The connection to estrogen is an interesting one. Estrogen does have an important effect on neurotransmitter receptors, including dopaminergic, but my speculation is worthless here. Is there anyone here that has a better understanding of this that can provide some clarity?
So, go back, and first check or devise a model. Model organism for autism is a very hard problem.
Fwiw I found his comment to be interesting conjecture. I too have many dopamine related issues and until we have a better true understanding, all we can do is hypothesize and guess based on the small bits we do know.
Treating humans as black boxes isn't necessary anymore. We have very good measuring tools now. I believe we can make much faster progress if we just look inside and use logic inference.
Interesting how you mention sound sensitivity at a later age and I would say puberty saw many senses become more acute. Hearing still today (which is not fun living above a crack-house) in my 50's, it is still impressive.
I, also developed my own coping mechanisms and in many situations, people would have no clue that I was on the spectrum. Equally I'm aware of my kryptonite issues, so avoidance is as with many, whilst not ideal, a good plan B coping mechanism.
But with sound, and many coping mechanisms we develop in out brain, I do find falling asleep hard as those mechanisms take focus and the conflict of sleep and awake fall foul in such situations.
But I just love my bluetooth headphones, listening to music and whilst not drown out the outside world (I don't use noise canceling and play music low), it is enough to dull outside sounds that can prove annoying - which are more annoying the more tired I am, as in unable to focus them out.
But you know what my most favorite things in life still is today - a walk in the snow with nobody around. Kinda my happy place and living in outer London, one in which a good memory has its upsides as not that many opportunities to actually do it.
Do you remember having ear infections as a child, and were they painful at all?
Re: Falling asleep - what you've said regarding sleep is another proof point to me that you likely have a hearing imbalance. I found the comment on HN I made going into more detail on theory of how it works - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973 - and in it I explain why your brain may not be able to actually stop paying attention to sound, which of course - a natural cycle of falling asleep - will have your senses slowly diminish until you're asleep and not not getting strong signals from them, or rather not reacting to them - making it difficult to fall asleep.
When I was in Grade 2 I had trouble focusing in class - they brought in an audiologist to see if I had trouble hearing. They were surprised that no, in fact, I could hear extremely well - however they didn't recognize that as a problem, hypersensitive hearing.
A standard audiogram only checks to see that you can hear well enough in each ear, at different frequencies, say at 15 decibels. Checking for imbalances they check instead for HOW LOW of a decibel you can hear at different frequencies. Say in your right ear the lowest you can hear 1000 Hz frequency is 15 decibels, but in your left ear you hear at 10 decibels - that would show an imbalance by 5 decibels. Very few audiologists do this test, so I'd be very surprised if you found stumbled into one who did check it in this way.
So soothing.
I am not autistic, but do have high aural senses. As a kid, I could hear well above 20khz. Today, that has rolled off due to age, but my discrimination is still great.
Sounds can sometimes move me to distraction. ASMR, for example. I trigger easily and it is fairly intense.
There is something about the crisp air, dampening on sound that snow presents to us, and what little is heard otherwise seems to just stand right out, like incongruent, but not in a bad way. Just there, present.
That shit is weird.
In order for genes to have any impact on an organism they need to be expressed. And it's expression that creates the enzymes that create hormones. So it's hard to separate those two.
Environmental exposure can change how genes are expressed and thus hormones.
Hormones valances in the womb, as you mentioned, are likely a driver of homosexuality. And having kids changes the hormone balance, making some arrangements of sons and daughters more likely to be gay.
And of course not a p-value or effect size is sight.
Because... it’s wikipedia and you wouldn’t expect to find those things
While I’m sure nobody thinks there is a casual relationship, you can find statistically significant effects on the digit ratio
Those are two names for the same finger. Did you mean index and ring ringer?
I don't know if this is good news, or bad news but... there is no normal. I know what you meant, what it would be like without ASD. But I'm not sure that would give you any particular insight into anything other than simply being a different person.
In a classroom of 30 students, where 1 is viewed by the rest as abnormal, there is normal. Yes, it is only a social construct whose impact is based on our personal experience and the society in which we live, but this is true of many things which I think we would not tolerate being dismissed so readily.
When half the class isn't neurotypical, being neurotypical isn't any more "normal" than having blue eyes is "normal".
I mean, yeah there is? There are 7 billion people on this planet. If you could create some score of peoples intelligence, how they react/respond to people, their normal physical movements and put that into a distribution the autistic people would definitely be on the tail end of the curves.
Sure everyone is different in various ways- but a lot of those differences are very small compared to the differences exhibited by autistic people.
