I appreciate the thoughtfulness and research going into this piece. I have what used to be called Asperger's (now just part of the autistic spectrum) and as a formally "gifted" kid myself, and I think way too much pressure is being put on kids who happen to perform really well in a niche subset of academic tasks at the expense of their emotional needs. I think this is particularly true in the US where genius is fetishized. I don't think trauma causes autism (twin studies comparing the concordance fraternal and identical twins with autism suggest the causes are mostly genetic) however it can make the severity autistic symptoms much much worse (identical twin studies show the severity of symptoms can differ widely). And I see huge differences between kids whose parents accept their condition and try to raise them in a more balanced way, versus the parents who hyperfocus on their kids' gifts and are in denial that they have any struggles.
I will say that The Diametric Mind theory of autism has never sat right with me. Perhaps this is because me and other Asperger's people I know love the connection between the left and right sides of the brain, love the connection between spirituality and science, or music and math, or have things like synesthesia where they experience words and numbers with colors/emotions. The Connectivity Theory of autism is a competing theory with The Diametric Mind theory, which that autists have different patterns of connectivity in the brain compared with allistics, with some having less connection between left and right hemispheres, but others having more. Autism is truly heterogeneous as you highlighted, and so that might explain why The Diametric Mind theory summarizes a subset of cases but not others. Nevertheless, I can totally agree that our society over-prioritizes the mechanistic over mentalistic to our detriment!
A few additional notes on the problems with twin studies and autism:
(1) There is a higher incidence of autism diagnoses in multiple births than in single births (i.e. twins and triplets are more likely to be autistic than solo birth children). This points to prenatal factors, the mother's body struggling to provide enough for both babies, and to the co-morbid risk of premature birth (multiple births are more likely to be premature, premies are more likely to be autistic). NICU factors play a role here; if you've ever spent some time in a NICU (I had a four day stay with my daughter, it sucked) it's obvious that it would be very traumatic for the babies and adversely affect mother-infant attachment.
(2) Identical twins are at a higher risk for problems in general than fraternal twins because things are more likely to go wrong when the embryo divides. Fraternal twins run in families, so presumably there would be some family genes buffering against complications, but identical twins are more of a random thing.
(3) In adoption studies with twins, you're looking at children developing in a womb environment where the mother is pregnant under stressful circumstances and doesn't want to keep the children. Earlier theories about autism included that rejection by the mother while the child is in the womb increases risk.
Again, not claiming genes aren't involved, but I think conclusions drawn from twin studies tend to be overblown.
Thank you for your comment! Honestly, this essay could have easily been 3x the length, I left so much out, including that I'm with you re Badcock's Diametric Model ... I don't think EITHER him or Iain McGilchrist (hemispheres) are entirely correct, but the overlap in their observations interests me. (This is a little clearer in the two-part essay "The Dangers of Reading Too Much").
The diametric model doesn't have an accurate description of schizophrenia and fails to account for why schizophrenia and autism are highly co-morbid (Badcock says this is indicative of genius—the child is autistic and then the adult is more schizophrenic—but this still feels a little off to me). Spiritual interests tend to kick in in adulthood for most people too.
And Iain McGilchrist fails to explain why so many autistic people have RIGHT HEMISPHERE associated "savant" or "spiky" skills (e.g. spatial skills/math, music).
I think the latter can be reconciled by inferring that autistic people have ABNORMAL right hemisphere brain development, over-development in some areas, unique in each case (e.g. spatial skills, music, connection to animals) and under-development in others (e.g. non-verbal communication, connection to others, connection to one's own body, and in many cases connection to nature—as I include an addiction to or preference for processed foods under this category).
And, of course, more localized connection—the "connectivity theory" seems kind of vague to me, I mean, yes, obviously there's different connectivity, but why and why the variation? As well, "allistic" people will have a wide range of connectivity differences too. All brains are unique ... and there's considerable variation between cultural groups (as well as average differences between males and females within groups).
I don't think trauma/neglect can cause autism *on its own*; I guess I don't see much distinction between something that can make autism *worse* versus being a contributing factor, because I sincerely doubt *most* children diagnosed with it are born with it (I think some are, but primarily due to factors in prenatal development, epigenetics not genes). I think in every case there are other factors involved—the skyrocketing rates and increased severity of cases indicates that environmental factors are playing the largest role. However, I think genes for *sensitivity* and ones that affect nutrients (e.g. MTHFR) dramatically increase vulnerability. I think in all "gifted" kid cases there's genes for sensitivity involved, and those make us more vulnerable to abuse/neglect, to toxins, and to drugs (including, most notably, refined sugar).
Badcock also offers an explanation as to how mothers could pass Aspergers on to their offspring (in particular males) through the X chromosome through inactivation imprints that fail to reset, a process called "lingering Lyonization".
But regarding trauma *causing* autism, keep in mind I'm referring to autism diagnoses (and self-diagnoses) here. I don't think what's getting labelled as "autism" is one condition. I think there's a very reasonable argument that many traumatized people are getting diagnosed with "autism" when "complex PTSD" would be more accurate and appropriate. But it's a huge mess to tease apart, because in basically every case where a child is "coldly" parented, you're going to have other risk factors (e.g. a diet higher in processed convenience foods). And higher levels of stress negatively affect the gut microbiome and the body's ability to detox, which would contribute (but not cause by itself) to the higher levels of heavy metal build-up seen in autism.
The problem I have with twin studies is that twins shares a womb, and in the case of adoption studies, the significant trauma of adoption. I'm skeptical of them. And regarding autism running in families, the issue is so do environments, diets, and parenting styles. But as I think autism is more than one condition, I also think there's a good chance that a subset of diagnoses, especially at the "Aspergers" end of things, are largely epigenetic, a result of generations of high mechanism, high cognitive / low nurture, low embodied families (this is clearer in the "Dangers of Reading Too Much" essays).
Gah. It's a giant mess of information. I think the safest approach is to treat each case of "autism" as unique; look for individual causal factors, and come up with an individual approach to improve quality of life.
Will throw it out there that magic mushrooms did WONDERS for me; I especially recommend them if you have disordered or restricted/picky eating / ARFID as a co-morbidity. A high dose of mushrooms seems to be able to fix that.
Many other "autism" traits are caused or exacerbated by nutritional deficiencies. So, for example, if you struggle to eat vegetables, you might have a lutein deficiency, which will cause light sensitivity. Sound sensitivity can be caused by magnesium and B6 deficiencies. Difficulty sleeping is usually related to Vitamin D and magnesium. Refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine all deplete various nutrients, as do many medications, including birth control pills. Eating a lot of processed foods also means a higher glyphosate exposure, and that screws up folate levels (B9), among other things.
