tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post5910951313649809086..comments2023-12-18T02:21:25.723-08:00Comments on cracking the enigma: Autism and the art of campervan maintenancedrbrocktagonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-89923945844524874862014-03-23T21:17:50.594-07:002014-03-23T21:17:50.594-07:00But aren't chromosomes and regions of chromoso...But aren't chromosomes and regions of chromosomes also ideas? If you're going to argue against an essential rabbit-ness, and an essential autism-ness, why not argue against an essential chromosome-ness? What separates it from these other ideas?Cavoyonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-2371299481970227102014-01-28T08:43:33.442-08:002014-01-28T08:43:33.442-08:00I think the essence of autism should not be sought...I think the essence of autism should not be sought at the level of phenotype but at an underlying global mechanism which pervades the brain and so affects different brain functions. You can see the idea in this image (http://pairal.net/im/levels.jpg) and its development in this article (http://pairal.net/asperger/HED-Cererols.pdf).<br />Ramon Cererols (pairal.net) (rcererols@gmail.com)pairalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00428081146905704061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-74557536929342174462013-03-07T15:34:58.042-08:002013-03-07T15:34:58.042-08:00Not sure this is helpful but Karen Barad and other...Not sure this is helpful but Karen Barad and others write about the origins of representationalism, which, according to Hacking, can be traced back to Democrtius: According to Hacking’s anthropological philosophy, representations were unproblematic before Democritus: “The word ‘real’ first meant just unqualified likeness” (1983, 142). With Democritus’s atomic theory emerges the possibility of a gap between representations and represented.-- “appearance” makes its first appearance. (p. 48 of Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. And to cut a very long argument short, you get to think not about categories or boxes in which to put things but the practices that enact or do the boxes. <br />cjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00331402912164101124noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-4470604167241760292013-03-06T23:13:20.328-08:002013-03-06T23:13:20.328-08:00Nice name for a campervan! :) Good thing that trip...Nice name for a campervan! :) Good thing that trip offered you much time to read that wonderful book. Impressive analogy on autism too. Thank you.Apollo Motorhomeshttp://www.apollocamper.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-12114149352015143692012-06-14T20:43:00.182-07:002012-06-14T20:43:00.182-07:00Hi Jon
Sitting thousands of miles away I am back ...Hi Jon<br /><br />Sitting thousands of miles away I am back in MACCS. Great post as always. Names of Max and Anne bring me close to home in Sydney...<br /><br />On to the next!<br />Cheers<br />Ushaushanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-59055445024732082492012-06-07T13:03:31.889-07:002012-06-07T13:03:31.889-07:00Lovely post. Agree that Richard Lenski’s work is g...Lovely post. Agree that Richard Lenski’s work is great (my field, sort of).<br />Paul Rainey in New Zealand is also worth looking up. Two weeks ago I met Bruce Levin, Lenski’s former collaborator and PhD supervisor, and founder of the E coli liberation front (www.eclf.net) [1]. He pointed out a similar problem with essentialism in bacteriology: bacteria tend to be described as either antibiotic sensitive or resistant. The reality, of course, is that there is a whole range of levels of resistance, as well as different patterns of expression of resistance. All that variation makes a difference to an infected patient. If you think only resistant/sensitive you miss half the story. <br /><br />Could it be language itself that forces us into this trap? It’s interesting just how many scientific breakthroughs come from people reasoning not with words, or even mathematics, but with pictures (Darwin’s trees, Einstein’s clocks on trains etc). Could language impairments even lead to better scientists? Einstein, Teller and Richard Feynman all had significant language delays. The current head of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, struggled to get a place at university because he continually failed his French ‘O’ Level. Some of the best scientists I know are dyslexic. Has anyone ever looked systematically to see if there is really a pattern here? Are those who reason using pictures more than words more likely to make large conceptual leaps?