Isegoria

From A genius explains:

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can’t drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

Tammet is a “savant”, an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population — and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population — have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do,” says Snyder. “It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.”

Daniel Tammet recently met Kim Peek, the real-life Rain Man:

Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read.

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many discusses Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism:

They are what autism researchers call “mind blind.” Lacking the ability to read cues like body language to intuit what other people are thinking, they have profound difficulty navigating basic social interactions. The diagnosis is reordering their lives. Some have become newly determined to learn how to compensate.

They are filling up scarce classes that teach skills like how close to stand next to someone at a party, or how to tell when people are angry even when they are smiling.

Many Aspies, as they call themselves, and their families find it reassuring to know that they have a condition — even though there’s no cure.

I’m certainly addicted to my prairie vole. Reward Mechanism Involved In Addiction Likely Regulates Pair Bonds Between Monogamous Animals:

The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.

New Insights Into Autism reports on a recent study:

The study in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that a small head circumference at birth followed by a sudden growth spurt of the head before the end of the first year is a reliable early warning sign of autism.
[...]
National statistics on autism spectrum disorder are hard to come by, but the incidence has been rising mysteriously. The disorder, which ranges from severe to moderate cases, affects an estimated one in 160 children in the U.S., according to UCSD researchers. It is typically diagnosed between ages 2 and 4, based on a child’s behavior — delayed speech, difficulties with social interactions, poor attention, impaired exploration of the environment and inappropriate emotional responses.
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The cause of the small brain size at birth is unknown. But the abnormally sped-up brain growth, says Dr. Courchesne, likely reflects excessive numbers of brain cells, failure of the brain to prune the hundreds of synapses that connect one neuron to another, or both. Normally, experiences sculpt the developing brain; unneeded or unused synapses are pruned away. Autistic children, in contrast, seem to suffer from the neurological equivalent of electrical overload: too many impulses, thoughts and sensations in their brain.
[...]
[T]he scientists found that the head size at birth of the autistic children was, on average, in the 25th percentile (smaller than 75% of other newborns). But most of these children quickly began a period of such rapid brain growth that, by 6 to 14 months, they landed in the 84th percentile. By 4 or 5, their brain was the size of a typical 12-year old’s.

The New Sex Scorecard declares that “It’s safe to talk about sex differences again.”:

Get out the spittoon. Men produce twice as much saliva as women. Women, for their part, learn to speak earlier, know more words, recall them better, pause less and glide through tongue twisters.

Here’s an interesting anatomical difference:

Gur’s discovery that females have about 15 to 20 percent more gray matter than males suddenly made sense of another major sex difference: Men, overall, have larger brains than women (their heads and bodies are larger), but the sexes score equally well on tests of intelligence.

Gray matter, made up of the bodies of nerve cells and their connecting dendrites, is where the brain’s heavy lifting is done. The female brain is more densely packed with neurons and dendrites, providing concentrated processing power — and more thought-linking capability.

The larger male cranium is filled with more white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. “That fluid is probably helpful,” says Gur, director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. “It cushions the brain, and men are more likely to get their heads banged about.”

White matter, made of the long arms of neurons encased in a protective film of fat, helps distribute processing throughout the brain. It gives males superiority at spatial reasoning. White matter also carries fibers that inhibit “information spread” in the cortex. That allows a single-mindedness that spatial problems require, especially difficult ones. The harder a spatial task, Gur finds, the more circumscribed the right-sided brain activation in males, but not in females. The white matter advantage of males, he believes, suppresses activation of areas that could interfere with work.

The white matter in women’s brains is concentrated in the corpus callosum, which links the brain’s hemispheres, and enables the right side of the brain to pitch in on language tasks. The more difficult the verbal task, the more global the neural participation required — a response that’s stronger in females.

Women have another heady advantage — faster blood flow to the brain, which offsets the cognitive effects of aging. Men lose more brain tissue with age, especially in the left frontal cortex, the part of the brain that thinks about consequences and provides self-control.

“You can see the tissue loss by age 45, and that may explain why midlife crisis is harder on men,” says Gur. “Men have the same impulses but they lose the ability to consider long-term consequences.”

This should come as little surprise:

Women’s perceptual skills are oriented to quick — call it intuitive — people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.
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Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events. In the coinage of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., they systemize.

The superiority of males at spatial cognition and females’ talent for language probably subserve the more basic difference of systemizing versus empathizing. The two mental styles manifest in the toys kids prefer (humanlike dolls versus mechanical trucks); verbal impatience in males (ordering rather than negotiating); and navigation (women personalize space by finding landmarks; men see a geometric system, taking directional cues in the layout of routes).

Autism is fascinating:

In his work as director of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, he finds that children and adults with autism, and its less severe variant Asperger syndrome, are unusual in both dimensions of perception. Its victims are “mindblind,” unable to recognize people’s feelings. They also have a peculiar talent for systemizing, obsessively focusing on, say, light switches or sink faucets.
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Autism overwhelmingly strikes males; the ratio is ten to one for Asperger.
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The more testosterone the children had been exposed to in the womb, the less able they were to make eye contact at 1 year of age. “Who would have thought that a behavior like eye contact, which is so intrinsically social, could be in part shaped by a biological factor?” he asks. What’s more, the testosterone level during fetal life also influenced language skills. The higher the prenatal testosterone level, the smaller a child’s vocabulary at 18 months and again at 24 months.

Lack of eye contact and poor language aptitude are early hallmarks of autism. “Being strongly attracted to systems, together with a lack of empathy, may be the core characteristics of individuals on the autistic spectrum,” says Baron-Cohen. “Maybe testosterone does more than affect spatial ability and language. Maybe it also affects social ability.” And perhaps autism represents an “extreme form” of the male brain.

If this is true, it’s really creepy. California Autism Rate Doubles in Four Years:

Autism cases in California nearly doubled over the past four years to more than 20,000 — a phenomenon whose cause may be difficult to pinpoint because it is not related to population increases or the way the disorder is diagnosed, a state study said on Tuesday.

Once a rare disorder, autism now is more prevalent than childhood cancer, diabetes and Down syndrome, the study’s author, Dr. Ron Huff, said.

The spectacular rate of increase for autism dwarfs rises of 35 percent to 49 percent for new cases of mental retardation, cerebral palsy and epilepsy in California, he said.

“We are convinced that this is for real,” Huff said. “It has to be taken seriously.” Huff’s study was a follow-up to an earlier report ordered by California lawmakers that showed a 273 percent rise in autism cases statewide between 1987 to 1998.

“All through the 1970s to the mid-1980s, we were looking at a couple of hundred (autistic) kids each year,” Huff said. “Over the next decade we were looking at thousands of new cases each year. Parents were reporting anecdotally that there were a lot more of these kids out there that anyone believed.”

Of course, if the number of functioning autistics increases, we can expect a boost to the tech sector. (Sorry.)