Published on 12, July, 2020
This is my first post in this discussion.
It might soon be possible to discover if someone is Autistic by a brain scan.
There is information about the new brain scan on the web site and the articles were written last year in 2010. Anyone can look it up for themselves on the web.
The computer can tell small differences in the brain so tell if the person is on the Autistic Spectrum.
It would be much quicker than interviewing the person.
I do not know if a person would count as Autistic if they behaved as though they were but the brain scan did not show Autism.
People in that situation might be denied help if they did not count as Autistic.
In the 1980s I was told that the brain scans did not detect anything wrong with my brians. People who knew me were not impressed.
I have since done brain scans for research the idea being to find out by scanning many Autistic people if their brains are different from Non Autistic people.
That research might have helped them develop the new brain scan.
Do you think the new brain scan will be a good thing when it is developed?
What would you feel if the brain scan found that your were not Autistic?
David
Kester said:I am in acute and chronic pain and I do not wish that on anyone and frankly if arthritis could be cured I would be the first person to have it done and to apply eugenics to prevent others going through the levels of pain that I have.Equally if conditions like deafness and autism were painful, you would all be out campaigning to get rid of them.
Equally if conditions like deafness and autism were painful, you would all be out campaigning to get rid of them.
We have lost the environmental drive to evolve. We no longer live in caves in groups, go out hunting, and so on. Now we live in small family groups in safe comfortable houses. We shop at the supermarket, and sit watching TV in some cases getting fat (like me, oops). It is only likely more disabilities would creep in to the gene pool as there is little "survival of the fittest" going on anymore. Whereas in the previous environment I may have not done well, I am free to breed as I like (with anyone who consents).
Once we begin to practice Eugenics, we have to make the decision what types of disabilities we get rid of, and begin moving towards idealogy the Nazi's had. At the extremes we could practice selective breeding telling people who they must have intercourse with (like is often used in farming), and sterilise those we think are genetically unfit. Something I suspect there would be mass objection to (unless you were the person choosing who must breed with who ).
What makes Autism difficult to live with, is the fact most people are NT's. If the whole world was Autistic, we would all be far better off as people would not expect abilities of us we just do not have. As Tony Attwood so aptly put, "you don't suffer from Aspergers, you suffer from other people". What is to say that the NT way is right and the Autistic way wrong? Should we eliminate the Autistic population for the benefit and ignorance of NT's who are clearly so rigid in their approach to other people that they are so inflexible as to cause difficulties? Perhaps we exist so as to improve the flexibility of NT's? I think you are right about a WW3, perhaps it will end up being Autistics vs NT's if NT's are unable to adapt and provide equal opportunities in employment and so on?
I can sympathise with chronic pain conditions, having had gallstones - if I was expected to live with that my entire life I could not.