Hi and thank you for your really detailed response. I appreciate that you have actually read extensively about autism and that your theories are based on careful engagement with the science. A lot of people writing about this topic kind of have these hot takes on it without ever doing a basic lit review and I find it frustrating. Thank you for your work and your sincere dedication to understanding this complex topic.
I am talking about twin studies with non-adopted kids, comparing fraternal vs. identical twins raised by the same parents. I think your second point only applies in this situation, and it’s an interesting one! However, to me that would point to a difference in in utero environmental factors versus differences in parenting environmental factors. It is believed that environmental factors due absolutely play a causal role in autism, but it would only make sense if they happened very early on because in order for autism to be correctly diagnosed, symptoms have to start appearing in the early developmental period.
One of the reasons the twin studies are interesting to me is that I have a pair of fraternal twins in my family (not adopted, same womb) and one twin has autism (level I) and the other doesn’t. The one who does started showing some symptoms as an infant and then other symptoms appeared around age two which is when most autistic symptoms appear.
However, I do absolutely agree that trauma later in life can impact the way autistic symptoms express themselves, and bring out more of the negative ones. This is true in ADHD as well. You make a good point in differentiating how autism presents (as differences in behavior) versus the neurological difference that may (or may not in some causes) cause those behaviors. I also suspect that not all cases of adult diagnosed ADHD are actually caused by the same thing, and I think some cases of self-diagnosed autism are probably people mislabeling themselves. Trauma is probably a huge reason. But I also know autistics who were told that their symptoms were just due to trauma, and this turned out not to be the case.
I appreciate the good will in your advice but I have found ways to manage drug free and have found a nutrition, exercise, and other wellness practices that work for me. I am okay with being autistic and not trying to fix it, but rather manage the negative sides. I will never do psychedelics because meditation and spiritual ritual have psychadelic-like effects on me, and I suspect I’m already too open and my brain is already too far off in the spirtual-ecological-everything-is-connected direction, and it’s more useful for me to engaged in grounded, mechanistic type work to keep the my woo-woo side in check :) I do have a lot of friends who are into psychedelics though, and I fit in more easily in communities that use them and think that they’re clearly beneficial for many, and glad they’re becoming less stigmatized and more widely available! I just don’t think they should be recommended for everyone.
Thanks for your thoughtful engagement and I look forward to subscribing and following your work.
Oh, yes, I suspect ADHD is probably more environmental/trauma-based than autism, in general. (Though still related to those pesky sensitivity genes).
Re psychedelics. I avoided them for ages for the same reason as you, but my health got bad enough I was willing to try anything, and they really helped me. I did get way too woo-woo-y for a while, talking in metaphors and making predictions like some sort of old-school prophetess, but once I settled down I was significantly healthier, and most of the weird stuff I said turned out to have some validity behind it (downloaded a bunch of excellent advice on avoiding Covid lol). But I don't think anyone should take them if they're afraid of them, and the main benefits for me were gut healing, curing my chronic migraines, putting me more in touch with spirituality, and with my own body / instincts, and convincing me to stop eating refined sugar and drinking alcohol. It sounds like you already have several practices for a healthy diet, spirituality, and physical connection, and that you did that without any medicine is admirable :-) (And I wasn't trying to suggest mushrooms will "cure" autism, more help with the negative symptoms, depending on what they are! I also realize that since autism is so multifactorial that no treatment will benefit everyone).
I haven’t finished reading this yet, I like to read all the listed sources while I am reading the central piece, so it takes me a bit more time. But great stuff so far and a very well argued case!
On McGilchrist’s hemisphere lateralization theory, I think that the key point that he captures, and other dichotomous theories on cognition miss out on, is that the two hemispheres differ in the “how” more than they differ in the “what”. This means that for the small scale and short term thinking the right hemisphere has a major handicap against the left. But the right hemisphere is excellent at aggregating and synthesizing and becomes unbeatable at long term and more complex kinds of thinking. This maps perfectly onto the kind of precocious giftedness that wears off when more hemisphere balanced people eventually catch up and overtake the left hemisphere focused ones.
Good article overall! For point #6 on cold parenting, when I read how you described cold parenting it sounded like a natural way for an autistic parent to parent their child. This makes me think there is correlation, but only because there is a genetic link that leads autistic parents to have autistic children.
Best way to test this out would be twin studies, but it might be hard to get a large enough one to identify causes of autism.
Yeah ... I think it's epigenetic. Parents high in autistic traits are more likely to pass on genes that increase the risk of autism *and* are more likely to parent their children in such a way that steers them toward autistic development (and they themselves were most likely parented in a way that contributed to their autism). Hans Asperger noted in his paper that many of the mothers in particular of his autistic patients seemed high in autistic traits themselves.
"While we have never met a girl with the fully fledged picture of autism, we have, however, seen several mothers of autistic children whose behaviour had decidedly autistic features. It is difficult to explain this observation. It may be that autistic traits in the female become evident only after puberty. We just do not know.” (Hans Asperger, 1944)
The Drew family in this story is an interesting example of an autistic father who did a lot of research, including reading accounts of children who blame their difficult childhoods on their parents' autism, and is trying to consciously parent in a non-cold way ... at the time of the story, his daughter showed no signs of autism:
Woah. It's rather disturbing how uncannily precise this is as a summary of my life.
Absurdly early cognitive skills - check (poetry and multiplication at age 3)
Mother with narcissistic tendencies - check
Expectations of genius accomplishment, pushed to skipped grades, etc - check
Isolation and bullying throughout school - check
Being essentially raised by, or peered with adult outsiders - check (my family and social connections in childhood and adolescence was de facto an intellectual online discussion forum)
Deviant sexuality - check (not trans but became a PUA and later underground sex guru, had ruminations of being wretched and disgusting unless my "performance" as far as sex quantity/quality/variety, etc was "adequate" for most of my adult life, until recovery last year) (and a check - plus for the recovery being psychedelic assisted)
Sensitivity to criticism, difficulty following through with challenging tasks later in life - check
Atypical right brained interest - check (playing exotically designed / extended range basses and guitars)
Extensive challenges with relationships, including professional - check
Interestingly, I am trying and have a decent chance of success of achieving tenure in (my current) dream job for someone in my position, an academic research mathematician with no teaching and service duties. Perhaps this essay presents a nice way to have a non-narcissistic way to present my intended case: suggest a modest basic income with a performance-based high tail. That way if I'm just a wacko I'm still content and they don't waste too much resources, and the degree to which I'm more than just a wacko and I could create outstanding intellectual contributions to make the world a better place (and I am directing research towards prosocial ends as much as I can, energy efficiency, health science, etc) is incentivized, and thus the expectation of contribution to the world even under (the non narcissistic prior of) low probability of true "genius" is still maximized :)
(And my data driven prior has not changed from my prior, I had top pub/citations in my CS dept for a couple years in a row but recently one of my PIs informes me that I am a stupid underperformer, so I truly have no idea, it's somewhere in between with a bias towards just being a wacko, is my current understanding)
(My apologies if the terminology is unfamiliar, I came to your substack from statistical sociologists so assumed you were similar)
I'm glad you have a shot at the dream career! Not technically a "math" book, but a book about math -- have you read Weapons of Math Destruction? Sounds like it might be up your alley (albeit probably a little simplistic since it's written for lay readers).
