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Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)
- codr7 2y agoWhat if growing bigger, more connected brains is the next evolutionary step? Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me.
- airstrike 2y agoIs there a survival and reproduction advantage from that?
- esseph 2y ago[dead]
- indogwetrust 2y agoYes
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Is there a survival and reproduction advantage from that? Low-grade autism is overrepresented in Silicon Valley. That wealth absolutely confers a reproductive advantage.
- sanitycheck 2y agoAny evidence the reproduction rate is higher among tech workers, or even among the wealthy in general? From what I've gathered in the past autistic people are more likely than average to not reproduce.
- 0u89e 2y agoThat is not how things work. Females are the main drive to reproduction and decide demographic trends in societies where they are not oppressed(also, diagnosed autism levels in minority grpups is higher compared to classical white populations - make from it what you want, but I will avoid comments for this here). And female autism works differently than male autism and a lot of that does not show up, because less females would be diagnosed for the very simple reason that diagnosis is not a disease but how well a person can function in society and females differ from males in that as they are doing better than males. We do not exaclty know variable for amount of females, that have "autistic" genes, but they seems to be main drive to spread autism and very successful at that, regardless how diagnosed male autists are multiplying less. Also, people seem to have wrong idea about how genes spread - it takes SINGLE successful case to spread dominant and successful genes over the next generations. The main issue that people are thinking of autists, that they are somewhat different from other people - even on biological level and it does not help, that among autistic people there arte those that think in the levels of "autistic nation", because genetically we are even less different to other humans than a lab rat to other rats. And like I mentioned before, spread of succesful autistic genes is irrevelant of the number of direct descendants that person produces, and with genes you can't assume, that they are only present to those that have diagnosis.
- sampton 2y agoNo. Too many fully connected layers.
- readthenotes1 2y agoThe trouble seems to be the lack of tidal pools to isolate stimulation. Maybe that will happen, but ASD people need to have a lot more babies
- lazide 2y agoGood luck with that social awkwardness thing going on.
- thinkingkong 2y agoThe fitness function that would govern that evolution would be new though. We’d be intentionally optimizing for brains that work that way with some new social or technical construct. Like if we said “autism is the new exposed ankles” and suddenly had many more babies who also demonstrated that trait. Or if we had access to technology that would select for that outcome, gattaca style.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoFitness function? What if end up walking down the eugenics path or genetic engineering.
- iinnPP 2y agoSociety took the biggest of bats and beat the ever loving love out of the fitness function in many parts of the world.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoFitness functions are retrospective, so there is no "We should have done this differently." The definition of fitness is literally whatever persists by reproduction. Features and species that persist for a while and then collapse/disappear are a normal part of the process.
- SubiculumCode 2y agoOver-excitation tends to create more redundant, less synergistic information in networks. The balance between excitation and inhibition is thought by some to be requisite for efficient and flexible cognition.
- RockRobotRock 2y agoAhh yes in other words adderall/caffeine and weed.
- codr7 2y agoAka hippie speedball :)
- qwertox 2y agoThis is like assuming that cancer is good? More cells, better body? This is just a hypothetical counter-argument. More connectivity could be better, "more intelligent", and autism seems to be "cool" among nerds for this reason. But maybe it's just a fallacy, just a way to pretend to be something better. Again, all hypothetical. Yesterday I listened to a podcast episode about bird brains [0]. That some birds have a way more efficient brain than ours, even if they are not as intelligent as we are. They are smarter than other primates, but their brain just weighs around 10g, while the one of chimps, which are about as intelligent as some birds, weighs 400g and consumes a lot more energy. They have an underdeveloped cortex, so apparently it isn't as important as one might think. That it could be that the cortex is more dedicated to sensing, than to thinking. Birds, for example, don't have such complex sensory inputs like our hands or our entire skin surface, that "memory mapping" all those inputs requires such a big cortex. [0] https://www-spektrum-de.translate.goog/podcast/spektrum-podcast-gehirn-die-evolution-der-kognition/2252594?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-spektrum-de.translate.goog/podcast/spektrum-podc...
