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Does watching television trigger autism? (2007)
- spacemanmatt 4y agoOne of the big problems with studying or talking about autism is assuming that because we have one word for it that autism is just one thing, subject to root cause analysis, and then you have the cause for that one thing. It is very much not like that.
- metamuas 4y agoProximity to freeways increases autism risk, study finds [0]. Having a mother who lived within 1,000 feet of a freeway while pregnant doubles a child's odds of having autism [1]. Basically, white noise can cause autism. People are screwing up their kids at an exponential rate [2]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210609042055/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-dec-16-la-he-autism-20101217-story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210609042055/https://www.latim... [1]: https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20101217/fast-lane-to-autism-living-near-freeways https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20101217/fast-lane-t... [2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=children+white+noise https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=childre...
- dqpb 4y agoWhy do you think white noise causes autism?
- metamuas 4y agoBasically, humans are pattern seeking creatures, and children exposed to white noise will try to find patterns in white noise, when there are none, thus leading to the brain maladapting to random patterns. My theory, but I couldn't find a good definition of traffic noise being related to white noise or classified in particular, but who knows.
- thinkingemote 4y agoI used to share a room with someone who would fall asleep to TV. In the UK after the last show of the night there would be beep tone for a long time and then it would just be static, no signal. This lead to me having a recurring nightmare which I also got for a long time into adulthood, seeing the tone as 1/2D line, flowing along nicely, and then the static would screw it up and turn it to knots and I would be unsuccessful in making it turn back to a line.
- ariste 4y agoI have this same reoccurring nightmare and I also grew up in the UK. The line would be smooth, but the violently contort into anxiety inducing sharp triangles. This is the first time I have heard someone echo the same dream.
- thinkingemote 4y agoNice to hear someone else having the same thing! In a way perhaps it's kind of an abstract "powerlessness in the face of chaos" nightmare. Not sure why exactly it went away. But I do remember being conscious of it in my 20s and trying to understand it. I think I tried to understand it consciously and accept some of the powerlessness perhaps. Or maybe later on, it was meaning general confusion and anxiety which was suppressed. At any rate the nightmare was very scary and awful, as if something evil and wrong was there.
- blowski 4y agoIn argument against your theory - a lot of parents use white noise explicitly to help their babies to sleep. From my own personal experience, most of those kids don’t then suffer from autism.
- spacemanmatt 4y agoIn argument against your theory - personal experience is not data.
- skim_milk 4y agoI could see how living next to a major road or having a noisy environment could disturb a child's sleep at night. Perhaps it is the role of noisy cars that disturb the sleep that triggers these changes? I was a strange child that could only sleep if mother turned on a hair dryer next to me some nights. This is materially different from highways - I briefly got to experience what it was like living next to a noisy road and I would argue it would be more likely that it is the role of noisy cars, screeching tires, horns, and pollution that is at play in these studies, not the white noise of highways. Would children that lived in windy forests with no sound isolation having to listen to the noise of the trees fare the same? Most autistic people are sensitive to stimuli - sensitivity being nearly completely genetic determined and little to do with environment. I wonder if it this greater sensitivity being triggered by highways and disturbs sleep that impairs brain development.
- melony 4y agoMore likely would be tire particulates.
- sascha_sl 4y agoDon't underestimate noise pollution. It's a very real stressor. Though, what's more likely is that a child with mild ASD is more obviously autistic under stress, which leads to diagnosis earlier.
- labster 4y agoDon’t underestimate particulate matter and ozone. Kills millions every year. But the same theory could apply, as health-induced stress instead of distraction stress. Or both.
- sascha_sl 4y agoBoth seems plausible. I just wanted to note that noise pullution is often overlooked and much more impactful than people assume.
- silisili 4y agoI did a -lot- of research on a house about 1500 feet of a freeway. It seemed to me nearly all of it was correlative. Which is fine, as it may be true. But very few corrected for the fact freeways often run through the worst areas in town, which could mean nutrition, drugs, alcohol, lead paint, asbestos, heck about anything else bad about living in older, run down areas.