I can give you a direct example- my oldest son has.. something. We had him tested for autism when he was younger and were basically told that yeah there is 'something'. He's not technically autistic, or at least not the level where he needs extreme special stuff, but he does exhibit some of the traits of autistic children, just in a more minor way. So for lack of any better term he is "very slightly autistic". At 7 years old he has an insane memory (closest to "photographic" that I've ever encountered) and seems highly intelligent in some areas (but definitely not in others! it's quite incredible actually to see sometimes..). He has some of the physical traits where he can't really sit still, needs weighted blankets, has some of those unique arm movements of autistic people.. but again fairly subtle. A lot of things to him can be more black/white than gray, because he seems to need to fit everything into a very specific bucket in his mind.
Every teacher he has had, including some which work with the more special ed kids, has said "yeah there is... something different about him".
Now conversely, my younger child I would classify as "normal". Why do I say that? Well.. I worked at co-op preschools with both of my boys for years. I saw lots of kids. And when you see a ton of kids and play/interact with them... I mean yeah there is a normal. Normal is how you would expect someone to behave and interact with. There is a relatively normal way you would expect a 7 year old to respond in various situations, etc.
Anyway- sorry for writing a book. I guess I'm putting off work.. I just found it a bit strange to not accept that, well, most people are actually pretty darn similar while a minority of people are very different. I see it every day in my house!
The non-controversial terms that people use related to issues like autism are “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent”.
No it's not... I was responding to someone who said there is no "normal". Yeah, there is. Most people behave in a way you would expect. Most people exhibit motor controls the way you would expect. A minority of people, and specifically people with autism, really do think in a "different" way and exhibit strange motor functions at times that most people do not.
I don't think we have to dance around politically correct terms here. I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.
Which is semantics. You’re using a different meaning of the word to fit your point just like the person did in the grandfather comment. You even put the word normal in quotes yourself indicating that you understand how words can be interpreted differently. I wasn’t disagreeing with your interpretation of the term.
This is absurd. How do you have any idea what "you would expect"?
>I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.
First, define "very neurologically similar". Second, "most people are similar" in a normal distribution because that's the way the distribution is defined. It's not some biological coincidence.
There's a funny thing that happens every time an article on autism comes up on this site where a bunch of commenters state they have some degree of autism. This aligns perfect with the OP's argument: everyone is "normal", but I'm not. I'm special.
It's why "normies" is a thing. Everyone sees everyone else as "normal", but they're different. I wonder why that is?
The stats I can find quickly suggest blond hair in the US is around 3%, and autism in the US is around 1.7%.
Some measurable aspects of human physiology and behavior would fall into a normal distribution (i.e. "bell curve") if you graph it, yes. Bell curves are common enough that there is a lay assumption that all distributions look like that, but it isn't the case, at all. Certain forces are required to lead to that flavor of distribution and in the absence of those, you can get graphs of all sorts of shapes.
For example, if you were to graph "how feminine" a set of people are, you're unlikely to get a bell curve where most people are androgynous. Instead, you get a bimodal distribution where there's a hump on one side for dudes and one on the right for ladies. In fact, graphs of height show a similar distribution.
If you graph how many fingers someone has, you'll probably get something closer to a power law where almost everyone is on the left at "10", a few misfortunate at "9", even few very unlucky at "8", and so on. (Plus a couple of odd points for polydactyly, etc.) This is the famous "long tail" you hear about in economics.
So there is certainly variation in all attributes, but that does not imply that the center of that range is the most populated. And thus, there may not be a "normal" in the typical "average and most common" sense of the word.
What does a normal set of genitals look like?
Equally it is hard to evaluate such a different timeline as you are evaluating from a different perspective/timeline.
Just as long as people remember that this is a personal decision, and not one you can make for others. I wonder what I would do for my children, both of whom have autism and who I love. But my older child is non-verbal, still wears diapers, and is a flight risk. He cannot take care of himself. I worry what will happen when my wife and I can no longer take care of him adequately. Adult autistic support is not great.
But what will he lose if I "cure" him. Both boys are happy, affectionate, and they are the lights of my life. They are far happier than those who are far more "successful" in life.
It's not easy.
Could be a pattern. Could be a pattern that doesn't actually exist. I think we need more samples (I'd imagine some selection bias on HN)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn509-pointer-for-autis...
I notice my fingers are similar in length if I look at the top of my hand.
But looking at the palm of my hand, as shown in the picture on the wikipedia page, they look very different in length.
However, as somebody who is on the autistic spectrum, I have noted that my index and "ring finger"[edit thanks to comment] are of equal lengths, a trait more common in females than males who tend to have one longer - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio
Another aspect/theory from personal experience is that my earliest memory was as a baby, equally I used to have a nightmare that abaieted when I was able to tell my mother who informed me of my birth complications and so much of my nightmare correlated, just seemed so related but then, never know for sure beyond once I knew this, my nightmares stopped. In short, maybe (least in my case) autistic people senses and other parts of the brain kick in earlier at a time when we are less able to process them and this becomes another party of the puzzle.
But would I change if I could go back in time and become normal is a question I have asked myself and the answer for me is - no, though the thought of what life would of been like, naturally yields to pondering.