<br /><br />I guess the autistic spectrum metaphor is an improvement on the autistic/non-autistic dichotomy (1 dimension instead of 0, a line instead of a dot), but maybe we need to think in more dimensions than that. Statistical clustering approaches could help here, though researchers might be resistant to such approaches because with the same number of patients it’s much harder to show so-called “statistically significant” findings if you have 3 or more groups instead of two. Without such statistical significance it can be hard to publish papers. But that’s a whole other worm can.<br /><br />Worth also remembering, in some cases the essentialist position does turn out to be justified. Williams Syndrome (WS), for example, has a single well-defined cause. Intuitively I would have thought less variable than autism (or perhaps as variable, but less likely to form into distinct clusters). It would be interesting to compare the results of cluster analyses of, say, behaviours or brain scans or face measurements or whatever of kids with WS and kids diagnosed with autism. Hypothesis would be that WS cluster into one group, while those with Autism would cluster into several. <br /><br />[1] While discussing animal models for bacterial infections he also made the observation: “We need better models than the mouse. Something bigger. Like a pig. Or a Republican.” I guess the same could be said for autism research.Ben Cooperhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-cooper/4/28/ab4noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-41799637178695940622012-05-06T08:35:23.423-07:002012-05-06T08:35:23.423-07:00Sometimes a rabbit is just a rabbit.Sometimes a rabbit is just a rabbit.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-68606794186449420722012-05-05T08:35:13.521-07:002012-05-05T08:35:13.521-07:00To understand how essentialistic is our way of tho...To understand how essentialistic is our way of thought we must go to the basics. <br /><br />We have a tendency to accept terms as "autism" as valid entities and use them to explain every event we face. They become recurrent, and yes, essential to our reasoning. <br /><br />When we talk about autism or any other mental pathology, we must not forget that we are not using signs of a disease (as objective features). <br /><br />Somehow we decided that certain responses deserve a name. To make it "easy" we establish arbitrary boundaries like "take 3 out of five". <br /><br />Amazingly, mental pathologies that we take for granted are decided by the votes of an elite. That's how homosexuality was considered for a long while a disorder until social pressure got the vote from the psychiatrist establishment on the contrary. <br /><br />So, psychiatry and his mental illnesses or diseases are established upon votation of a few. Quite unscientific I'd say.<br /><br />I would suggest that before we talk about autism in terms of a complex and heterogeneous disorder, we must establish what a disorder is (mental disorder in this case, very important) since I do not see, so far, anything other than a bunch of responses that we decide must have a label called autism and that label is, therefore, a disorder.<br /><br />From there the label or expressions like "people with autism" become the causal elements that explain behavior. What a twist: we observe behaviors, give them a name and then we use that name to explain those behaviors. <br />Evidently terms like "autism" "PDD" "schizophrenia" are all labels and as such they cannot never be explanations of anything. <br /><br />Taking for granted "the disorder" then we commit a second mistake. Like everything in life, we think a disorder must occupy a place in the universe, must have a location. Therefore, we look in the brain. <br /><br />We are blind to the possibility of phenomena not having a location or the idea that behavior can be a type of relationship with necessary elements such a body or a brain, but not sufficient to explain behavior.<br /><br />We are also blind to the idea that perhaps mental patologies do not exist other than in our language. <br /><br />Yes, I agree that "we have invested too much significance in the label itself". Not only that, the most popular members on the autism world tend to be the ones searching for the rarest or oddest behaviors in order to accentuate the label and the difference of "autistic people" in respect to us, "the normal people.