Reminds me of some of the things I'd been looking at on substack. You see I recently was a part of a research project I only mid way realized was associated firmly with an unethical ideology (fortunately I left that project without cancellation incident it seems). So I started to read up on the antrhopology of the intelligentsia and came across this article.
It's important to have civic duty as a researcher, as distrust of quantification can be very problematic. For instance when they stopped using SATs for admission criteria in the US all the American professors complained about the quality of the students. Indeed it even made disparities worse: exceptionally high SAT scores in an area with generally low scores were a reliable way to rescue intelligent kids from rough neighborhoods. Whereas upper middle class white kids could afford tutoring on and were culturally better aligned to do well on essays and interviews.
I'm a bit cynical, and suspect it was less a distrust of quantification that turned elites against the SAT, and more that a smart kid without any advantages will typically score higher than an advantaged kid without smarts. They want college admissions to be based on things money can buy.
You neglected to mention the single greatest contributor to male GD—autogynephilia. AGP is strongly correlated with autism, which is most likely the chief reason why so many dysphoric young men are gifted. (Also while I’m not wholly convinced of the “extreme male brain” theory, the fact that autism correlates with non-heterosexuality in males does not on its own disprove the theory, since most non-heterosexual behavior in autistic males stems from AGP.)
That said, I think the factors you have listed certainly contribute, especially for females.
The essay was already very long and I don't want to introduce a complicated and controversial topic such as autogynephilia without being able to do it justice. I hope you understand.
This is a very interesting essay. I wasn't 'gifted' and I don't know many who were. I HAVE met extremely intelligent people, in my profession of engineering, I cant really say if any of them, as kids, were noted as 'gifted', I kind of doubt it. From reading I have done, the average IQ of many engineers is 130 or close, so near-gifted, technically. You said one curious thing, though, which was "This essay will focus on progressive, white families." What is it about 'progressive' families that causes an increase in 'giftedness' in their kids? Most of the engineers I have know were NOT progressive types, mostly.
I think the observation re engineers goes back to what I was saying about "precocity" versus actual intelligence. If I had to guess, the engineers you know probably WEREN'T particularly precocious, they're just smart, and developed at a healthy pace, thus were less likely to be identified as "gifted" while still children (even if they're capable of getting over 130 on an IQ test as adults). Engineering is a practical career that requires a lot of brains, but not one that prestige-obsessed parents would necessarily push their children toward, or affirmation-seeking "gifted" children would be drawn to.
The essay focussed on "progressive" white families because the rapid onset gender dysphoria social contagion, at least according to the limited data available, seems to be more concentrated in that group. From my observations and what I've read, progressive/leftist families are also more likely to seek and obtain psychiatric diagnoses. Engineering types are often high in autistic traits, but if they tend to come from more conservative families, as you suggest, my guess is that parents would be less likely to doctor-shop for a label to explain why their son likes to line up his cars so much (also less likely to seek the "gifted" label or IQ test their kid).
What is it about "progressive" families that increases "giftedness" in their kids? Keep in mind I don't think childhood "giftedness" = general intelligence, the latter is more complex.
Some ideas:
- Conservatives are more family-centric and more likely to raise their children close to extended family members, to have larger families, and to socialize more with family. Progressive/liberal children are probably more likely to spend more time alone with books, games, toys etc that develop the left hemisphere and academic cognitive skills -- their parents tend to be more highly educated and to put a greater weight on academic achievement.
- Liberal/progressive women have significantly higher rates of mental illness than conservative women; it's reasonable to infer that liberal mothers have higher rates of mental illness than conservative mothers.
- Liberals / progressives are more likely to live in urban centres, their children would have more cultural exposure but less exposure to nature. Schools in urban centres, in particular elite ones, would also foster more of a culture of academic hyper-competition.
Not an exhaustive list but what I could think of off the top of my head before coffee!
OK interesting thanks. Makes sense. I entered kindergarten in 1970 and while I recall a couple of kids here and there got 'skipped', it wasn't common. I grew up in professional suburb of Montreal, and I'd say politically it was probably mixed, but not especially a progressive area for the time. I agree with all your points, and yes my experience is that parents seeking validation through their child's intelligence were not mostly not planning a career in engineering for them. I do wonder, is this 'gifted' thing more common after 1980? The type of parent you describe, in my mind conjures up images of wealthy New Yorkers living on the Upper East Side.
I *think* it became more common after 1980? But I'm not sure. I think the wealthy New Yorkers caricature is fairly accurate. I was born in 1988 and am Canadian so a lot of what I know/understand about this (edit: pre-1990s and US WASP culture) is from research, not personal experience. I do think a lot of the kids I was in the "gifted" program fit my descriptions in this essay, but I also was only in my school district's program for a year before I insisted on dropping out (which, thankfully, my parents allowed).
Well thanks for your comments, it was an interesting essay and you said a lot of interesting things. This subject isn't directly personal for me, but I am very concerned about ROGD, its obvious social contagion and how society is dealing with it (not very well at the moment).
Steven, as another child who grew up around the same time as you, my observation concords with yours in that the meaning of "giftedness" seemed to change during the period of our childhood. I can think of several social factors that fed into that change, principally among them the sense of pressure that requisite college enrollment puts on parents. Before the manufacturing decline in America, a perfectly fine middle-class life was available to people who didn't go to college. In that context, gifted kids were just weird and mostly nobody cared; that's how I grew up.
Once the only road to a secure future seemed to be college placement and academic achievement, middle-class parents felt themselves under great pressure to increase their kids' chances. At that time, separate gifted tracks (with more capacity than the odd pull-out period I encountered) started to be created, for example in NYC. The first gifted classes in NYC were started in 1973, in forty schools, beginning in Kindergarten. You can bet there was a rush among wealthy parents on the Upper East Side to get their kids ready and get their kids tested, to enter those programs.
Creation of public school based programs with greater resources than the general population is an example of a shift from "gifted" kids being oddballs who weren't particularly doted upon to "gifted" kids being the thing wealthy people had to turn their kids into, or miss out. This also played out in private schools, which drastically upped their academic game during the period. Before the 80s, fancy boarding schools did a good job with academics, but paid much more attention to sports and culture - when I visited some in 1982, they were much more interested in my height than my IQ. Now they offer dozens of math classes past the second year of Calculus. To get to them, you have to have been accelerated in math at a younger age, i.e. identified as "gifted."
