Regarding that amazing discovery, about a biological mechanism that I believe could be the origin of at least two different types of genetic autism, that I wrote about yesterday, it just gets better. I was catching up on reading through some back issues of New Scientist and there it was - a little story in that magazine about an interesting study that uncovered an interesting new fact about medicine/biology that has been written up in a science journal paper. The new fact uncovered in this article explained and confirmed my scientific insight. It was one of those moments! The sex ratios in autism could very well be explained, although there is one seemingly paradoxical fact about sex ratios that I have yet to find an explanation for. My theory fits like a glove with the idea of autism as an ancient evolutionary adaptation to an unfavourable environment, which is the icing on the cake. So many autistics seem to be born into the mindset of a person under seige. When things get really tough, complex social connections break down and society atomizes. Just ask anyone who has actually survived a war zone caused by political insanity. This doesn't mean that autism is amenable to counselling, it just gives a hint at how some types came about and why they exist.
I think it was the philosopher Karl Popper who had the bright idea that all truly scientific theories are testable and have the potential to be disproved. My theory could very easily be put to the test in studies of simple design, and could be shown wrong in doing so.
It really does pay to keep an eye on the details of autistic people that one knows in real life, and the details of the lives of famous autistics, and it also pays to read about science in an unstructured serendipitous manner.
When I first read the science mag article and realised where it fit into my ideas, I wondered if this was anything like the way the autistic scientist Sir Isaac Newton felt when he was discovering the laws of physics but keeping history's most amazing secrets to himself. So many strange things that I had thought were connected do seem to be connected. Incredible things are all around us, waiting to be seen and understood. Just live your life with eyes that really see and a curious mind.
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2 comments:
A curious mind seems to be one of the few assets in a brain that often seems to work against me . Do aspies collect information like Nt's collect social esteem or is it just our general confusion about the world that makes us desire to make some sense of all the seeming insanity that is human existence ?
I have tried to fit AS neurology into some kind of social Darwinist system but can't seem to imagine what it was to "be" in other times and places...the traits certainly seems to work against me in my gender, time and place .
"Do aspies collect information like Nt's collect social esteem or is it just our general confusion about the world that makes us desire to make some sense of all the seeming insanity that is human existence?"
I think obsession, boredom and sensory enhancement might explain my accumulating of info and observations of small and isolated things.
"I have tried to fit AS neurology into some kind of social Darwinist system but can't seem to imagine what it was to "be" in other times and places...the traits certainly seems to work against me in my gender, time and place ."
I've been told that in times in which the political situation made it unwise to trust anyone else, times in which ordinary people acted as spies and informants, it is a gift to have a distrustful, solitary nature. Of course, this could simply be one weird family's self-justificatory mythology.
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