of the brain are primed developmentally to handle certain cognitive tasks. If something goes sideways then you get a deficit. It's harder for the person to learn or perform that task. You get delays and impairments. Some of those can cause socialization issues. Others don't, like dyslexia. What's the underlying cause, huge numbers of things probably.
- bluSCALE4 6y ago
  You're right in that it's not a disease but it's also not a label. It's an identity. You can stop being poor, but you can't stop being black. Just like you can learn to compensate if you are autistic but never stop being autistic. I mean, there are documented shifts to becoming nuero-typical but of the few I'd read about, the change was bitter sweet.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    This is why the autism "treatments" are so dangerous; they cause serious mental damage, not to treat or "cure" autism, but to force people to mask it, to pretend they're neurotypical. At least these treatments are being banned left and right. (brainfart, I can't think of the name of these treatments atm) Anyway, autistic people tend to have to learn how they're expected to behave, it costs them energy and analytical capacity, etc. In general they learn to manage, and you probably won't be able to tell someone is on the spectrum at first glance. This is especially true in women with ASD, who grow up with higher societal expectations. Same with ADHD really.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  Isn’t this basically the meaning of the word ’syndrom’? There exist symptomps, which are standardized descriptions for biological issues. Then there are syndroms, which describe common collections of symptomps. Asperger syndrom basically means Asperger noticed a cluster of symptomps recurring together, and they looked a bit like a lighter variant of Autism. If we were sure they are always to be treated, and we had an orgaized idea about how, it would be a disease and not a syndrom.
h0l0cube 6y ago
The modern understanding of ASD is that it's a cluster of traits, and generalized into the broader autism phenotype. I think this paper is taking some of those traits and understanding the selection mechanisms that increase their prevalence, and also builds upon earlier work suggesting that ASD could be caused by the amplification of typically attractive and useful traits by sexual selection. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23713510/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23713510/
- dd36 6y ago
  I have a hypothesis: autism prevalence is up because of the “back to sleep” campaign, which babies hate because it massively decreases sleep quality. This reduced sleep quality adversely affects brain development.
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    I didn't know prevalence to be up, or that an increase in prevalence could be easily disentangled from better diagnosis due to increased awareness of autism. Do you have data on this increase?
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
One of my therapists at one point described how the mental health community wanted to move away from labelling people into boxes (especially for Autism and ADHD). They're a series of traits which people can have at in different quantities individually. One of the challenges seems to be that health insurances work expecting a concrete diagnose, and this labelling satisfies this need.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

> “The (BAPCO) traits are not what people expect. They expect the traits to be about challenges or difficulties, but instead there are six main traits — increased attention, increased memory, a preference for the object world vs. the social world and their environment, increased nonconformity, increased differences in sensory and perception, as well as systemizing.” I’m very curious whether this theory is an opportunity to explore the high rate of overlap between ASD and ADHD. Most or all of these are common in my experience and my understanding of ADHD, including increased attention (despite the unfortunate name collision). This also reinforces my desire to look into an ASD diagnosis and hopefully better understand how my ticker brains.

armada651 6y ago
You are probably right that it's two sides of the same coin. As societal preference has shifted towards people with longer attention spans it exposes the group that has stayed behind. People who already had short attention spans are now even further from the norm and are forced to function in a society increasingly designed against them.
- andai 6y ago
  My (Asperger's) attention span is strange: it's very high (10-15 hours of work at full concentration with hardly any breaks) when I care, and abysmal (0-0.5h of useful work despite exerting my best effort) when I don't care about the work -- despite external consequences like pay -- and even when I really need the pay! I heard a similar experience from Jonathan Blow (paraphrasing), "I was doing this contract database work I just didn't care about, and my whole motivational structure just shut down and I stopped working. They were paying me money to do it, so I felt guilty about not working, but that didn't actually help me start working again." He didn't become truly productive until he went all-in on his interests and luckily that worked out for him (in the end).
  - throwaway2552 6y ago
    Oh gosh - this is me 100%. I got an official Asperger Diagnosis in 2008. And one thing it finally explained to me: why for certain contracts ($BIG_BANK_LTD SQL) I just stopped working when I had no interest in the project. And it's crazy - I was on £££ per day and just COULD NOT do the work from lack of interest. Insane. I had to resign even though I knew this was an irresponsible thing to do. For a year or two I actually switched to working as a care assistant in a home for the elderly. Then when I started a shift I just had to do my 12 hours shift - no scope for just freezing and not doing the work.