Thanks for your comments, all makes sense and aligns with my personal experience and wider observations. As you say, in my elementary school (which was public but located in affluent catchments) in the 1970s any of what we would now call gifted kids would have been considered oddballs, basically. There were a couple of kids in the school who had skipped grades (including one whose parents were European and who forced the kid to play the violin - which he constantly dragged around with him), but they usually suffered by being social outcasts in some way (they were maybe a little less socially mature). In my single class cohort at the school, there were two so-called brains (I was one, the other was a female classmate) but we were never considered 'gifted'. Today we might be.
It has not been my observation that liberal women are on average more nurturing than conservative women, nor does any evidence support this. Research does support that liberals (both men and women) are more likely to care about "out-groups", but that doesn't translate to a higher level of nurturing towards one's own children. If I had to guess, I suspect there's a curvilinear relationship, with moderate and apolitical women being more "nurturing" on average than women on the far left or far right. This is in part because ideological thinking (seen on the far ends of the political spectrum) would be more typical of left hemisphere dominance, and the RH is the nurturer. As well, it is increasingly becoming apparent that highly cerebral / career-focussed women struggle a bit more with motherhood, and more of these women would fall to the left.
But what I said above is that conservatives are more family-oriented, i.e. more likely to live closer to extended family and have more children. Extended family is protective against family dysfunction and low maternal nurturance. And liberals are more likely to live in cities, and city life is worse for mental health for a variety of reasons (lack of easy access to nature and exposure to air pollution, for example). It's certainly complicated.
Just to clarify something, because from both your comments I'm not sure you picked up on this ... I've identified as being on the LEFT for most of my life, and was active in the feminist literary community until 2019. Now I'm politically homeless; I've never been a conservative. I'm also not "neurotypical" in any sense of the word, and was the weirdly-good-at-math kind of "gifted" kid.
I was officially diagnosed as gifted in fifth grade, and was in the gifted track throughout junior high and high school. But this was in the 1970s.
I have a son who is even smarter than me, and he just came out as transgender at age 16. One factor to consider is the world of gaming, especially online social gaming where one can create an online persona untethered from one’s physical body. My son has always had a lack of interest in the physical world, and has been much more interested in ideas, math, abstractions, and gaming. Gamers jokingly refer to interacting with nature as “touching grass”.
Yes! I tried to cover this (albeit briefly, the essay already being too long) when I discussed the distinction between a "cold development" / "upbringing" from "cold parenting" and factors that would shift brain development more toward the left hemisphere and mechanistic cognition (in particular under the subheading "Excess time spent in LH-dominant and/or mechanistic activities." A key point here, which your comment highlights, is that this is often directed by the CHILD.
I don't know enough about the gaming world to write about it, but I did write an essay about excessive reading in childhood making a person more "left hemisphere dominant" and "autistic", and a lot of what I wrote there would apply to excessive gaming too. (I recognize gaming would be more complicated, e.g. gaming can develop hand-eye coordination and spatial skills and can involve more social interaction, depending on the game etc as well as the ability to create literal avatars, as you mention).
As I'm sure you know, cells that fire together wire together. The more we do an activity, the more our brain becomes wired for it. The more we use parts of our brains, the stronger they get. And the more we neglect parts of our brains, the more difficulty it becomes to use those parts.
I guess I'm of the opinion that if your child is reluctant to "touch grass", it's a good idea to drag them outside and make them do it anyway. (I know it's not always that easy).
Something I haven't looked into / there doesn't seem to be much information about, is the possibility that people who are more "intelligent" (distinct concept from "IQ") also have more brain plasticity, i.e. the ability to form new brain connections faster. If this is the case, then highly intelligent children and teenagers would be more vulnerable to things like video game addictions, because their brains would rewire to the game much quicker than normal children. The same could apply to ideologies ... if this makes any sense? As I said, it's not something I have any supporting evidence for, more a speculation.
This is an interesting article and while parts of it made me thoughtful others made me very uncomfortable. You seem to be pathologizing many ways of being that are perfectly fine for both the individual and society.
Isn’t a very logical explanation for gender and sexuality prevalence that autistic people feel very little peer pressure and desire to conform (makes life difficult in school but also potentially great benefits to society.)Therefore they more accurately label their own feelings about gender and sexuality instead of instinctively suppressing them to fit in?
Additionally, I personally know autistic girls whose spiky gifts lie entirely in the verbal realm with no STEM gifts or interest. In your world view presentation it doesn’t seem that they should happen.
I’m more a fan of the “too many neurons” and “step by step analysis versus instinctive generalization/stereotyping” as the underlying descriptor in autism.
(1) What "ways of being" am I pathologizing that are "fine" for the individual? Throughout this entire essay I am speaking about people who are experiencing some sort of mental distress. I was very clear that this essay does not apply to all autistic people, all gifted people, or all transgender people, and CERTAINLY not to all gender non-conforming people, as I noted that positive androgyny is associated with BETTER mental health. I'm not pathologizing anything, I'm examining a sub-group that appears to be in significant distress, with the desire to understand and help.
(2) Autistic people are actually MORE vulnerable to radical ideologies (which require high conformity) than allistic people. Look it up. I've noticed a high degree of conformity within autistic online spaces, including harassment / exclusion / anger at autistic people who challenge the prevailing opinions. The whole concept of autistic "masking" is that autistic people deliberately conform to what they think will gain them acceptance. I've observed that while autistic activists seem to think allistic people are more "conformist" and similar to each other, that is not the case. There's really no such thing as a "neurotypical" mind. All brains are different, all people are different. Evidence is overwhelming that autistic people are less gender-conforming (less naturally masculine or feminine), but they seem to readily conform to the queer mainstream.
(3) Actually, autistic girls having spiky skills in the verbal realm doesn't conflict with anything I'm saying in this essay; the evidence I present would actually predict that. I debunk the "extreme male brain" theory, and point out that autism is associated with left hemisphere dominance: reading and writing are quintessential left hemisphere dominant tasks.
(4) It's actually more local connectivity in autism, less global connectivity! But in the gifted/autism overlap I'm examining here we're probably looking at overactive brains. But this is just a sub-group. I agree with you re step by step analysis (left brain logical, bottom-up, mechanistic thinking) versus instinctive generalization (right brain gut feelings). However, both types of thinking are valuable. Autistic people are less likely to stereotype and exhibit prejudice, which is a strength; however, this also makes them more vulnerable to being taken advantage of and to falling for lies / deception.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and research going into this piece. I have what used to be called Asperger's (now just part of the autistic spectrum) and as a formally "gifted" kid myself, and I think way too much pressure is being put on kids who happen to perform really well in a niche subset of academic tasks at the expense of their emotional needs. I think this is particularly true in the US where genius is fetishized. I don't think trauma causes autism (twin studies comparing the concordance fraternal and identical twins with autism suggest the causes are mostly genetic) however it can make the severity autistic symptoms much much worse (identical twin studies show the severity of symptoms can differ widely). And I see huge differences between kids whose parents accept their condition and try to raise them in a more balanced way, versus the parents who hyperfocus on their kids' gifts and are in denial that they have any struggles.
