Autism and Masculinity

Very interesting article on the BBC Web site last week, about research into high levels of testosterone in fetuses that would later become children with autistic traits.

Eight years of research show a fairly high correlation (20% in the world of scientific research is very high indeed). However, it’s just a beginning: The link is only to autistic traits, not the disorder itself, and there is no way to know at this stage whether testosterone causes the traits, or is just correlated for any of a number of possible reasons.

This furthers the interesting hypothesis of the well-known British autism expert, Simon Baron-Cohen (no relation to Sasha) that symptoms of the disorder, such as highly analytic and logical thinking, social isolation, and others, are an expression of male thought patterns in extreme, unhealthy form. He thinks that perhaps the testosterone creates a brain in which this is inevitable. More specifically, Baron-Cohen says...

… the hormone [testosterone] could be affecting the brain through altering neural cell connectivity and chemicals that carry messages, known as neurotransmitters.

The team is now planning to follow up its study to test direct links between autism and testosterone levels in foetuses. The group will use Denmark's archive of 90,000 amniocentesis samples and its register of psychiatric diagnoses.

The work is connected to Professor Baron-Cohen's hypothesis suggesting that autism is a version of the extreme male brain.

He said that although researchers had tested this theory at the psychological level, the new studies meant it could now be tested at the biological level.

Freud Pumps His Fist

I'm a bit foggy tonight after nearly finishing the fifth of six weeks straight with my campers with Asperger's. (Today was a most victorious day, by the way.) And I'm up extra-early tomorrow in order to be able to take them on their weekly field trip. So tonight, a quick link to a really interesting article in the Times claiming that the unconscious drives our daily actions far more than we think. A tip of the Thinkulous hat to Goat Rope blogger El Cabrero for hipping me to this article.

I can just see old Freud coolly releasing a cloud of cigar smoke, and saying, "Well, duh!" (A rough translation from the German.)

Herr Sigmund may have named the concept over a century ago, but it's only recently that science, that stodgy older sibling, is grudgingly admitting that psychology was right all along. Some key 'graphs:

On the way to the laboratory, [participants in a recent study] had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Like a lot of academic psychology, the implications of the new research are far more interesting than they are practical. That doesn't stop me from gobbling them up...

Williams Syndrome and Big Brains

For all you psych geeks, I recommend a very interesting article on Williams Syndrome in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. WS starts with some missing genes, which leads eventually to “a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.” Williamses (as they call themselves) also have congenital heart problems which lower their life expectancy; they also suffer from a lack of spatial awareness.

The author, David Dobbs, branches off from the syndrome itself, and into various interesting implications. Of course, researchers are drooling over the possibility that genes might directly cause or prevent certain behaviors. That’s the kind of find that people spend whole careers seeking.

In one fascinating, lengthy segué, Dobbs outlines recent research on why the human brain grew so much larger than that of our forebears over the millennia. It has been assumed for many years that the purpose of the larger brain was greater facility at hunting and tool-making. This new research suggests the brain grew in order to allow humans to develop language, which was needed to help us navigate the complexities of ever-larger communities of fellow humans.

From the Darwinian perspective, bigger brains, and the language they made possible, allowed us to both to fulfill our basic longing to affiliate with others, and, at the same time, assess the level of threat those others posed within the confines of the group.

Hey, wait a minute. If understanding people and bonding with each other gives the greatest edge in competitive selection, we therapists ought to end up passing on far more genes than anyone else, right? Woo-hoo! Finally a social advantage to being a geek!