apeiron said:
Maybe if your cousin really is a neuroscientist he means he knows of the work of Courchesne and many others, but he just does not think their studies to be methodologically sound, adequately replicated, etc. In many cases, this would be a valid criticism.
Maybe, maybe not, the name doesn't ring a bell to me, but I am really bad at remembering names when it comes to this. He did show me some things which he criticized as assuming too much and colouring and having some systematic biases, and I agreed.
Note that I also find that famous test where you get some electrodes on you and some machine anticipate your decisions a split second before you make them often having conclusions drawn from it which can't be made, even though those conclusions fit my reductionist view. The evidence is shallow, for one, the situation cannot be ruled out that they indeed had the conscious decision before the image flipped, but later on they changed their own memories. I would find it probable that this happens all the time really.
But if you read what I wrote you would also realize that I was suggesting the brain differences would be very fine-grained. At the dendritic connectivity or cortical column level. So I personally would not expect to see obvious differences in brain scans. And they would be difficult to even see in post-mortem tissue samples unless we really knew the circuit patterns to be looking for.
As I said, my own argument follows from carefully listening to the accounts of those with autism spectrum disorders and then matching that to what is known about brain organisation, brain development, and perceptual processing.
Well, my first criticism was mainly that all seems to rely on the assumption that autism spectrum disorder is one category simply because naïvely to humans it appears as such. You really have to demonstrate that first before you can even begin to use your approach.
I mean, it's all about perception, just because two things appear as similar to
human perception doesn't mean they are. There could be two completely unrelated 'disorders' around which both manifest similarly in the symptoms that humans pay attention to which are grouped together under 'autism' with psychologists and neurologists alike failing to see a difference when they could be completely unrelated. I mean, an average person probably won't see any difference between trance and techno, but lump them together in the face of a fan and he will promptly tell you they are completely not alike.
From what I saw when I was institutionalized myself (yap, forced, I'm sure you will not hold this against me) is that psychiatrists were unable to see the difference between anger, aggression, hatred and annoyance and proceeded to treat all as the same. Now these come from completely different sources and a key difference is that hatred and anger are
directed at some object, usually a person, while aggression and annoyance are not directed, I believe they require completely different treatments, but they hardly recognised any difference between them. Also, people have the awkward pattern of putting things like self-loathing / insecurity together or happiness / excitement / joy, or more such things, while I'm pretty convinced they have completely different causes.
Likewise, I've seen a lot of people who are diagnosed with aspie who have little to do with each other except that they don't really move that well socially. In some cases they lack empathy, in other cases confidence, in other cases simply desire. Also, 'thas come to my observation that as long as you're really extroverted, people have a tendency to completely not notice the fact that you are completely incapable of not reading facial expressions or having the empathy to see what goes on in another's mind, which I find quite interesting. Aspies are generally known as introverts, however say for sake of argument that my observation is correct, and people fail to notice if extroverted people aren't that good at reading people's mood and all?