I will say that The Diametric Mind theory of autism has never sat right with me. Perhaps this is because me and other Asperger's people I know love the connection between the left and right sides of the brain, love the connection between spirituality and science, or music and math, or have things like synesthesia where they experience words and numbers with colors/emotions. The Connectivity Theory of autism is a competing theory with The Diametric Mind theory, which that autists have different patterns of connectivity in the brain compared with allistics, with some having less connection between left and right hemispheres, but others having more. Autism is truly heterogeneous as you highlighted, and so that might explain why The Diametric Mind theory summarizes a subset of cases but not others. Nevertheless, I can totally agree that our society over-prioritizes the mechanistic over mentalistic to our detriment!
A few additional notes on the problems with twin studies and autism:
(1) There is a higher incidence of autism diagnoses in multiple births than in single births (i.e. twins and triplets are more likely to be autistic than solo birth children). This points to prenatal factors, the mother's body struggling to provide enough for both babies, and to the co-morbid risk of premature birth (multiple births are more likely to be premature, premies are more likely to be autistic). NICU factors play a role here; if you've ever spent some time in a NICU (I had a four day stay with my daughter, it sucked) it's obvious that it would be very traumatic for the babies and adversely affect mother-infant attachment.
(2) Identical twins are at a higher risk for problems in general than fraternal twins because things are more likely to go wrong when the embryo divides. Fraternal twins run in families, so presumably there would be some family genes buffering against complications, but identical twins are more of a random thing.
(3) In adoption studies with twins, you're looking at children developing in a womb environment where the mother is pregnant under stressful circumstances and doesn't want to keep the children. Earlier theories about autism included that rejection by the mother while the child is in the womb increases risk.
Again, not claiming genes aren't involved, but I think conclusions drawn from twin studies tend to be overblown.
Thank you for your comment! Honestly, this essay could have easily been 3x the length, I left so much out, including that I'm with you re Badcock's Diametric Model ... I don't think EITHER him or Iain McGilchrist (hemispheres) are entirely correct, but the overlap in their observations interests me. (This is a little clearer in the two-part essay "The Dangers of Reading Too Much").
The diametric model doesn't have an accurate description of schizophrenia and fails to account for why schizophrenia and autism are highly co-morbid (Badcock says this is indicative of genius—the child is autistic and then the adult is more schizophrenic—but this still feels a little off to me). Spiritual interests tend to kick in in adulthood for most people too.
And Iain McGilchrist fails to explain why so many autistic people have RIGHT HEMISPHERE associated "savant" or "spiky" skills (e.g. spatial skills/math, music).
I think the latter can be reconciled by inferring that autistic people have ABNORMAL right hemisphere brain development, over-development in some areas, unique in each case (e.g. spatial skills, music, connection to animals) and under-development in others (e.g. non-verbal communication, connection to others, connection to one's own body, and in many cases connection to nature—as I include an addiction to or preference for processed foods under this category).
And, of course, more localized connection—the "connectivity theory" seems kind of vague to me, I mean, yes, obviously there's different connectivity, but why and why the variation? As well, "allistic" people will have a wide range of connectivity differences too. All brains are unique ... and there's considerable variation between cultural groups (as well as average differences between males and females within groups).
Check this paper out: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
I don't think trauma/neglect can cause autism *on its own*; I guess I don't see much distinction between something that can make autism *worse* versus being a contributing factor, because I sincerely doubt *most* children diagnosed with it are born with it (I think some are, but primarily due to factors in prenatal development, epigenetics not genes). I think in every case there are other factors involved—the skyrocketing rates and increased severity of cases indicates that environmental factors are playing the largest role. However, I think genes for *sensitivity* and ones that affect nutrients (e.g. MTHFR) dramatically increase vulnerability. I think in all "gifted" kid cases there's genes for sensitivity involved, and those make us more vulnerable to abuse/neglect, to toxins, and to drugs (including, most notably, refined sugar).
Badcock also offers an explanation as to how mothers could pass Aspergers on to their offspring (in particular males) through the X chromosome through inactivation imprints that fail to reset, a process called "lingering Lyonization".
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201002/lingering-lyonizationthe-genetics-aspergers-syndrome
But regarding trauma *causing* autism, keep in mind I'm referring to autism diagnoses (and self-diagnoses) here. I don't think what's getting labelled as "autism" is one condition. I think there's a very reasonable argument that many traumatized people are getting diagnosed with "autism" when "complex PTSD" would be more accurate and appropriate. But it's a huge mess to tease apart, because in basically every case where a child is "coldly" parented, you're going to have other risk factors (e.g. a diet higher in processed convenience foods). And higher levels of stress negatively affect the gut microbiome and the body's ability to detox, which would contribute (but not cause by itself) to the higher levels of heavy metal build-up seen in autism.
The problem I have with twin studies is that twins shares a womb, and in the case of adoption studies, the significant trauma of adoption. I'm skeptical of them. And regarding autism running in families, the issue is so do environments, diets, and parenting styles. But as I think autism is more than one condition, I also think there's a good chance that a subset of diagnoses, especially at the "Aspergers" end of things, are largely epigenetic, a result of generations of high mechanism, high cognitive / low nurture, low embodied families (this is clearer in the "Dangers of Reading Too Much" essays).
Gah. It's a giant mess of information. I think the safest approach is to treat each case of "autism" as unique; look for individual causal factors, and come up with an individual approach to improve quality of life.
Will throw it out there that magic mushrooms did WONDERS for me; I especially recommend them if you have disordered or restricted/picky eating / ARFID as a co-morbidity. A high dose of mushrooms seems to be able to fix that.
I talk about it in this note: https://substack.com/@meghanbell/note/c-47663035
Many other "autism" traits are caused or exacerbated by nutritional deficiencies. So, for example, if you struggle to eat vegetables, you might have a lutein deficiency, which will cause light sensitivity. Sound sensitivity can be caused by magnesium and B6 deficiencies. Difficulty sleeping is usually related to Vitamin D and magnesium. Refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine all deplete various nutrients, as do many medications, including birth control pills. Eating a lot of processed foods also means a higher glyphosate exposure, and that screws up folate levels (B9), among other things.
Hi and thank you for your really detailed response. I appreciate that you have actually read extensively about autism and that your theories are based on careful engagement with the science. A lot of people writing about this topic kind of have these hot takes on it without ever doing a basic lit review and I find it frustrating. Thank you for your work and your sincere dedication to understanding this complex topic.
