Uriah

If you have autistic relatives, you might be curious how this kind of growth spillover actually leads to autism. My stance is that much of autism qualifies as “precocious depression”, in which normal depressive symptoms occur so early as to become fixed.

Depression and autism are both characterized by low levels of brain blood flow; from a certain fmri point of view autism doesn’t look _like_ depression it looks like it IS depression, but depression that begins at an abnormally early point in development.

When people become depressed they undergo mental declines in areas like psychomotor speed and episodic memory for real events that sometimes outlast the depression by months. The decline in memory leads to a kind of self-centered rumination reminiscent of autism.

Hopefully that makes sense, but what’s much more baffling is how exactly autism would be associated with high intelligence, likely having something to do with their overgrown frontal lobes.

Autistics have large, impressive looking frontal lobes, but autism is in many ways actually reminiscent of the executive dysfunction and avolition of people who have suffered frontal lobe damage. It's possible there are just too many cells.

A solution to the problem might be glimpsed by looking at childhood prodigies, among whom autism in close relatives is much more common than among the general population. https://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ruthsatz-Urbach-2012.pdf …. The world’s greatest mathematician, Terence Tao, has a severely autistic brother

The autistic frontal lobe can be compared to a huge ceremonial sword a man keeps on his wall. It looks powerful, but if he actually tries to swing it he fails so miserably he’d be better off with his fists. But if the right, rare person came along to pick it up.....

I do think, though, that the autistic frontal lobe is evidence of an isolated mental superiority. The frontal lobe’s role in working memory, in blocking the sensory interference of the outside world, interacts with episodic memory deficits to produce a kind of blindness.

One of the few conditions that competes with tuberous sclerosis in its autism overlap is congenital blindness: nearly half of children born blind have autistic symptoms and this group also produces prodigies at a greatly elevated rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693122/pdf/12639331.pdf …

Autistics often seem to be half-blind, unable to track what’s happening around them. You might ask them to pick up an object on the other side of the room and see them scanning desperately trying to identify something five feet away.

I once saw a very smart autistic kid waiting in a lunch line with a look of deep concentration on his face. A cook put a cupcake on his tray and waited for him to leave, which he didn’t, eventually asking politely: “Uh, can I get my cupcake?” He hadn’t seen it.

Of all the autistics I have ever met this particular kid had the best memory, a genuine prodigy. The autistic deficit in their awareness of the real world is in part a pure defect related to depression, but it’s also the result of a genuinely superior ability to focus attention.