- taeric 4y agoYour point relies on the causative link not being that having a freeway through a section causes it to decline into being the worst part of town.
- silisili 4y agoWell, there's plenty of rural and 'rich suburban' areas close to freeways. In my county in Florida, they're building brand new 500k dollar houses 100 feet from the freeway. For reference, 500k is high end of house prices here. Would be interested to see if those show the same. If not, you could rule out white noise completely. That would then seem to point to other factors, including total pollution, or more socioeconomic things.
- taeric 4y agoApologies, I should have left my point more open. That is, I don't know that there is a link. Would love to see evidence.
- taneq 4y agoWhat else correlates with living within 1000 feet of a freeway? Population density? Pollutants in the atmosphere? Proximity to Starbucks? Lower socioeconomic status?
- mrblampo 4y ago[2] does not support the idea that white noise causes autism. It's a pretty big leap from "freeway proximity, even in utero, correlates with autism" to "white noise causes autism."
- scruple 4y agoIsn't the womb a fairly noisy place, anyway? From the perspective of a fetus, that is. I remember when our twins were born, white noise was recommended to us by practically everyone because of the similarity to sounds heard in utero.
- taeric 4y agoOdd, I would expect a steady beat to mimic your heart to be a big part of mimicking sounds of the womb. Along with a colored noise. Though, I would suspect pink is better than white.
- scruple 4y agoThey're essentially under water and a pregnant mothers noisy internal processes, other than her breathing and her heart beat, are not really following any sort of pattern. And we can't discount the environment that the pregnant mother finds herself in, either, since that noise will also be present to varying degrees. edit/ Having said that, the "white noise" machines that I've seen, which are available as sleep aides specifically for young children, are not really white noise. There is white noise there but there is also something that sounds like a tumbling drying machine, or a fan, or a hair dryer... Something that a brain could attach itself to as a pattern.
- taeric 4y agoThis makes sense. Probably most is marketed as "white noise" because that was a familiar term.
- seba_dos1 4y agoUhm... wouldn't that rather be "more noise/television makes you more likely to notice your child's autism"? An overstimulated autistic person has a much harder time masking their autism. Seems likely to me that a child raised in a quiet environment may not get diagnosed until adulthood, while the same child raised in noise may have a hard time fitting in already. Most of "symptoms of autism" that people notice are actually how autistic people react to distress when they can't mask anymore, and overstimulation definitely causes such distress. Also, I'd say that modern children programming that's optimized for grabbing as much attention as possible isn't exactly autism friendly; I find older cartoons with their slower pacing much more comfortable to watch. "White noise causes autism" is a pretty weird conclusion to get from all of that and would require extraordinary evidence to support it.
- CryoLogic 4y agoCorrelated, not caused.
- metamuas 4y agoCorrected, thanks.
- Trouble_007 4y agoCorrelation does not Imply Causation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau... Edit: Add; White Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise Pink Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise Red (Brownian) Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise Purple Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_noise Grey Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_noise
- walty 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/
- metamuas 4y agoIf you have the time, please find out what traffic noise is closest to. I tried to find out but couldn't get any further than this wikipedia page[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadway_noise
- Trouble_007 4y agosearch: >'traffic noise effects on people'< @DDG: <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q='traffic noise effects on people' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q='traffic noise effects on...> Edit: Add; Health Effects from Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise
- kstenerud 4y agoIf you're going to post joke research, please don't do it about autism. It's already bad enough as it is with all the quackery going around.
- metamuas 4y agoPrecipitation means the kids stay inside and are more likely to watch television[0]. This was influenced by another paper about the link between precipitation and autism[1]. Why do you think it is joke research? Why did you criticize before looking into it? [0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989648 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989648 [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/articlepdf/380363/poa80036_1026_1034.pdf https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/articlepdf/3...