I am talking about twin studies with non-adopted kids, comparing fraternal vs. identical twins raised by the same parents. I think your second point only applies in this situation, and it’s an interesting one! However, to me that would point to a difference in in utero environmental factors versus differences in parenting environmental factors. It is believed that environmental factors due absolutely play a causal role in autism, but it would only make sense if they happened very early on because in order for autism to be correctly diagnosed, symptoms have to start appearing in the early developmental period.
One of the reasons the twin studies are interesting to me is that I have a pair of fraternal twins in my family (not adopted, same womb) and one twin has autism (level I) and the other doesn’t. The one who does started showing some symptoms as an infant and then other symptoms appeared around age two which is when most autistic symptoms appear.
However, I do absolutely agree that trauma later in life can impact the way autistic symptoms express themselves, and bring out more of the negative ones. This is true in ADHD as well. You make a good point in differentiating how autism presents (as differences in behavior) versus the neurological difference that may (or may not in some causes) cause those behaviors. I also suspect that not all cases of adult diagnosed ADHD are actually caused by the same thing, and I think some cases of self-diagnosed autism are probably people mislabeling themselves. Trauma is probably a huge reason. But I also know autistics who were told that their symptoms were just due to trauma, and this turned out not to be the case.
I appreciate the good will in your advice but I have found ways to manage drug free and have found a nutrition, exercise, and other wellness practices that work for me. I am okay with being autistic and not trying to fix it, but rather manage the negative sides. I will never do psychedelics because meditation and spiritual ritual have psychadelic-like effects on me, and I suspect I’m already too open and my brain is already too far off in the spirtual-ecological-everything-is-connected direction, and it’s more useful for me to engaged in grounded, mechanistic type work to keep the my woo-woo side in check :) I do have a lot of friends who are into psychedelics though, and I fit in more easily in communities that use them and think that they’re clearly beneficial for many, and glad they’re becoming less stigmatized and more widely available! I just don’t think they should be recommended for everyone.
Thanks for your thoughtful engagement and I look forward to subscribing and following your work.
Oh, yes, I suspect ADHD is probably more environmental/trauma-based than autism, in general. (Though still related to those pesky sensitivity genes).
Re psychedelics. I avoided them for ages for the same reason as you, but my health got bad enough I was willing to try anything, and they really helped me. I did get way too woo-woo-y for a while, talking in metaphors and making predictions like some sort of old-school prophetess, but once I settled down I was significantly healthier, and most of the weird stuff I said turned out to have some validity behind it (downloaded a bunch of excellent advice on avoiding Covid lol). But I don't think anyone should take them if they're afraid of them, and the main benefits for me were gut healing, curing my chronic migraines, putting me more in touch with spirituality, and with my own body / instincts, and convincing me to stop eating refined sugar and drinking alcohol. It sounds like you already have several practices for a healthy diet, spirituality, and physical connection, and that you did that without any medicine is admirable :-) (And I wasn't trying to suggest mushrooms will "cure" autism, more help with the negative symptoms, depending on what they are! I also realize that since autism is so multifactorial that no treatment will benefit everyone).
I haven’t finished reading this yet, I like to read all the listed sources while I am reading the central piece, so it takes me a bit more time. But great stuff so far and a very well argued case!
On McGilchrist’s hemisphere lateralization theory, I think that the key point that he captures, and other dichotomous theories on cognition miss out on, is that the two hemispheres differ in the “how” more than they differ in the “what”. This means that for the small scale and short term thinking the right hemisphere has a major handicap against the left. But the right hemisphere is excellent at aggregating and synthesizing and becomes unbeatable at long term and more complex kinds of thinking. This maps perfectly onto the kind of precocious giftedness that wears off when more hemisphere balanced people eventually catch up and overtake the left hemisphere focused ones.
Pinning this comment because you summed it up much better than I did / could have!
Well researched and easy to read, great writing! Fascinating info.
Good article overall! For point #6 on cold parenting, when I read how you described cold parenting it sounded like a natural way for an autistic parent to parent their child. This makes me think there is correlation, but only because there is a genetic link that leads autistic parents to have autistic children.
Best way to test this out would be twin studies, but it might be hard to get a large enough one to identify causes of autism.
Yeah ... I think it's epigenetic. Parents high in autistic traits are more likely to pass on genes that increase the risk of autism *and* are more likely to parent their children in such a way that steers them toward autistic development (and they themselves were most likely parented in a way that contributed to their autism). Hans Asperger noted in his paper that many of the mothers in particular of his autistic patients seemed high in autistic traits themselves.
"While we have never met a girl with the fully fledged picture of autism, we have, however, seen several mothers of autistic children whose behaviour had decidedly autistic features. It is difficult to explain this observation. It may be that autistic traits in the female become evident only after puberty. We just do not know.” (Hans Asperger, 1944)
The Drew family in this story is an interesting example of an autistic father who did a lot of research, including reading accounts of children who blame their difficult childhoods on their parents' autism, and is trying to consciously parent in a non-cold way ... at the time of the story, his daughter showed no signs of autism:
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/05/autism-parenting/526989/
Woah. It's rather disturbing how uncannily precise this is as a summary of my life.
Absurdly early cognitive skills - check (poetry and multiplication at age 3)
Mother with narcissistic tendencies - check
Expectations of genius accomplishment, pushed to skipped grades, etc - check
Isolation and bullying throughout school - check
Being essentially raised by, or peered with adult outsiders - check (my family and social connections in childhood and adolescence was de facto an intellectual online discussion forum)
Deviant sexuality - check (not trans but became a PUA and later underground sex guru, had ruminations of being wretched and disgusting unless my "performance" as far as sex quantity/quality/variety, etc was "adequate" for most of my adult life, until recovery last year) (and a check - plus for the recovery being psychedelic assisted)
Sensitivity to criticism, difficulty following through with challenging tasks later in life - check
Atypical right brained interest - check (playing exotically designed / extended range basses and guitars)
Extensive challenges with relationships, including professional - check
Interestingly, I am trying and have a decent chance of success of achieving tenure in (my current) dream job for someone in my position, an academic research mathematician with no teaching and service duties. Perhaps this essay presents a nice way to have a non-narcissistic way to present my intended case: suggest a modest basic income with a performance-based high tail. That way if I'm just a wacko I'm still content and they don't waste too much resources, and the degree to which I'm more than just a wacko and I could create outstanding intellectual contributions to make the world a better place (and I am directing research towards prosocial ends as much as I can, energy efficiency, health science, etc) is incentivized, and thus the expectation of contribution to the world even under (the non narcissistic prior of) low probability of true "genius" is still maximized :)
(And my data driven prior has not changed from my prior, I had top pub/citations in my CS dept for a couple years in a row but recently one of my PIs informes me that I am a stupid underperformer, so I truly have no idea, it's somewhere in between with a bias towards just being a wacko, is my current understanding)
(My apologies if the terminology is unfamiliar, I came to your substack from statistical sociologists so assumed you were similar)
Thanks! Will keep an eye on your work
I'm glad you have a shot at the dream career! Not technically a "math" book, but a book about math -- have you read Weapons of Math Destruction? Sounds like it might be up your alley (albeit probably a little simplistic since it's written for lay readers).
