However I think we should applaud the lad for taking such a keen interest in mathematics at such an age, and having a willingness to expand his mind by way of creativity.

Usefulness or not, he's showing the signs of a thinking man in the works.

Yes.

If I had an idea, and someone explained to my why it's no good, I'd be very pleased. I'd be glad they replied and told me something I didn't know. I'd consider it a reward; and a much more useful one than applause. I think that's the most sensible way to feel: applause is OK, but serious replies are even nicer.

(kissing more of my karma away for saying true things)

That's textbook autistic thinking. Almost verbatim, that's the difference between autistic and non autistic responses to praise. You are completely justified in thinking that way about yourself (and I think the same thing).

But you also have to realize most people's brains aren't wired that way. Especially children who are also engaged in things like spontaneous sharing.

Why is autism called a mental illness if rational thinking is a textbook example?

Anyhow, I agree that you should make personality-appropriate comments that the child will appreciate.

(I upvoted all your comments in this thread now. Please don't worry about karma.)

Because autism involves (most likely) a deficiency in the mirror neurons which do not allow the children to learn from mimicking the social interaction of others. It's theorized that sometimes these deficient mirror neurons get replaced by other skills and pre-sensory processing, like logic, music, perfect pitch, etc, in the same way that some blind people have phenomenal hearing.

Also it's debilitating for a lot of people, many of whom lack so many mirror neurons they never learn how to communicate.

Come on, "mirror neurons" are just bullshit.

As I understand it, "mirror neurons" are a silly idea. Researchers noticed that people, for example, running, and people observing running, have similar brain activity. Why might that be? Well, they say that certain neurons somehow mimic what one observes. They imply these neurons are somewhat autonomous.

But there's another rather obvious possibility: the person running, and the person watching running, were both thinking about running. Their brain activity was similar because they were thinking about the same thing.

You don't understand it at all. The idea of mirror neurons is well proven. The only thing left to understand is if the mirror neuron problems result from or cause the autistic spectrum.

It's not true that for two people thinking the same thing, their brain scan looks the same, so your intuition is flawed. They are sure mirror neurons exist, and they know where in the brain they are.

I am sure they are not. We don't really know how the brain works yet. I am pretty sure the "mirror neurons" are not special neurons, but simply neurons like all the others.

This is a good example of failure of the threading model at YC. It's very hard to see, visually, what the parent is. It's just sort of this comment in the middle of nowhere.

Link to the best web-available paper with evidence that they exist, and some text ruling out alternative explanations, and and I will read it.

You don't want to do the study you would need to do to grasp the issue well enough to form a coherent judgement. Reading one paper won't even come close to cutting it.

I can give you a list of books on neurology and autism to read. But I don't want to hunt papers on the web, decide on the best ones, read them all and find one to recommend to you, sorry. I'd hunt down VS Ramachandrans recent work if you wanted to find one, but he is more of a theorist then the researcher who proves the theory, so I'm not sure if that's quite what you want.

Alright I found this, which has various links to more.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran0...

Could you give one reason to suppose that mirror neurons are a hardware feature -- a type of neuron -- not a software feature -- a particular strategy/mental-technique for using one's neurons?

Because Ramachandran thinks so?

Well actually it seems to say in the paper "the same neurons fire when you poke someone with a needle as when you watch someone being poked". So how can they be "mirror neurons"? Seems to me they could hardly be both, "mirror" and "direct" neurons, or at least the term "mirror neuron" does not make much sense if the neuron also acts directly.

Therefore the "software" theory seems much more plausible.

Simply, the brain models it's environment. That is all there is to it. A flower is a flower is a flower.

An appeal to authority? That's not very persuasive.

It’s persuasive if you fill in the unstated extra bit, which goes something like “… and can explain why in great detail, if you take the trouble to read his writing about it. But such detail is excessive for this comment thread.”

Well I was just reading some of his writing, but so far I am not persuaded. Further, I have noticed some critical flaws in his writing caused by his lack of understanding of epistemology.

Yeah, you noticed flaws in Ramachandran's thinking.

That'd be like me going up to Buckminster Fuller and saying "I don't think those dome things will work because I played with legos as a kid and don't see building it out of legos."

Or going up to Einstein and saying "I don't think your special relativity is good because I threw rocks at each other and then away from each other, and I didn't notice it happen."

You're a bit out of your league here, is what I mean to say. The point of Ramachandran's writing is to persuade people who know neurology, not to teach it to laypeople who don't have the intellectual integrity to admit they are out of their league.

You don't know what my league is, or what my areas of expertise are.

I do know that your arguments from authority are invalid.

I know what Ramachandran's league is. What areas of expertise do you have to such a degree that your intuitions upon a cursory glance at one or two of his papers carry more weight then his decades of study and work at the cutting edge of this field?

Appeals to legitimate authority are valid.

(disclaimer: Ramachandran is one of my biggest intellectual heros)

For example, I know a lot about epistemology, and I am already familiar with the common phenomenon where psychiatrists and neuroscientists accidentally stray into philosophical areas they know little about and make epistemic blunders.

I emailed you two passages from Ramachandran's essay. Could you confirm that they are representative of his view, and not out of date?

I did not get the message. Maybe the internets have a clog.

I wrote:

I'm sorry, I can't talk to you, my mail client says you're a spammer.

Do you think this is an accurate statement about mirror neurons?

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p2...

Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."

And this from the next page?

Denying [one's own] paralysis is odd enough but why would a patient deny another patient's paralysis? We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this.

The first one is trivially true because of the word 'might'

The second one I think is true and an extremely elegant solution for a bizarre neurological phenomena.

And critiquing Ramachandran's neurology on the basis of an epistemology ignorant of neuroscience seems a lot like critiquing Newton's physics on the basis of an astrology ignorant of astronomy. (this is hard for me to admit, my training is as a philosopher).

I've replied by email. Hopefully you'll receive it.