Color emphasis is mine...
Originally posted by
TimeLab
[...] Whichever cells in what part of the brain die due to lack of oxygen, produces the various neurological disorders sids, autism, schizophrenia, and many, many more.[...]
No, it doesn't, and I really, really, really wish that people would stop making such ridiculous claims and compare autism to brain damage when the rest of the world already long knows that autism is a genetically predisposed neurological difference — not damage or a disorder, but a difference, just like one person may have blue eyes and another person may have brown eyes, or like one person can be tall and skinny and another person can be short and chubby.
(In fact, schizophrenia, which is completely unrelated to autism, is also a genetically predisposed condition, but one in which the chemical balance of the brain can be upset by strong emotional or otherwise traumatic influences. It, too, is not brain damage, but the upsetting of the chemical balance itself may result in brain damage later on in life.)
The genes responsible for an autism spectrum neurology have already long been identified, and research has shown that people with an autism spectrum neurology have a different and more complex brain structure, with literally a multitude of the amount of neurons found in a non-autistic brain. These neurons are slightly less differentiated on account of the stimuluses they are meant to transfer than in a non-autistic brain, but given that there is literally a multitude of them, and that they form synapses between them which are not present in non-autistic brains, the autistic brain is significantly more complex than a non-autistic brain.
In fact, Albert Einstein's brain was removed from his skull before he was buried and is currently still being kept at a research facility, and so far the analysis of his brain structure by way of scans et al confirms everything I've already said earlier. And that's just one of the many autism-related research projects which all confirm what I've already said on this topic so far.
(Note: Kim Peek, upon whom Dustin Hoffman based his character for the movie "Rain Man", was not autistic, even though he did exhibit savantism. His brain, too, was different, but this had nothing to do with an autism spectrum neurology.)
From the neuropsychological point of view, an autism spectrum brain does not filter out the things which a non-autistic brain does. By consequence, autistic people notice all the little details that a non-autistic brain overlooks as "unimportant information".
As an anecdotal manifestation of that, many stand-up comedians are actually on the autism spectrum — both the late Robin Williams and Jim Carrey can clearly be named as afflicted with ADHD, which is an autism spectrum phenotype. This is why such comedians can go on and on about those little details, such as other people's strange tics or habits, or innocuous peculiarities about any given situation, because everybody else will be subconsciously aware of those things as well — given that it pertains to clearly observable details — but most people's minds simply filter out that information as not important. As such, one could easily postulate that autistic people's consciousness is broader than that of non-autistic people, because all of the information comes in unfiltered, and the presence of the extra synapses also allows for more associative thought processes.
(Jeffries)
(Nurse)
(Jeffries)
(Nurse)
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"What's the matter with him?"
"He's autistic."
"You mean nothing gets through to him?"
"On the contrary, Agent Jeffries. Everything gets through to him."
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(Conversation from the movie "Mercury Rising", between FBI Agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) and a nurse, when Jeffries drops off the autistic and hysterical 9-year-old Simon Lynch at the hospital after the boy was discovered hidden in a closet at the house of his murdered parents.) |
Autistic people are also far more meticulous in their work, exactly because they are acutely aware of all the little details, and many of them also have OCD/OCPD as a manifestation of the autism spectrum genotype, prompting them to be perfectionists. Ron Dennis, the founder and CEO of the McLaren Technology Group — the parent company of McLaren Automotive and of the McLaren Formula One Racing Team — fits that description to a tee.
In fact, I have a BBC documentary about McLaren Automotive on this computer — downloaded from YouTube, so the video is up there, and I'll provide the link for anyone who would be interested, but I'm not going to embed it here in order not to derail the thread — in which Ron Dennis points out a damaged tile in the enormous main hall of the McLaren Technology Centre at Woking, Surrey, UK, where he then emphasizes how much that cracked tile bothers him, and how they couldn't possibly fix that without having to repave the entire hall, because those tiles come in large batches, and if you replace only one of them, then there will be a color and texture difference with the others. Farther into the documentary, he also grins "My wife thinks I'm ill."
So if you or anyone else — and I don't care whether they call themselves medical researchers or not — think that this is something which is either brought about by the neurotoxins inside the conservation agents used in vaccines, or which would be a form of brain damage, then I suggest you look beyond the very insular and reactionary US American medical community and start looking at some real scientific research conducted in less intellectually corrupted parts of the world.
Autism is not brain damage, and it is not a defect. It is a manifestation of a genetically predisposed neurological difference which can present itself in a whole variety of ways — this is why the symbol of the autism community long used to be a rainbow, until the gay crowd decided that they were tired of the pink triangle and stole the rainbow from the autism community as their new political symbol — and certain of these autism spectrum manifestations may pose challenges for the individual on account of how they function within this (already dysfunctional) society. And I could go ahead and tell you all about the challenges I myself have had to face — several of which I am still facing today — but that would derail the thread again, because then we'd be getting into the subjects of discrimination, bullying and severely traumatizing psychological abuse, and that's a subject that warrants a separate thread all of its own.
I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm ranting — and in fact, that is what I'm doing, yes — but this subject lies very close to my heart, given that I myself and at least half of my family and my circle of friends are on the autism spectrum, and I consider the equating of autism with brain damage or with "a disease" or "a disorder" a grave insult, on top of all the other crap I've already had to endure from people because of my being different.
If anyone wishes to consider me brain-damaged, then I'd be more than happy to toss my IQ scores on the table and compare them with theirs, and just for laughs, I would also then point my finger at how I became an autodidactic computer network administrator and programmer, how I've written an unfinished novel and the preparation work for another one, how I taught myself to play the guitar and played lead guitar in a band for which I've written maybe a dozen or so songs — music and lyrics.
Or maybe I should address the fact that I, as a Belgian kid who was born as the first son to a middle-school-graduated couple in their late twenties in a small Flemish village back in the early 1960s, and who was raised in (a local Flemish dialect of) Dutch, started teaching myself English as of the age of 7 onward without any help from anybody at all — my parents did not speak or even understand English, and our English classes at school didn't even start until 8th grade — and I was already capable of upholding a decent conversation in English by the time I was 10. And with a perfect Oxford accent too, although I have a distinctly North American accent now. Not to mention that I also speak French, Afrikaans and a bit of German, and that I can read about half of a text written in Norwegian — I do not speak it and I cannot write it, but I can make up about half of what it means by looking at the words. I even know some words and expressions in Spanish and Italian, although I've never taken any classes for that either.
Am I a savant? No, I'm not. I have an eidetic memory, but I cannot look at a page of the phone book and then recite all of the names on there. I cannot perform any complicated calculations in my head and spit out square roots without even understanding what I'm doing. But I can think, I can analyze, and I can remember, all to a far greater extent than the typical non-autistic person can be bothered with. I attempt to approach perfection in (almost) everything I do, and whenever I am required to do something for somebody else, I deliver a level of quality that they won't even get anywhere else. At no charge at all. It's just who I am.
And most of the time, I don't even get any gratitude at all for what I'm doing. On the contrary, I get criticized and falsely accused all the time. But I am being the change I want to see in this world. Instead of thinking linearly, I think multidimensionally. I see the patterns which are all there right under everybody's nose, but which everyone then also simply ignores until it's too late. And then they throw in my face, "Why didn't you tell me/us?" And then my answer is always the same: "I did, right there and right then, but you weren't listening."
So please, do not insult me, nor any other autistic individual, with such ludicrous claims.