Reminds me of some of the things I'd been looking at on substack. You see I recently was a part of a research project I only mid way realized was associated firmly with an unethical ideology (fortunately I left that project without cancellation incident it seems). So I started to read up on the antrhopology of the intelligentsia and came across this article.
It's important to have civic duty as a researcher, as distrust of quantification can be very problematic. For instance when they stopped using SATs for admission criteria in the US all the American professors complained about the quality of the students. Indeed it even made disparities worse: exceptionally high SAT scores in an area with generally low scores were a reliable way to rescue intelligent kids from rough neighborhoods. Whereas upper middle class white kids could afford tutoring on and were culturally better aligned to do well on essays and interviews.
I'm a bit cynical, and suspect it was less a distrust of quantification that turned elites against the SAT, and more that a smart kid without any advantages will typically score higher than an advantaged kid without smarts. They want college admissions to be based on things money can buy.
You neglected to mention the single greatest contributor to male GD—autogynephilia. AGP is strongly correlated with autism, which is most likely the chief reason why so many dysphoric young men are gifted. (Also while I’m not wholly convinced of the “extreme male brain” theory, the fact that autism correlates with non-heterosexuality in males does not on its own disprove the theory, since most non-heterosexual behavior in autistic males stems from AGP.)
That said, I think the factors you have listed certainly contribute, especially for females.
The essay was already very long and I don't want to introduce a complicated and controversial topic such as autogynephilia without being able to do it justice. I hope you understand.
This is a very interesting essay. I wasn't 'gifted' and I don't know many who were. I HAVE met extremely intelligent people, in my profession of engineering, I cant really say if any of them, as kids, were noted as 'gifted', I kind of doubt it. From reading I have done, the average IQ of many engineers is 130 or close, so near-gifted, technically. You said one curious thing, though, which was "This essay will focus on progressive, white families." What is it about 'progressive' families that causes an increase in 'giftedness' in their kids? Most of the engineers I have know were NOT progressive types, mostly.
Thank you for this comment!
I think the observation re engineers goes back to what I was saying about "precocity" versus actual intelligence. If I had to guess, the engineers you know probably WEREN'T particularly precocious, they're just smart, and developed at a healthy pace, thus were less likely to be identified as "gifted" while still children (even if they're capable of getting over 130 on an IQ test as adults). Engineering is a practical career that requires a lot of brains, but not one that prestige-obsessed parents would necessarily push their children toward, or affirmation-seeking "gifted" children would be drawn to.
The essay focussed on "progressive" white families because the rapid onset gender dysphoria social contagion, at least according to the limited data available, seems to be more concentrated in that group. From my observations and what I've read, progressive/leftist families are also more likely to seek and obtain psychiatric diagnoses. Engineering types are often high in autistic traits, but if they tend to come from more conservative families, as you suggest, my guess is that parents would be less likely to doctor-shop for a label to explain why their son likes to line up his cars so much (also less likely to seek the "gifted" label or IQ test their kid).
What is it about "progressive" families that increases "giftedness" in their kids? Keep in mind I don't think childhood "giftedness" = general intelligence, the latter is more complex.
Some ideas:
- Conservatives are more family-centric and more likely to raise their children close to extended family members, to have larger families, and to socialize more with family. Progressive/liberal children are probably more likely to spend more time alone with books, games, toys etc that develop the left hemisphere and academic cognitive skills -- their parents tend to be more highly educated and to put a greater weight on academic achievement.
- Liberal/progressive women have significantly higher rates of mental illness than conservative women; it's reasonable to infer that liberal mothers have higher rates of mental illness than conservative mothers.
- Liberals / progressives are more likely to live in urban centres, their children would have more cultural exposure but less exposure to nature. Schools in urban centres, in particular elite ones, would also foster more of a culture of academic hyper-competition.
Not an exhaustive list but what I could think of off the top of my head before coffee!
OK interesting thanks. Makes sense. I entered kindergarten in 1970 and while I recall a couple of kids here and there got 'skipped', it wasn't common. I grew up in professional suburb of Montreal, and I'd say politically it was probably mixed, but not especially a progressive area for the time. I agree with all your points, and yes my experience is that parents seeking validation through their child's intelligence were not mostly not planning a career in engineering for them. I do wonder, is this 'gifted' thing more common after 1980? The type of parent you describe, in my mind conjures up images of wealthy New Yorkers living on the Upper East Side.
I *think* it became more common after 1980? But I'm not sure. I think the wealthy New Yorkers caricature is fairly accurate. I was born in 1988 and am Canadian so a lot of what I know/understand about this (edit: pre-1990s and US WASP culture) is from research, not personal experience. I do think a lot of the kids I was in the "gifted" program fit my descriptions in this essay, but I also was only in my school district's program for a year before I insisted on dropping out (which, thankfully, my parents allowed).
Well thanks for your comments, it was an interesting essay and you said a lot of interesting things. This subject isn't directly personal for me, but I am very concerned about ROGD, its obvious social contagion and how society is dealing with it (not very well at the moment).
Steven, as another child who grew up around the same time as you, my observation concords with yours in that the meaning of "giftedness" seemed to change during the period of our childhood. I can think of several social factors that fed into that change, principally among them the sense of pressure that requisite college enrollment puts on parents. Before the manufacturing decline in America, a perfectly fine middle-class life was available to people who didn't go to college. In that context, gifted kids were just weird and mostly nobody cared; that's how I grew up.
Once the only road to a secure future seemed to be college placement and academic achievement, middle-class parents felt themselves under great pressure to increase their kids' chances. At that time, separate gifted tracks (with more capacity than the odd pull-out period I encountered) started to be created, for example in NYC. The first gifted classes in NYC were started in 1973, in forty schools, beginning in Kindergarten. You can bet there was a rush among wealthy parents on the Upper East Side to get their kids ready and get their kids tested, to enter those programs.
Creation of public school based programs with greater resources than the general population is an example of a shift from "gifted" kids being oddballs who weren't particularly doted upon to "gifted" kids being the thing wealthy people had to turn their kids into, or miss out. This also played out in private schools, which drastically upped their academic game during the period. Before the 80s, fancy boarding schools did a good job with academics, but paid much more attention to sports and culture - when I visited some in 1982, they were much more interested in my height than my IQ. Now they offer dozens of math classes past the second year of Calculus. To get to them, you have to have been accelerated in math at a younger age, i.e. identified as "gifted."