<br /><br />If I properly recall, it was Mayr himself who considered that the mixture of the same terminology for the different disciplines was a recipe for disaster. <br />We have put together too many disciplines, all at the same level, like sciences without boundaries and their own characteristics and features. <br /><br />Just another mistake to add to the puzzle. Perhaps that's why it has that symbol.Jorge Campohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09469017420000014493noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-26029061261939319542012-05-04T21:24:18.722-07:002012-05-04T21:24:18.722-07:00There is genetic heterogeneity, and no doubt neura...There is genetic heterogeneity, and no doubt neural hetereogeneity. But those are uninterpretable unless we first get a clear description of the cognitive heterogeneity. All of this is true not only of autism and dyslexia and SLI, but also of Williams Syndrome and developmental prosopagnosia; so quite possibly true of all developmental disorders of cognition.Max Colthearthttp://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~max/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-79422179660178507522012-05-04T21:18:00.761-07:002012-05-04T21:18:00.761-07:00And this is true IN SPADES for essentialist dyslex...And this is true IN SPADES for essentialist dyslexia research.Max Colthearthttp://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~max/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-85509476686606557342012-05-04T01:04:42.882-07:002012-05-04T01:04:42.882-07:00Your post is really interesting, and I want to tha...Your post is really interesting, and I want to thank you for the work you're doing on your blog, I enjoy it because you always manage to offer perspective. I have always been sure that philosophy can bring insights and help us think.<br />I am also amused by your inability to stop thinking about work, and thus your ability to use any situation to build reflexions about autism !<br /><br />I hope you will not take offense of my perhaps naive comment, but here are some thoughts I came up with.<br /><br />I am very interested because I am under the impression that, confronted to the diversity of people with autism, and the aporia created by statistical and behavioural diagnosis, scientists can now suggest to focus more on individual "phenotypes".<br /><br />Plato would describe two worlds : the worlds of things, and the world of "ideas". These ideas are the ideal and essential models of things, and things are thus determined by ideas. <br /><br />Sartre's existentialism, on the contrary, says that "existence precedes essence", which means that one individual is not determined by an essence, that things are first, and men exist before they can think the "idea" of "man" and then give birth to essential concepts (it is difficult to talk about all this in english, forgive me !). <br />This is why everybody know what "man" is, but this doesn't mean that "man" existed before all men, or that there is an "abolute" man above all. <br /><br />Where Plato is determinist, Sartre states that one is defined by his actions and his existence in the world, and that choice is always possible. <br />Sartre had a huge influence on ways of thinking in France. <br /><br />In France a lot of people working in the field of autism have not abandonned the psychodynamic point of view (I would like to emphasize that most of smart people were horrified by the people interviewed in "the wall", and I don't know anyone working like that, but this is a whole other question) but have made it evolve to meet scientific discoveries and observation facts. <br />In France, this point of view, nourished by philosophical background such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty... is the one allowing to focus on singularities.<br />We need science to understand the "essential" mechanisms underlying autisms, we also need a humanistic method to understand the individual's way of being. <br /><br />So, it is very interesting for a french psychologist like me to read that scientists feel they may need to address more the individual differences. It really makes sense to me.<br />I hope this was not too boring. I just wanted to point at the bridges that can link two paradigms that are often considered as opposed.BlaiseLaPsyhttps://twitter.com/#!/BlaiseLaPsynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-23406155725474505812012-05-04T00:57:09.316-07:002012-05-04T00:57:09.316-07:00Thanks Kevin.