- sascha_sl 4y agoThey're both written by the same people, econ professors that are helplessly out of their field. They're assuming a lot of things here: * Rain means children watch televsion, no rain means they do not. This is a harsh oversimplification of how parents work. * Cable TV was correlated to increased autism diagnosis. But what else is correlated to Cable TV? Wealth. And what's correlated to wealth? Getting your kid diagnosed properly in the country where healthcare is not easily affordable maybe? If you think that's a stretch, well, the entire paper is argued on this sort of thin ice. * Autism isn't generally considered to have "a trigger", but some circumstances like stress can make it more obvious how a someone with autism is different. Autism is one of these things that aren't objectively measured, but often are diagnosed as a result of how annoyed parents are.
- sterlind 4y agoN=1, but I grew up without cable TV (only one movie on the weekend), and I'm autistic. very so as a little kid. my parents were both mildly on the spectrum, I apparently got a double dose. hooray for assortative mating!
- dragonwriter 4y ago
- sascha_sl 4y agoThis is a hilariously bad line of reasoning and basically a signal for me to take econ researchers less seriously.
- metamuas 4y ago"Diagnoses of autism have risen dramatically over the past few decades, from an estimated one in 2500 children thirty years ago to one in 150 today." is one of the first lines of the article. If you are so smart, and only you are so smart, what environmental factor has increased that rapidly?
- jat850 4y agoWhy not diagnosis over environment?
- danamit 4y agoWhile it can be argued for other things like ADHD, I doubt it can be argued for cases of severe autism.
- cyphar 4y ago1. The quote says "diagnoses of autism" not "diagnoses of severe autism" so if the definition of autism has expanded over time due to improvements in our understanding of autism (which it has) the diagnosis argument is far more effective. 2. It is easier for children of poorer people to get an autism diagnosis now than it was 50 years ago, so even severe cases might not have shown up in the stats if the child was born to a poor family.
- danamit 4y agoI meant it could explain some of it, but not the full 16x times. I am talking under the presumption that researchers today are aware are correcting for that fact that there is some selection bias (if that's what I can called) in stats.
- kalefranz 4y agoThe HN headline should probably have a (2007) indication appended.
- danamit 4y agoAutism seem to be a politicized issue by looking at the replies. As far as I can tell the paper is nothing but honest truth seeking, you know a study doesn't equal truth, the article itself doesn't say it is a confirmed hypothesis. And while correlation doesn't mean causation, when you see a correlation, the first thing you do is you investigate if it is a causation too. The most logical thing to do and thanks God smart people did that with lead and many other toxic chemicals that affected society in the past.
- sascha_sl 4y agoAll it tells me is that the standard for evidence in economics is much lower than the standard of evidence in medicine or sociology. This paper has some problems that run very deep in established methodology, so while it might be good faith, it's also useless.
- gryson 4y agoWhat specific problems are you referring to?
- sascha_sl 4y agoThe number of assumptions made without good evidence (neither rain nor having a cable subscription is automatically more TV time - especially the presence of cable says nothing about how parents control their childs media diet and is just an indicator of wealth) and the blindness for alternative explainations for these supposed relationships. They started from a typical armchair hypothesis and then looked for a way to interpret data to fit that hypothesis. That by itself is not remarkable, but the quality of the interpretation is questionable at best and outright malicious as worst.
- gryson 4y agoThey address the connection between rain and TV time in the article: >The authors first use data from the American Time Use Survey to confirm the link between precipitation and television watching. The results suggest a strong relationship - a child under age 3 watches an average of 27 additional minutes of television on a day with one inch of precipitation (which is equivalent to a day of heavy rain) than on a day with no precipitation.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> The authors reason that children are likely to watch more television if they live in an area that gets more precipitation Growing up in part of the California Central Valley where it is intolerably hot outside for a large portion of the year and has near-desert levels of precipitation, and then moving to the Bay Area which has more precipitation and less intolerable heat, I found the reverse to be the case, which given where the research was conducted... > If that is the case, then a finding that areas with higher levels of precipitation have higher autism rates would be strongly suggestive of a role for television watching as an autism trigger, “Strongly suggestive” ludicrously overstates the case. I mean, there's a lot of things more strongly associated with precipitation than television watching.