Thanks for your comments, all makes sense and aligns with my personal experience and wider observations. As you say, in my elementary school (which was public but located in affluent catchments) in the 1970s any of what we would now call gifted kids would have been considered oddballs, basically. There were a couple of kids in the school who had skipped grades (including one whose parents were European and who forced the kid to play the violin - which he constantly dragged around with him), but they usually suffered by being social outcasts in some way (they were maybe a little less socially mature). In my single class cohort at the school, there were two so-called brains (I was one, the other was a female classmate) but we were never considered 'gifted'. Today we might be.
This is very odd, I would suspect that liberal women are considerably more nurturing than conservative ones.
It has not been my observation that liberal women are on average more nurturing than conservative women, nor does any evidence support this. Research does support that liberals (both men and women) are more likely to care about "out-groups", but that doesn't translate to a higher level of nurturing towards one's own children. If I had to guess, I suspect there's a curvilinear relationship, with moderate and apolitical women being more "nurturing" on average than women on the far left or far right. This is in part because ideological thinking (seen on the far ends of the political spectrum) would be more typical of left hemisphere dominance, and the RH is the nurturer. As well, it is increasingly becoming apparent that highly cerebral / career-focussed women struggle a bit more with motherhood, and more of these women would fall to the left.
But what I said above is that conservatives are more family-oriented, i.e. more likely to live closer to extended family and have more children. Extended family is protective against family dysfunction and low maternal nurturance. And liberals are more likely to live in cities, and city life is worse for mental health for a variety of reasons (lack of easy access to nature and exposure to air pollution, for example). It's certainly complicated.
Just to clarify something, because from both your comments I'm not sure you picked up on this ... I've identified as being on the LEFT for most of my life, and was active in the feminist literary community until 2019. Now I'm politically homeless; I've never been a conservative. I'm also not "neurotypical" in any sense of the word, and was the weirdly-good-at-math kind of "gifted" kid.
Yes, an excellent read. Thank you.
I was officially diagnosed as gifted in fifth grade, and was in the gifted track throughout junior high and high school. But this was in the 1970s.
I have a son who is even smarter than me, and he just came out as transgender at age 16. One factor to consider is the world of gaming, especially online social gaming where one can create an online persona untethered from one’s physical body. My son has always had a lack of interest in the physical world, and has been much more interested in ideas, math, abstractions, and gaming. Gamers jokingly refer to interacting with nature as “touching grass”.
Yes! I tried to cover this (albeit briefly, the essay already being too long) when I discussed the distinction between a "cold development" / "upbringing" from "cold parenting" and factors that would shift brain development more toward the left hemisphere and mechanistic cognition (in particular under the subheading "Excess time spent in LH-dominant and/or mechanistic activities." A key point here, which your comment highlights, is that this is often directed by the CHILD.
I don't know enough about the gaming world to write about it, but I did write an essay about excessive reading in childhood making a person more "left hemisphere dominant" and "autistic", and a lot of what I wrote there would apply to excessive gaming too. (I recognize gaming would be more complicated, e.g. gaming can develop hand-eye coordination and spatial skills and can involve more social interaction, depending on the game etc as well as the ability to create literal avatars, as you mention).
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part
As I'm sure you know, cells that fire together wire together. The more we do an activity, the more our brain becomes wired for it. The more we use parts of our brains, the stronger they get. And the more we neglect parts of our brains, the more difficulty it becomes to use those parts.
I guess I'm of the opinion that if your child is reluctant to "touch grass", it's a good idea to drag them outside and make them do it anyway. (I know it's not always that easy).
Something I haven't looked into / there doesn't seem to be much information about, is the possibility that people who are more "intelligent" (distinct concept from "IQ") also have more brain plasticity, i.e. the ability to form new brain connections faster. If this is the case, then highly intelligent children and teenagers would be more vulnerable to things like video game addictions, because their brains would rewire to the game much quicker than normal children. The same could apply to ideologies ... if this makes any sense? As I said, it's not something I have any supporting evidence for, more a speculation.
This is an interesting article and while parts of it made me thoughtful others made me very uncomfortable. You seem to be pathologizing many ways of being that are perfectly fine for both the individual and society.
Isn’t a very logical explanation for gender and sexuality prevalence that autistic people feel very little peer pressure and desire to conform (makes life difficult in school but also potentially great benefits to society.)Therefore they more accurately label their own feelings about gender and sexuality instead of instinctively suppressing them to fit in?
Additionally, I personally know autistic girls whose spiky gifts lie entirely in the verbal realm with no STEM gifts or interest. In your world view presentation it doesn’t seem that they should happen.
I’m more a fan of the “too many neurons” and “step by step analysis versus instinctive generalization/stereotyping” as the underlying descriptor in autism.
(1) What "ways of being" am I pathologizing that are "fine" for the individual? Throughout this entire essay I am speaking about people who are experiencing some sort of mental distress. I was very clear that this essay does not apply to all autistic people, all gifted people, or all transgender people, and CERTAINLY not to all gender non-conforming people, as I noted that positive androgyny is associated with BETTER mental health. I'm not pathologizing anything, I'm examining a sub-group that appears to be in significant distress, with the desire to understand and help.
(2) Autistic people are actually MORE vulnerable to radical ideologies (which require high conformity) than allistic people. Look it up. I've noticed a high degree of conformity within autistic online spaces, including harassment / exclusion / anger at autistic people who challenge the prevailing opinions. The whole concept of autistic "masking" is that autistic people deliberately conform to what they think will gain them acceptance. I've observed that while autistic activists seem to think allistic people are more "conformist" and similar to each other, that is not the case. There's really no such thing as a "neurotypical" mind. All brains are different, all people are different. Evidence is overwhelming that autistic people are less gender-conforming (less naturally masculine or feminine), but they seem to readily conform to the queer mainstream.
(3) Actually, autistic girls having spiky skills in the verbal realm doesn't conflict with anything I'm saying in this essay; the evidence I present would actually predict that. I debunk the "extreme male brain" theory, and point out that autism is associated with left hemisphere dominance: reading and writing are quintessential left hemisphere dominant tasks.
(4) It's actually more local connectivity in autism, less global connectivity! But in the gifted/autism overlap I'm examining here we're probably looking at overactive brains. But this is just a sub-group. I agree with you re step by step analysis (left brain logical, bottom-up, mechanistic thinking) versus instinctive generalization (right brain gut feelings). However, both types of thinking are valuable. Autistic people are less likely to stereotype and exhibit prejudice, which is a strength; however, this also makes them more vulnerable to being taken advantage of and to falling for lies / deception.