- inurqubits 2y ago[dead]
- bobim 2y agoThis is an interesting take, along the line of elephants who need a huge brain mainly to actuate their trunk.
- calmbonsai 2y agoAkin to bottle-nose dolphins and orcas with sound. They have, easily, the most signal-processing neurons of ANY species on the planet. And, fwiw, their encephalization quotient is just behind one species--us. Since they're aquatic mammals (given the requisite mass for thermoregulation), that severely under-represents their effective brain/body-mass ratio too.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoAutism plus "AI for social" coprocessor could be a wicked combo ;)
- BarryMilo 2y agoWhat do you mean by "next"? Evolution doesn't have a plan. It'd be more adapted for some things and less for others.
- indogwetrust 2y ago[flagged]
- mihaaly 2y agoFor evolution it means next known retrospectively. Naturally. Those with hyperconnectivity not evoking social dysfunction (some dots in the charts) may become a potential step in evolution in a society not supressing evolution. And in a post Trump world of course where intelligence and the ability of collaboration for common good (needs social skills) is beneficial again.
- codr7 2y agoIt's not a plan at this point, it already happened.
- robwwilliams 2y agoExcept than in brain development the general trend is to lose a large fraction of many neuron types, synapses, and excess axonal connections.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- calmbonsai 2y agoWell, there are plusses and minuses. At a certain level of size, connectedness, and semi-specialization, you get (what we label) consciousness. It's not just size, but there is some bare minimum of nodes. It's not just pure contentedness. That's just noise. It's not just specialization. It helps with speed, but you lose plasticity and adaptability. Also, there's a physical limit with respect to growth speed 'cuz cancer and sustainable metabolic rates wrt food intake, digestive efficiency, and thermoregulation. It seems the shrews and moles have "hacked" that in very different ways. There's also a physical limit with brain size for live births--which we're already really, really pushing. Honestly, I would've thought the most intelligent species would use eggs to minimize the trauma/risk of live-births to both child and mother, but I guess mother's milk is so beneficial it makes up for all of that.
- thoo4j334324 2y ago> What if growing bigger, more connected brains is the next evolutionary step? I don't mean to be mean - but unlike what "nerds" think "intelligence" isn't some superior trait that automatically means the gulag/eugenics for the socially popular kids who they despise. All this situation indicates is that the societies are broken/mean (on every side). Traits need to be "rewarded" for them to be evolutionarily meaningful in the individual's environment. More connections etc. also means a lot more energy consumption. Not many societies can support such phenotypes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- someothherguyy 2y agoWhat is the selective pressure? How is this becoming more widely expressed (if it actually is)?
- ok_dad 2y agoRapid data ingestion?
- someothherguyy 2y agoIs causing what to happen? Killing people? Making them sterile? Making them grow huge dicks? Giving them 40 wives? As far as I can tell, autism isn't really a trait one wants in order to be successful sexually.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoI dunno, look at Elon with his X children.
- AngryData 2y agoElon isn't autistic, he is just an asshole who wanted an excuse to deflect blame for his actions.
- tgv 2y agoAs someone else pointed out: more isn't better. There's an optimum, and it depends on the task. There are some "in vivo" studies about connections in the young cat's visual cortex. It starts out very connected, and most of the connectivity is lost, while structures form.
- someothherguyy 2y ago> Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me. It does to me, sounds like Lamarckian confusion, not evolution.