The CNTNAP2 story is seriously inte...Thanks Kevin.<br /><br />The CNTNAP2 story is seriously interesting. I blogged about it a while back but I think that's already out of date.<br /><br />http://crackingtheenigma.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/genes-for-autism-or-genes-for.html<br /><br />Dan Geschwind has a recent review, which I'm about to read:<br /><br />http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22365836<br /><br />As for co-occurence in families, I think that's the big puzzle. If it were the case that there were distinct behavioural subtypes of autism that were linked to corresponding aetiologies, then we'd expect people from the same family to have the same subtype of autism phenotypically. But that's manifestly not the case. You'll get one kid who has classic autism, one with Asperger's, and maybe another with something else entirely (ADHD or DCD). This doesn't fit with a simple subtypes model, and it doesn't fit with an "essentialist" account either, unless the claim is that ADHD is essentially the same as ASD. So I think the only feasible explanation is something along the lines you've described.<br /><br />The good thing about paradoxes is that they tell you where your theory is wrong and where you should really start poking around. So looking at variations within families is probably the way to go.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-2252087454652142142012-05-04T00:33:36.202-07:002012-05-04T00:33:36.202-07:00Following on the dyslexia comment, I think the ide...Following on the dyslexia comment, I think the idea of the phenotype emerging from the genotype in a probabilistic rather than deterministic sense is spot on. A mutation affecting a particular neurodevelopmental process will often not disrupt it completely, but degrade its robustness so that it sometimes works alright but other times does not. If the process is repeated in many sites across the brain, then you can get phenotypic effects emerging in different brain areas in different carriers of that mutation, possibly giving rise to quite different manifestations.<br /><br />This sort of effect may be why specific mutations can be associated with very diverse disorders (e.g., autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, Tourette's syndrome are all associated with mutations in CNTNAP2 gene).<br /><br />It can also lead to the situation where a predisposition to a disease or condition in general may be inherited, but the precise form that emerges is more random, depending on which brain areas are more affected. We have observed this for synaesthesia, where very different forms co-occur in families (even twins; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=17586484%20). It is also seen for epilepsy, where different brain areas are involved between twins (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=21885256).Kevin Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07172255754953214162noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-87884304463067017482012-05-03T19:32:22.294-07:002012-05-03T19:32:22.294-07:00Thanks Max. Funnily enough I had exactly the same ...Thanks Max. Funnily enough I had exactly the same conversation with Anne Castles yesterday!<br /><br />I think you're right to separate out the essentialism issue from the heterogeneity. In my research and on this blog I've been focusing a lot on heterogeneity within autism, but I think that's only part of a bigger picture, which involves looking across neurodevelopmental disorders.<br /><br />On the dyslexia theme, I really liked Frank Ramus's paper a few years ago (TiCS, 2004) where he was talking about genetic risk factors for cortical anomalies, but the precise consequences and hence the child's diagnosis would depend on where the cortical anomalies actually occurred.<br /><br />In the autism field, there is more interest at present in connectivity, but we can make a similar argument - genetic risk for dysconnection that manifests differently (and results in different diagnoses) depending on where (and perhaps when developmentally) the dysconnection occurs.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-53650483295576634482012-05-03T17:31:02.090-07:002012-05-03T17:31:02.090-07:00Lovely post.
It seems to me that what's said ...Lovely post.<br /><br />It seems to me that what's said in this post applies not only to autism, but also to other developmental disorders such as dyslexia or specific language impairment. Essentialism is also rampant here. One often still sees, for example, such claims as "The core of developmental dyslexia is phonological impairment", despite the very clear evidence that dyslexia is at least as heterogeneous as autism (so its specific language impairment).<br /><br />One could translate Jon's post by replacing "autism" with "dyslexia" throughout, and then show that the same points apply: for example, just as Pelphrey et al. offer the view that there is a single neural abnormality underlying autism, so many have argued that there's a single neural abnormality underlying dyslexia. But neither claim can be correct because both claims ignore the well-documented cognitive heterogeneity of each condition. Note the weasel-word "core": "core disruptions in social information processing" (Pelphrey et al) means "we know there are other disruptions, but we are not going to bother about them" - i.e "we know there is heterogeneity, but we are going to ignore this"<br /><br />Bottom line: Jon's points hold not only in the scientific study of autism: I believe they hold for the scientific study of developmental disorders of cognition in general, and that this is impeding scientific progress in this general field. The heterogeneity can be dealt with scientifically: but first we must overcome the essentialism and acknowledge the heterogeneity, in relation to all kinds of developmental disorders of cognition, not just autism.Max Colthearthttp://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~max/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-21292073283695801442012-05-03T15:51:46.189-07:002012-05-03T15:51:46.189-07:00Touche!
