Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)

I 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/

Ha. I didn't even notice the date.

> OP's article is about children, yours is about adults.

Studies on biological causes of ASD are notorious for failing to replicate and reaching contradictory conclusions. It is just as likely that you’d reach the opposite conclusion with children too

Because “ASD” isn’t really a thing, it is a whole bunch of different things with different causes and different symptoms semi-arbitrarily squished together under the one label, simply because those symptoms have some overlap. And every research sample is a random mixture of these different underlying conditions, and two different samples are unlikely to have the same mix, which is why studies of the same thing with different samples (even defined on the same criteria) frequently produce opposite conclusions. “Heterogeneity” is the technical term for this

One of the lessons that I would hope that the world learns from the rise of the radical right world-wide is that platitudes about universalism, egalitarianism, empathy, and basically everything that the Baha'i faith teaches makes people hate you and want to kill you. This has been true historically (see treatment of Baha`i faith by like everyone) and is true today. These platitudes that you and the Baha`i faith (and jains) espoused seem to trigger a revulsion to "weakness" and "submissiveness" among others around them. Early Christians had to deal with the same extreme hatred.

Autistic people suffer the same fate. Dr. Hans Asperger could only say the "smart" autistic people from certain death by showing that they are useful to the war machine and could produce rockets so Nazis could continue gassing people longer.

Even today, "Autist" as a slur or insult is used even more than "Retard" 10 or 20 years ago, and the connotations around "Autist" are very similar to "Incel". Most people genuinely feel a level of horror that leads to "I wish you didn't exist" when they are around a chris-chan tier autistic person.

The world isn't ready to accept universalism, or love, or happieness, or peace or any of that hippy shit. The world wants a boot from a strongman on its face - forever!

There 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.

does hyperthermia affect fungal infections? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7572136/

I want to note that I am NOT making a connection to vaccines, nor do I see one. (Quite the opposite actually!)

The 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.

There is NO deficit.

While science allowed the schizophrenics to fix their material related thinking (but they eventually corrupted that anyway) and become somewhat funcional in that regard, they have always stayed socially isolated. As such, all recent history that we are taught is narrated from their perspective. People suffered horribly, until science allowed the people to rise up against THEM. Anything else is at best mentioned as a side note, utter madness, a fringe belief only held by the 95% of the people. They were harmed, opressed, subjugated and gassed, and whatever else, but now they are free.

Autism plus "AI for social" coprocessor could be a wicked combo ;)

Isn't it usually assumed that birds have such an efficient brain, akin to a real-time kernel, so that they can process incredibly high resolution occular input, while managing flight, and possibly possessing unknown senses (magnetic global positioning, wind speed, etc)?

This is an interesting take, along the line of elephants who need a huge brain mainly to actuate their trunk.

Birds use their optic tectums to process visual inputs, but that likely doesn't enable much more than visual recognition. The mammal brain goes far far far further than that:

It is the nature of most real life signals that they are sparse when represented in certain domains, and what the neocortex does is that it finds these sparse domains, which has at least three consequences:.

1. Simplicity. As mammal thinking doesn't deal with the world directly, but only through this latent space of sparse data, it only needs to deal with the meaningful values. This results in great simplicity, and allows previously overwhelming problems becoming manageable, then simple, and later trivial, as the neocirtex succesfully finds their sparse representation.

2. The representation in which the signal is sparse is its theory. By engaging only with the meaningful values, a mammal's thinking and creativity gets restricted to what can be relresented with those meaningful values, and so gets restricred to what is real, or realistic. Unlike the schizophrenic, which comes up with completely random nonsense that he needs to test with the scientific method, healthy people can't even conceive the theory that he's testing, as it cannot be represented within the values that they use.

Healthy people thus have very little need for science, as their brains do all the science they need in their daily lives.

The third one is reconstruction. This is what in its most extreme for allowed for various seers, oracles, visions and premonitions, and other such things, and what is already used in practice in MRA machines, once its nature is known, its sparse representation can be used to reconstruct a shockingly clear and accurate picture from seemingly hopelessly inadequate data.

yeah sure my autism is real cool and all until I forget my sunglasses or my headphones die at the grocery store. cool or uncool aside, seems like life must feel considerably more comfortable than for those of us with all the senses cranked to 100 24/7.

>>>This is like assuming that cancer is good? More cells, better body?

There are many things in our build up, where evolution have been outcome from viruses. However I do not like your comparision to cancer - cancerous cells are generally shredding cells from the unity of your organism - they might be making new organism, but that organism is not part of your evolution anymore. Changes that are happening in autistic brains are not destroying brains, but is part of the processes that are changing and optimizing them for the environment they have to exist in and the reasons for those changes are evolutionary - those changes started long time ago. Do you like that or not or can it be worded better - it does not really matter here.

>>>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.

You might be new. The mainstream argument and a direction for autistic people where it was going for a very long time has been, that autistic people were mentally disabled(not only intellectual but also emotional), which clearly is not the case. I mean, yes - that attitude might be helpful for purposes to suck out government support, but that leaves autistic people treated like deficient people, that are not contributing to society and telling a talented and intelligent person, that he is mentally disturbed would yield different results than telling that the person is very intelligent. And frankly, the issue is not hypothetical, like you have classified it but autistic people that they are smarter(at some things) stands out in the crowd. Genius and NT at this point in time is oxymoron.

>>>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.

You seem to have somewhat lack of knowledge and mixing things together based on what you know. Bird brains also have "cortex" - they have evolved some parts of brains, that are important to their evolution while we have massivelly developed cerebral cortex even compared to other primates, which is not what you are comparing here. Primates are much more inteligent than birds and if you realy want to go the route of comparing brain size, which you have got wrong, then brain weight to body mass comparision in birds is much lower than that to primates. As for energy that is used to operate brain, I would really need to know what is the evidence of that claim that birds are smarter than primates. It is assumed, that higher energy consumption of brains is because of amount of calculations that are happening in brains and birds brains are no more efficient than human brains - you can't use ostriches as a replacement of a very simple tasks for programming, that even dumb student can do.

The issue that you have declared that cortex is not needed is that it does not change the fact, that the cortex as part of human brains is not going to go away - cerebral cortex have developed over long time and it seems to be going to be foundation for future developments of human brains and also autistic brains. We could even get larger cerebral cortex, but expecting that some other brain regions would develop more than they are(as they also are constantly changing), compared to cerebral cortex is going against the topic, as while there are some changes in other parts of brains, the ones that are in celebral parts are more important to brains of austistic people.

We have wasted so much time in getting over your nonsense, but the information flow of human eyes is massive - the "thinking", that brains are doing is basically in discarding most of information for later processing. Autistic people have overflow of that information because their brains are not behaving "normaly"(like other human brains) and are not discarding as much information as other human brains does but tries to process it all. That is very much evolutionary change and very clearly processing more information has advantages compared to those that does not have them. Generally the things that some people are freaking about overstimulation will go away, as it is part of how changes are happening, but changes that will wire brains differently are there to stay - for all humans eventually.

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It's not a plan at this point, it already happened.

For 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.

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Fitness function? What if end up walking down the eugenics path or genetic engineering.

Ahh yes in other words adderall/caffeine and weed.

> Is there a survival and reproduction advantage from that?

Low-grade autism is overrepresented in Silicon Valley. That wealth absolutely confers a reproductive advantage.

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Yes