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.....