New APPS

Nice article here about Henry Markram's theoy of autism as "intense world syndrome," which entails that:

The behavior that results is not due to cognitive deficits—the prevailing view in autism research circles today—but the opposite, they say. Rather than being oblivious, autistic people take in too much and learn too fast. While they may appear bereft of emotion, the Markrams insist they are actually overwhelmed not only by their own emotions, but by the emotions of others.

Consequently, the brain architecture of autism is not just defined by its weaknesses, but also by its inherent strengths. The developmental disorder now believed to affect around 1 percent of the population is not characterized by lack of empathy, the Markrams claim. Social difficulties and odd behavior result from trying to cope with a world that’s just too much.

The article has a nice contrast between Markram's theory and the traditional account, which got off the ground by misinterpreting the infamous Sally/Anne puppet experiments (experiments that philosophers made so much out of during the "theory of mind" versus "simulation" debates a decade or so ago):

The most prominent theory suggests that autism results from problems with the brain’s social regions, which results in a deficit of empathy. This “theory of mind” concept was developed by Uta Frith, Alan Leslie, and Simon Baron-Cohen in the 1980s. They found that autistic children are late to develop the ability to distinguish between what they know themselves and what others know—something that other children learn early on.

It also describes how, unlike Baron-Cohen's theory, Markram's theory accommodates four facts: (1) autistics do not lack empathy by the normal meaning of the word, and in fact are often demonstrably more sensitive to other human's emotional states (the overintepretation of the Sally/Anne tests to miss this has led to clinical treatment, media portrayals, and social stigma of autistics that range from the merely unhelpful to sadistic), (2) non-autistic family members of autistics are often hypersensitive, (3) our neurological understanding of hyper-sensitive rats exposed in utero to valproic acid (VPA), their brain structures, and how they act like human autistics, (4) the role of VPA ingestion among human mothers in increasing the chance of autistic offspring. On the latter:

After all, the problem with VPA rats isn’t that they can’t learn—it’s that they learn too quickly, with too much fear, and irreversibly.

They thought back to Kai’s  experiences: how he used to cover his ears and resist going to the movies, hating the loud sounds; his limited diet and apparent terror of trying new foods.

“He remembers exactly where he sat at exactly what restaurant one time when he tried for hours to get himself to eat a salad,” Kamila says, recalling that she’d promised him something he’d really wanted if he did so. Still, he couldn’t make himself try even the smallest piece of lettuce. That was clearly overgeneralization of fear.

The Markrams reconsidered Kai’s meltdowns, too, wondering if they’d been prompted by overwhelming experiences. They saw that identifying Kai’s specific sensitivities preemptively might prevent tantrums by allowing him to leave upsetting situations or by mitigating his distress before it became intolerable. The idea of an intense world had immediate practical implications.

Anyhow, the whole article is really interesting, especially the manner in which Markram's theory fits so much better with the experiences of parents of kids on the spectrum and the self-reporting of high functioning autistics like Temple Grandin. Grandin's Animals in Translation came out in January of 2006. My impression is that it hasn't been until the dissemination of Markram's research starting in 2007 that people are starting to grant the self-reporting of Grandin and others with the seriousness it deserves. Though maybe Grandin's high visibility made the psychological community more receptive to Markram's ideas.

If this is the case, the only analogue I can think of is how (as recounted in Syliva Nasar's A Beautiful Mind) John Nash's receiving of the Nobel Prize overturned decades of accepted wisdom about schizophrenia. Since the only people being studied were those still in the mental health system, psychologists were unaware of the large percentage of cases where many of the symptoms went into remission and as a result had thought that the disease was degenerative. After the Nobel Prize speech, some clinicians listened to what Nash had to say about his experience of the disease and actually went back and started doing epidemiological research on schizophrenics who had left the mental health system.

Anyhow, this strikes me as two canonical victories for naturalized phenomenology, as the phrase was intended by Fransesco Varela.