Hypeconnectivity

No I'm not talking about the new Sky broadband deal, I'm talking about the new brain mapping research that has been done, which has resulted it the realisation that there is an actual physical change in the autistic brain that can be scanned and measured. (See http://t.co/3kpUUwKcg5)

Reading this report had me yelling "Yes!  They have finally got it!  Yes!" so many times that I lost count!  They have finally found that the is an underlying reason why I can't seem to cope with crowded situations, why my control goes to peices under stressful situations, why I find meeting new people so difficult.  It isn't just me, it isn't that I'm some sort of freak who is just poorly socially adept, there is a reason why my brain doesn't seem to work the same way as other people's.  I'm not just some delotional freak, it's that my brain is so over wired that the areas that are meant to be seperated so that they can edit what they are processing before sharing it with the central hub are interconnected in ways that they are not meant to be.

Basically the normal human brain is meant to be like an office building with different offices dealing with their own share of the work and leaving the rest to the other offices (smell in one office, hearing in another and so on and so forth).  The autistic human brain has all these extra wires so information that is meant to be dealt with in one office is leaking over into all the other offices, meaning the central processor starts to struggle and eventually crash.

I also loved the fact that the article pointed out the extremely close connection between genuis and autisim, suggesting that with the right training, therapy and help to over come the social struggle we experience autistics could do so much good in the world by applying our hyperconnected brains and their ability to hype-concentrate to science, mathamatics, music and the arts.

What I found odd was actually at the end of the article in the comments box.  Many people where saying that there is no evidence that autistism is a genetic disorder because a 'genetic epidemic' could not happen as quickly as scienctists are claiming it has.

Well, I hate to break it to you but you are both right and both wrong.  Austism has a genetic base -a base of at least one hundred and fifty genes (150 - and that's only what is known so far) and they are all recessive.  That is why it has taken so long for autistism to be identified from a genetic basis.  It is also why autistism has suddenly increased in the last three decades.

When you have only 10% of a population carrying the genes for autistism the chances of a cross match are negilable.  When you get up to 40% then the chances are signifatantly increased.  When you hit 50%,  60%, 70% carrying the genes then the chances of producing a generation of autistic children suddenly jumps through the roof.

It has been estimated that at least 80% of the human population now carries the autistic recessives.  However, that is not the end of the story.  Nearly every woman with an autistic child reports having either a traumatic or extremely quick birth.  What many people forget is that an extremely quick birth is easy on the mother, it is extremely stressful and traumatic on the baby.  Concentrate antibiotics during pregency also seems to increase the risk of having an autistic child.  It seems that autistim is set off by both genetic and circumstantual events.

What is more you can be an adult before you become autistic.  You have a head injury in the right place and to the right intensity and you will come out of the coma autistic.

So, unlike the tests for Down Syndrome which has resulted in 90% of Down Syndrome humans being murdered before they can be born, autism is here to stay.  What is more the human race ought to be damn glad of that because we are going to make easier for the human race to adapt to a world where we came explote every resource down to the bones.  We autistics are content to find a job that our brains can understand and with fewer pocessions than most.  I for one wear my clothes into destruction before I buy new stuff.  Very few of my pocessions wind up in the charity shops because by the time I admit that I need to replace them they are fit only for the recycling centre.  In short, for an autistic less really is more and for the world that is a really good thing.