You're right, though. It's much e...Touche!<br /><br />You're right, though. It's much easier to get funding and high impact publications for essentialist autism research.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-40043328307990115142012-05-03T15:48:22.697-07:002012-05-03T15:48:22.697-07:00Thanks Kevin. Your talk at BNA last year (and Mich...Thanks Kevin. Your talk at BNA last year (and Michael Owen's in the same session) were real eye-openers for me.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-53470600883261586872012-05-03T15:41:32.937-07:002012-05-03T15:41:32.937-07:00Thanks Sue. As you'll see from my response to ...Thanks Sue. As you'll see from my response to Uta, I've been thinking along similar lines. It would be really interesting to study autism researchers and clinicians as a target population themselves!!drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-49005192344550937512012-05-03T15:21:43.873-07:002012-05-03T15:21:43.873-07:00Thanks Bev. I very much like your argument about u...Thanks Bev. I very much like your argument about using "autistic" as an adjective rather than "autism" as a noun, although I'm still not convinced it gets us further scientifically. I think we have different objectives here, which is fine!<br /><br />I have to confess that I still do sometimes use pathologizing terminology. For example, "symptoms" is quite helpful in terms of differentiating between specific behaviours of some autistic people with autism, versus the idea of autism as a unitary syndrome. "Traits" is less pathologizing but means different things to different people - and risks underplaying the difficulties faced by many people with autism. I think there's always a tension between using words that are "non-pathologizing" and words that are understandable by the target audience. That's not to say that I/we can't do better!drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-62838116377291842272012-05-03T14:51:19.688-07:002012-05-03T14:51:19.688-07:00Definitely a better approach, although we should s...Definitely a better approach, although we should still be conscious of the possibility that similar manifestations might arise for different reasons. <br /><br />And "addressing the gaps" makes a lot of sense (assuming you're allowing for different individuals to have different gaps).drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-5392721311753934602012-05-03T14:20:58.485-07:002012-05-03T14:20:58.485-07:00Glad you like! New Zealand is indeed beautiful. De...Glad you like! New Zealand is indeed beautiful. Definitely coming back. Maybe South Island next time.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-60997235680854448022012-05-03T14:19:08.240-07:002012-05-03T14:19:08.240-07:00Absolutely. I had a great discussion with my mate ...Absolutely. I had a great discussion with my mate Giacomo Vivanti at the BioAutism conference earlier this year (see post from Feb). He was trying to predict which kids showed the greatest gains in function following intervention based on their pre-intervention characteristics.<br /><br />At present, most trials compare a particular intervention to "treatment as usual", which means basically letting the parents fend for themselves. A better option would be to have an RCT where kids were randomly assigned to different intervention programs. Then, rather than (or as well as) seeing which intervention was better on average, the researchers could take a more individual approach and develop criteria for optimally assigning future kids to different interventions.<br /><br />Disclaimer - I have absolutely no knowledge or experience of intervention research!!drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-20530190923825090272012-05-03T14:01:29.562-07:002012-05-03T14:01:29.562-07:00Thanks for the very kind comment, Uta. And thanks ...Thanks for the very kind comment, Uta. And thanks most of all for owning up as an essentialist!!<br /><br />I know exactly what you mean about a 30 second diagnosis - I have that experience myself sometimes. But I guess the point is that I can also look at a rabbit and in less than a second identify it as a rabbit. So speed of identification isn't itself evidence for an essence.<br /><br />I think there's a really interesting study to be done on people's concepts and identification of autism. Modern (exemplar or prototype) theories of categorisation assume that you classify a new object based on comparison to members of the same category you've previously experienced. My guess is that variation in experience of different kinds of autism accounts for a lot of the variation in diagnostic practices between clinicians.drbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-20514554753918532752012-05-03T13:32:20.848-07:002012-05-03T13:32:20.848-07:00Ha. So to "solve" autism, we should all ...Ha. So to "solve" autism, we should all take more acid?? :)<br /><br />Thanks for the linkdrbrocktagonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15225859145004971487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1270723657817172117.post-87102459163601731062012-05-03T06:59:51.044-07:002012-05-03T06:59:51.044-07:00Of course, if autism wasn't a name brand and i...Of course, if autism wasn't a name brand and industry, none of you could get funding for research. Swings and roundabouts.nerkulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04927301561819474314noreply@blogger.com