- linux2647 2y ago(2013)
- indogwetrust 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SubiculumCode 2y agoVinod, often flashy and interesting, also often plays a bit fast and loose..a strategy that seems to land his lab good journals, but questionable replication. So I immediately looked at the preprocessing steps in the methods...which is, annoyingly, in supplemental 1. A few comments: It is written so vaguely, it is difficult to understand what preprocessing steps were done and in which order (which matters). The steps to avoid motion confounds mostly talk about why they didn't do certain things (e.g. GSR regression), and not what they did do (tissue signal covariates?), what about non-GSR based noise cleaning to remove physiological and motion related noise? The study may be good,I just wish it was written more straightforwardly, and less like they are weaving past potential reviewer objections. Vinod (v) To Vinod a paper is to write it so loose and sexy, so fast and seductive, editors are bound to wake up the morning after with a new babe. (Just a little joke among some colleagues of mine).
- robwwilliams 2y agoAmusing comments provided you are not Vinod. Three sites and I would hope that connectomes were computed interleaved between cases and controls and analyzed with blinding. Is that standard? Do you think behavioral difference in the scanner could generate false positive connectome differences?
- SubiculumCode 2y agoI am not sure what you mean by interleaved here. In 2013 I am not sure that site differences were as appreciated as they are today. Today, in studies that use multi-site imaging data, ComBat Harmonization is often the method that is employed to account for site effects in two ways: (1) it models site-specific scaling factors and (2) it uses empirical Bayes to improve the estimation of the site parameters for small sample sizes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5845848/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5845848/
- robwwilliams 2y agoBy interleaved I mean that cases and controls were not each in their own run batches, but ideally run A ,B, A, B, Yes ComBat can some of the batch effect if sample sizes are large enough. But here as you point out they are on thin ice.
- davidthewatson 2y agoDoes brain science have a Fitt's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law This is before we even start talking about serial or parallel, concurrency, etc. And then modify the networks and the wires themselves dynamically in real-time and you have endogenous BDNF, endogenous DMT, and the fact that insulin has a different, psychoactive effect on the other side of the blood brain barrier. It would seem that time-speed-distance would be a useful metric here, as well as accounting for the fact that we don't actually know where we are in the 6d chess of triune, bicameral, hippocampal, or glycemic variation moment-to-moment in real-time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- gtsnexp 2y agoHere is where the original idea (with experimental evidence) came from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17638926/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17638926/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21423407/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21423407/
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoThere is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane. Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself completely wrong with an experiment, an "intelligent" man concocts a social conspiracy theory, but nothing proves him wrong: instead, he pronounces those who "don't get it" hopelesly stupid, too socially dumb to participate in a society.
- baq 2y agoThis sounds like memespeak cope. There is a deficit from the perspective of other people participating in the society. Yes, nothing died inside. No, it isn’t necessary for anything to be dead for a deficit to exist.
- hiciu 2y agoThe double empathy problem explains why it may not be a deficiency, just a "different brain language" between ND and NT people. Basically, from autistic perspective, it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication. There's been a whole lot of research about that in the last 10-15 years or so. And a lot of memes in the community.
- blueflow 2y ago> it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication Example: In a Job interview, when you get asked why you did apply. Its the social norm to lie and make up some reason that sounds good, and saying the truth "i need money to pay my rent" makes you the weird one. People say ND people are blunt and frank... but the other side of the same coin would be that NT people can't talk about facts.
- zozbot234 2y ago> when you get asked why you did apply. What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?" Then saying "hey, I need money for blah whatever" is non-responsive, but you can just talk about why you think you might be a good fit for them after all. Much of this stuff is just cultural anyway. There are Western societies where being "blunt and frank" like that is quite accepted or even expected, unlike the U.S. and the Anglosphere more generally.
- The_Amp_Walrus 2y agoOn this topic I really enjoyed reading "Autism as a disorder of dimensionality" https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/ https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen... I'm just a casual reader I can't vouch for the veracity of the content, but I found it very interesting
- funnym0nk3y 2y agoI wonder how that ties into the hyperconnectivity induced by various psychoactive substances like psilocybin. All the research about GABA and glutamate seems too low level to me and not specific enough for treatment targets. Somewhat like using body weight to determine that disease.
