UNDERSTANDING AUTISM FROM ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

FROM: DR. BIPIN JETHANI M.D. (Hom.)

LECTURER, DEPARTMENT OF ORGANON OF MEDICINE NEHRU HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICAL COLLEGE, NEW DELHI

PERSONALITY TRAIT OF AUTISM

Autistic children are of high intelligence with better appreciation for microscopic details enabling them to APPRECIATE THE TREES FOR THE FOREST

Breakdown of WHOLISTIC PERCEPTION

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE
Autism spectrum conditions are more prevalent in areas that are heavily involved with the information technology industry, according to a new study done at the University of Cambridge. Based on data drawn from three regions in the Netherlands, researchers found that an area with a technology-oriented university and tech-business campus saw two to four times the incidences of autism in schoolchildren as control regions.

Simon Baron-Cohens RESEARCH

Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the researchers and director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, proposes that regions where parents gravitate toward jobs involving "systemizing," like IT, have a higher rate of autism because the genes for autism are expressed "as a talent in systemizing" in first-degree relatives.

Simon Baron-Cohens RESEARCH

Baron-Cohen goes on to say that the results may explain why autism genes have persisted in the gene pool: they are linked to "adaptive, advantageous traits : traits which held to understand the microscopic details at the expense of whole.

SEEING TREES FOR THE FOREST

HALLMARK STUDY OF COHEN etal.

Is there a link between engineering and autism? Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Carol Stott, Patrick Bolton, and Ian Goodyer Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Cambridge

HALLMARK STUDY OF COHEN etal

At the cognitive level children with autism are impaired in the development of their folk psychology, whilst they are normal or even superior in the development of their folk physics. We predicted that if their parent shared this cognitive phenotype, then they should be overrepresented in engineering as an occupation. This prediction was confirmed. Both fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were found more than twice as often in the field of engineering, compared to fathers and grandfathers of other children.

Baron-Cohens HYPOTHESIS
Baron-Cohen proposes that the cause of autism at a biological level may be hypermasculinization. This hypothesis posits that certain features of autism (obsessions and repetitive behaviour, previously regarded as purposeless) as being highly purposive, intelligent (hypersystemizing), and a sign of a different way of analytical thinking.

Baron-Cohens HYPOTHESIS
They later developed theory that autism is an extreme form of the "male brain", which involved a reconceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathizingsystemizing theory.

EMPATHIZINGSYSTEMIZING (E-S) THEORY

The empathizingsystemizing (E-S) theory classifies people on the basis of their scores along two dimensions: empathizing (E) and systemizing (S). It measures a person's strength of interest in empathy (defined as the drive to identify a person's thoughts and feelings and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion); and a person's strength of interest in systems (defined as the drive to analyse or construct a system).

E-S profile SEX DIFFERENCES

E-S profiles show reliable sex differences in the general population (more females showing the profile E>S and more males showing the profile S>E). The E-S theory is a better predictor of who goes into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects than is gender.

BARON-COHENS STUDIES
Baron-Cohens studies have uncovered four traits of parents which he believes leads to a higher risk of producing a child which may develop autism, these include: 1) Both parents of children with autism are likely to be super-fast on attention tasks, in which the purpose is to spot a detail as quickly as possible.

BARON-COHENS STUDIES
2) Both parents have an increased likelihood of having worked in the fields having S>E according to EMPATHIZINGSYSTEMIZING theory.

3) Both parents are more likely to have elevated scores on subtle measures of autistic traits.
4) Both parents show a trend toward a more male pattern of brain activity when measured with an MRI.