Welcome to the Real World / A Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum

The social majority and psychologists can bad mouth Asperger individuals all they want, but the truth is, that if Asperger people had never existed, the technology and scientific discoveries that make the human environment oh so livable and convenient for Neurotypical people would not exist. If Asperger people were to vanish today, the technologies that provide energy, medicine, water and food for 7 billion people would crash in mere days.

Asperger's: An Unsought Individuality

Being diagnosed as Asberger's confers a strange unsought individuality.

We exist at the edge of the human domain, not looking inward to an anthropocentric land of incessant squabbles and breathtaking cruelty, but deeply, into the complex manifestation of matter and energy that is our earth. We also look outward to the inhuman universe, whatever it may be. We see what social humans refuse to see. Humans are not the summation of evolution, but one flicker in an emerging image.

 

 

Boston Children's Hospital: Autism and Asperger's are Different

from: VECTOR Boston Children’s Hospital’s science and clinical innovation blog.

Autism and Asperger’s are different… at least on EEG by Nancy Fliesler on August 15, 2013

Asperger’s syndrome vs. autism spectrum disorders:
This histogram separates children with Asperger’s (in red) from those with autism spectrum disorders (green) based on EEG coherence variables. Although there is overlap with high-functioning autism, the Asperger’s children clearly form a distinct group. (Courtesy BMC Medicine)

Is it Asperger’s syndrome or is it autism? Since there are no objective diagnostic measures, the diagnosis is often rather squishy, based on how individual clinicians interpret a child’s behavior. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV), early problems with language development are an indicator of autism; if there are behavioral symptoms but no early language problems, the child has Asperger’s. However, if the diagnosis is made late, parents’ recall of early language development may be fuzzy.

Under the new DSM-V, published in May, Asperger’s is included under the general “autism spectrum disorders (ASD)” umbrella. This has raised concerns among families who feel their children with Asperger’s have unique needs that won’t be met in classroom programs designed for autism.

Frank Duffy, MD, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, believes it’s possible to objectively differentiate Asperger’s from ASDs using a new wrinkle on an old technology. Originally trained as an engineer, Duffy is expert at interpreting electroencephalography (EEG) signals—the wiggly lines that represent electrical activity in the brain.

He’s devised computational techniques that measure the degree of synchrony among signals gathered from 24 different electrodes on different parts of the scalp.

These “coherence” patterns, though not evident to the eye, reflect how the brain is wired, and how it processes and integrates information. And they clearly reveal different patterns of brain connections in children with Asperger’s as compared to children with autism.

“It’s very easy to separate Asperger’s from autism patients by EEG measures,” Duffy asserts. “We could eventually come to the point where diagnostic differences are defined directly by differences in brain activity.”

First, we need to rewind to last year, when Duffy presented results from studying 430 children, ages 2 to 12, with “classic” autism and comparing them with 554 neurotypical controls. The autism diagnoses relied upon the DSM-IV, the Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Children with Asperger’s syndrome or very low or high-functioning autism were excluded. In the end, Duffy computed EEG coherence readings for more than 4,000 possible combinations of electrodes.

In the autism group, coherence tended to be reduced in brain areas at short distances from each other, while long-distance coherence was sometimes reduced, sometimes increased. Ultimately, Duffy found several dozen coherence factors that consistently distinguished the children with autism from the controls with more than 90 percent sensitivity. 

Birth Trauma: Is this any way to start life?

Is medical intervention in premature infants causing more brain damage and suffering than it prevents?

At what cost does society indulge in the irrational belief that "we" know better than nature what is good for our species and that emotion must be the primary consideration in medical decisions? 

What level of corporate profit justifies inflicting trauma on a fetus that will negatively affect it, its family and society for a lifetime?   

How many cases of neurologically-based brain
disorders are the result of poor societal decisions?