Much obliged Recombinantsocks and Zitami for re-assurance. Recombinantsocks is doing as much if not more to put new people at ease. Zitami's way of looking at trying to give experiential help that other autistic people can relate to is a good one.
Both of you express the need for more information on living with autism. I wonder though if NAS is able to give us that input.
We need to find outside research groups working in the right sectors and get their attention. That might mean individuals here writing to such research centres and saying - this is what I experience - have you any research interests that could consider this view of living with autism?
Perhaps some research centres would welcome the insight of people on the spectrum, as a means of relating research results to actual life experiences. This might then stimulate new research which NAS can present on the website or share with us through the forum.
I've lately read about research at the University of Warwick that might be useful to us. A Professor Feng there is modelling the brain from three-dimensional MRI scans that have identified some 20 examples of difference between autistic and non-autistic brains. In a paper published in "Brain" in March this year (Autism: reduced connectivity in cortical areas.....re facial expression, theory of mind and sense of self), they obtained data by scanning the brains of 523 individuals with autism and 452 non-autistic.
The conclusions are inevitably pitched at understanding theory of mind, but what interested me most was the work on facial expression. Differences in temporal lobe visual cortex affect our use of facial expression, thus affecting social behaviour, emotion and social communication.
One of my own theories is that we just aren't processing other people's facial expressions properly and aren't generating the right facial expression, which is enough to deny us a lot of the information, both ways, in social intereaction.
Another discovery is a connectivity factor affecting spatial interaction with our environment, which I guess might explain why we have trouble with environments that don't bother non-autistics.
As I indicated, they are pooling these factors towards explaining Theory of Mind, which I guess is inevitable from a scientific perspective - but just the revelations about reading facial expression could be a breakthough in itself, and help get a better understanding of the way people's lives are affected by this.
Somehow I think we have to deflect researchers from just explaining autism theory to coming up with nearer term solutions to living everyday with autism
Much obliged Recombinantsocks and Zitami for re-assurance. Recombinantsocks is doing as much if not more to put new people at ease. Zitami's way of looking at trying to give experiential help that other autistic people can relate to is a good one.
Both of you express the need for more information on living with autism. I wonder though if NAS is able to give us that input.
We need to find outside research groups working in the right sectors and get their attention. That might mean individuals here writing to such research centres and saying - this is what I experience - have you any research interests that could consider this view of living with autism?
Perhaps some research centres would welcome the insight of people on the spectrum, as a means of relating research results to actual life experiences. This might then stimulate new research which NAS can present on the website or share with us through the forum.
I've lately read about research at the University of Warwick that might be useful to us. A Professor Feng there is modelling the brain from three-dimensional MRI scans that have identified some 20 examples of difference between autistic and non-autistic brains. In a paper published in "Brain" in March this year (Autism: reduced connectivity in cortical areas.....re facial expression, theory of mind and sense of self), they obtained data by scanning the brains of 523 individuals with autism and 452 non-autistic.
The conclusions are inevitably pitched at understanding theory of mind, but what interested me most was the work on facial expression. Differences in temporal lobe visual cortex affect our use of facial expression, thus affecting social behaviour, emotion and social communication.
One of my own theories is that we just aren't processing other people's facial expressions properly and aren't generating the right facial expression, which is enough to deny us a lot of the information, both ways, in social intereaction.
Another discovery is a connectivity factor affecting spatial interaction with our environment, which I guess might explain why we have trouble with environments that don't bother non-autistics.
As I indicated, they are pooling these factors towards explaining Theory of Mind, which I guess is inevitable from a scientific perspective - but just the revelations about reading facial expression could be a breakthough in itself, and help get a better understanding of the way people's lives are affected by this.
Somehow I think we have to deflect researchers from just explaining autism theory to coming up with nearer term solutions to living everyday with autism