- AnthonBerg 2y agoI’d suggest tracing a line through the points of published research on autism, hyperthermia and its effects on autism spectrum related behaviors, the effect of Interleukin-17 thereon, the relationship from between IL-17 and Th17 helper cells, and the 5-HT2A receptor’s effects on Th17 cell regulation. And other stuff. Like thermoregulation. There’s more interesting stuff on the way and at every point. To manage expectations: It’s… an imaginary line? —- edit: on the run, hope to be able to follow up with papers
- galuggus 2y agodoes hyperthermia affect fungal infections? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7572136/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7572136/
- AnthonBerg 2y agoor vice versa, I have no idea! I do recall reading that certain autoimmune disorders like psoriasis which are therapeutically impacted by serotonin receptors’ effects on the immune system do happen to increase susceptibility to fungal infection iirc/afaik before readings: that paper is wild (I’ll approach it with a grain of salt while also not immediately discounting it)
- AnthonBerg 2y agoI want to note that I am NOT making a connection to vaccines, nor do I see one. (Quite the opposite actually!)
- ddmf 2y agohmm - still feel autistic on psilocybin and other tryptamines but more aware (and it works like a reset switch), however I've never felt as normal (or more like the people around me) as I did that first summer I binged mdma - when I managed to stay awake that is...
- cyocum 2y agoI am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2 Edited to add title of the article
- dartos 2y agoDifferent underlying causes for the same condition is possible. Given how little we know about the internals of brain function, it’s not surprising to see conflicting indicators of the same condition. I’m just a layman, tho, so what do I know.
- lumost 2y agoThere are also two axis of deficit in autostic individuals. Social and cognitive. Its not uncommon for individuals to present without cognitive deficit, however social deficits can still be severe e.g. A 5 year old who cannot participate in class due to meltdowns and inability to follow social norms such as sharing/turn taking/listening. I haven't read these studies, but it seems natural that there would need to be control for the type and severity of autism.
- mlyle 2y agoWouldn't be the first time that a syndrome ends up having basically two opposite etiologies. Abnormal synaptic density-- high or low) producing autism-like social deficits wouldn't be too much of a surprise. Alternatively, starting with high connectivity resulting in a greater rate of synaptic pruning and overcorrection wouldn't be a surprise, either. All are interesting things to think about and watch evolve.
- spoonfeeder006 2y agoOP's article is about children, yours is about adults. OP's article's conclusion states "Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of studying neurodevelopmental disorders closer to their onset, rather than in adulthood when a lifetime of compensatory mechanisms may have already taken place" As I understand, autistic people often get negative reinforcement from authoritarian mindsets of society (follow the general norm and the power structures instead of thinking for yourself) and that can be kinda traumatizing for autistic people So what we need is to value that every person's perspective is equally valid, and their ideas are plausible, and no one is inherently superior, whether NT or ASD etc... > Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value > > -Baha'i Teaching
- jan3024-2r 2y ago[flagged]
- fallingfrog 2y agoThis feels like the work of a highly intelligent person operating on very scant information- it’s easy to construct castles of thought that more or less fit your experiences, but at some point the slow tedious work of conducting experiments and data has to be done, and most of these sorts of elaborate guesses turn out to be wrong.
- SZJX 2y agoIf it’s true, one idea to explain it might be oversensitivity to input (which maybe sometimes leads to withdrawal or avoidance to social situations which could be too stimulating and stressful?), which given the connection between autism and ADHD which has become discovered more and more by research in recent years doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable to me. Then again I have no expertise in this field whatsoever so can only conjecture.
- ddmf 2y agoMy clinical psychiatrist crudely described autism as taking many - sometimes longer - pathways through the brain to do things and monotropism could be simply a sticky myelin sheath. But both could be true - a myelin sheath disorder along with hyperconnectivity could explain so many sensory issues and such singular processing.