Published on 12, July, 2020
Suppose you have the funding and technical skills to carry out autism research (e.g., questionnaires, qualitative interviews, MRI, EEG, behavioural experiments, virtual reality, etc). What kind of research question would you like to ask? What autism question do you think is still not well known, and what would be your solution to solving it, or extend current knowledge?
Brain scans revealing the wires in a NT and AT brain. Then again brain scans of both people under many different doses of LSD or similar. To see how the wires move and if we can find a place where we can almost have the same wiring. Just for a little while. And I mean both NT ans AT take LSD.
I find brain scans interesting but wonder whether what they'd be seeing would be cause or effect (e.g. the effects on the brain of long term meditation or lifestyle choices rather than original wiring). Also how the process of being scanned might affect the results. Plus how fleeting but possibly intense emotions might impinge. e.g. if my brain were scanned at a stressful time in my life or, say, after an argument, it might look very different. But I'd presumably still be autistic.
Is there anything that shows the structure of an autistic brain to be different? I remember seeing Temple Grandin's scans in one of her books and she highlighted the differences. But i think she went on to say that for most there is no visible difference. Perhaps the scanning techniques aren't yet sophisticated enough or perhaps there generally isn't a difference.
i also wonder whether any differences would be highlighted depending upon differences within the autism spectrum. Sort of my autism differs from your autism so how does that show? And what might it mean? Might it mean that there are actually a host of different unnamed diagnoses all currently hiding under the umbrella term "ASD"? Or that the ASD label itself is under question?
I did actually have a brain scan a number of years ago to check for aneurysms. I wonder whether I could go back and ask for a copy to check for differences. The wires that were firing then might just have depended upon the factors on the day, but maybe I have extra large amygdalae. I've often thought about that.
I think there is evidence of different wiring, but not as simple and obvious. I understand they presented a new research few days ago on INSAR (international society for autism research) where they scanned huge number of brains of genetically modified autistic mice (I know, nonsense) in order to trace the wiring to specific genes. It is unpublished and I didn't see it but feedback on twitter was in the sense that they catalogged more genes and more autism types than they can make sense of.
Very probably. I think the groupings within the DSM are arbitrary as they stand so it'll be interesting to see how it looks in its next iterations.
I think it might be useful to have well-defined different subtypes, like previously when there was Aspergers, autistic disorder, PDD-NOS etc. It could be easier to target support for each subtype. But I think it'll also depend on how autism is. If it's a polygene of multiple gene inheritance trait, then it might not be easily classified into subtypes, since if 200 genes determine the severity of autistic traits, then one would need 2^200 subtypes. It might be possible to reduce it by some clustering method, but it'll then be arbitrary how many groups to chose.
Yes, i suspect it will turn out that there are lots of subtypes (or would those nice people at the DSM decide to rearrange the diagnoses altogether?) and that any genes involved will operate in clusters and/or with modifier genes such that it's really difficult to track. i do find it really interesting though.