DudeIsJammin 6y ago

Their hypothesis doesn't really ring true to me. If the "assortative mating" hypothesis were correct it would mean that in the past people with ASD would have been having children with normies, for lack of a better word, and then due to some vague advancement in society are now instead choosing to mate with people who have more similar traits to themselves. Doesn't really make sense to me tbh

ainar-g 6y ago
> normies, for lack of a better word You may be looking for the word “neurotypicals”.
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  Or, more specifically, "allistic".
tapland 6y ago
Yes, it say so and it explains why in the article.
- DudeIsJammin 6y ago
  They explained it, but I guess it just doesn't ring true to me. They said: "In societies where people do not have freedom to pursue their interests and passions, where meritorious education is not valued, where men and women do not have freedom to choose their careers, and where nonconformity is not tolerated" I have a hard time seeing how these types of advancements would have such a drastic difference in mating habits.
thatcat 6y ago
If the dating pool was sufficiently small say below dunbar limit (150) then expanded, there would have been very few ASD (1/52) in the population to mate with. As it expanded that would obviously change and allow assortive mating.
konschubert 6y ago

vlovich123 6y ago

Is the theory that partner freedom was more restricted even in Western society? Or is it that math & science wasn’t as valuable/of well-regarded utility and it wasn’t until the 50s with the space race that people with abilities in math and science started to seek out each other as partners (& thus the traits that might make you successful in those fields suddenly started appearing in newer ways).

antibuddy 6y ago

>>Summary: New autism theory is consistent with the current science on the genetics of the disorder but shifts the focus to the positive traits of ASD and historical events that altered the prevalence of autism in society. Step 1: Redefine term (so autism is a trait); Step 2: Based on that definition make a research; Result: Devoid the original meaning of the term Autism was a disorder and now it is a trait. Instead of a disorder with certain obvious/extreme traits. >>McDonald’s theory, titled ‘The Broader Autism Phenotype Constellation-Disability Matrix Paradigm (BAPCO-DMAP) Theory,’ is consistent with the current science on the genetics of autism but shifts the focus to positive traits of autism and to historical events that changed the prevalence of autism in society. Let me define the "The Broader Schizophrenia Phenotype Constellation-Disability Matrix Paradigm" and redefine Schizophrenia as being moody and day-dreaming kind of person. It also stands for creativity and thinking out-of-the-box. >>McDonald’s theory also highlights how the prevalence of autism has increased in higher income countries due to societal changes that increase freedoms in education, employment and other opportunities for both men and women. Now I go on and explain why it is more prevalent in higher income countries, where the meaning of autism is different and is researched to oblivion. >>McDonald said she now knows what causes autism but it is not something that could be cured and, honestly, she wouldn’t want to do that. We usually (medically) treat disorders (not cure them) and we certainly neither treat nor cure traits. In that context it makes sense, but one has to see the shift of disorder to trait.

zadokshi 6y ago
If autism is defined as having a slightly different brain structure which leads to differences in how stimuli are processed. Do we call this a disorder or a trait? Is having a brain structure outside of the median set of types a disorder? Depending on the level of differences in the brain, one may be labelled as “Aspergers” and appear externally like everyone else, or on the other end of the scale, may need assistance with every day living. Neither disorder or trait captures nearly both ends of the scale. It’s probably also unhelpful to label someone with ‘asbergers’ as disordered. They have traits, some that are beneficial and at the same time some that create problems functioning in every day society.
- 6y ago

hackpert 6y ago

While this certainly seems to be redefining ASD as other commenters seem to suggest and we can debate if that is a good thing or not, it seems like it would be relatively straightforward to test the validity of this theory (perhaps not easy but straightforward.) Simply look at autism occurrence rates in countries where partner choice is still socially determined such as India/Pakistan/parts of the Arab World(?) etc. and see if there is any correlation between some arbitrarily defined scale of partner choice freedom and ASD rate, after factoring out individual genetics :S. PS. I haven’t read the actual paper yet so I don’t know if they have already done this.

skissane 6y ago

> but a theoretical model published in the journal Medical Hypotheses Medical Hypotheses is the very opposite of a prestigious journal. It intentionally rejects peer review, and is infamous for publishing AIDS denialism – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses Press release talking up a speculative theory published in a dubious journal.

car 6y ago
Agreed. My thesis was on the genetics of schizophrenia. A genetic contribution has been shown through twin adoption studies. Researching the literature, it turned out that there are hundreds of theories on the etiology of this psychosis. This was two decades ago. Hard biology eludes us to this day.
est31 6y ago
> AIDS denialism WTF first I thought this was a typo and you meant ASD denialism or ADHS denialism or something, but no, it was right. It really exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism I am ok with different scientific opinions on a topic when there is strong evidence for multiple theories, or no evidence at all on any theory, but at this point the relationship between HIV and AIDS is crystal clear, just like with climate change.

sdwr 6y ago

Interesting and plausible take on autism. Feels like a Hegelian leap in understanding: 1. Thing - people disabled or shunned for autistic traits 2. Antithesis - people living successfully with similar traits (who escape medical judgement and classification) 3. Synthesis - Smash the two groups into each other at high speed and filter out a new perspective As an aside, I wonder if autism as a word has any connection to "ought", as in "the way things ought to be". Lines up pretty nicely with mental rigidity and overmodeling to me

JacksonGariety 6y ago
It is indeed a Hegelian perspective shift. The prefix is 'auto,' though, which means 'self.'

rtx 6y ago

One of the points made in the article talks about us being attracted people with similar traits. We have some data against this in India, where most of the marriages are arranged. We are see same rate of increase in Autism numbers.