Is AS a personality?

topaz wrote:I was being somewhat facetious... I don't think of myself as having a disorder.

This subject is something I am familiar with for a number of reasons but I don't like to apply it to myself.

a dangerous cocktail of words there, topaz. i've been on the receiving end of the PD label. it still makes my blood boil. to me a PD is nurture (psychology) not nature (psychiatry). and AS is most assuredly nature. we are different and those differences provide for strengths and weaknesses. why we have to drag 'personality' and 'disorder' into this is quite simply beyond me!!!

shock_the_monkey wrote: and AS is most assuredly nature. we are different and those differences provide for strengths and weaknesses. why we have to drag 'personality' and 'disorder' into this is quite simply beyond me!!!

Well personality yes, just not disorder. Just another personality type, like so many others was the gist of my OP. The OP states clearly that according to them personality is nature at base with a little nurture thrown in.

Hey Shock,

I was referring more to a personality type than a disorder. When I am at rock bottom, I must admit that I tend to think of AS as being a 'disorder' but the majority of the time it just makes me feel 'different.'

Petrossa: For a phenomenological argument it was fairly uplifting. It is as plausible as anything else I have read on the subject. I know I have improved over time which would tie in with their hypothesis.

If I could ensure anonymity and security I would jump at the chance to have my brain scanned - would love to see what is going on in there.

topaz wrote:
If I could ensure anonymity and security I would jump at the chance to have my brain scanned - would love to see what is going on in there.

Don't, you'll never know what comes out I had a simple mri scan and they found a malformed clump of arteries in my head. Must have had it since birth, but now i'm worried about it exploding.

Hey Petrossa, have you seen the Britsh press today? Look up the Independent front page news brain scans for autism + sorry can't send you the link this phone does not allow me to do anything. Interesting story about the adult asperger who took the test...

Tnx Topaz. I looked and read it. Mmmm. Not convinced. In fact, in the 'yet another wild claim' department.

They did scans on 20 people, not what you'd say a representative group:
Ecker's team carried out MRI scans on the brains of 20 adult males with autism, 20 with attention-deficit disorder and 20 healthy controls. They used a machine-learning tool called a support vector machine (SVM) – which analyses data and identifies patterns – to identify key differences between the groups, such as in the cortical folding and curvature of the brain.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... utism.html

fMRI in general is just about adequate for identifying oxygen oxidation in a rather haphazard way. Way too many variables that can mess it up. To deduce high order processes from it is more beauty in the eye of the beholder then anything close to realistic. Maybe in another decade it's refined enough. At the current state of affairs it's very unreliable.

How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?
Craig M. Bennett and Michael B. Miller
Department of Psychology, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106

General Conclusions
One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons of investigation to scientists around the world. However, the results from fMRI research may be somewhat less reliable than many researchers implicitly believe. While it may be frustrating to know that fMRI results are not perfectly replicable, it is beneficial to take a longer-term view regarding the scientific impact of these studies. In neuroimaging, as in other scientific fields, errors will be made and some results will not replicate. Still, over time some measure of truth will accrue. This chapter is not intended to be an accusation against fMRI as a method. Quite the contrary, it is meant to increase the understanding of how much each fMRI result can contribute to scientific knowledge. If only 30% of the significant voxels in a cluster will replicate then that value represents an important piece of contextual information to be aware of. Likewise, if the magnitude of a voxel is only reliable at a level of ICC = 0.50 then that value represents important information when examining scatter plots comparing estimates of activity against a behavioral measure.
There are a variety of methods that can be used to evaluate reliability, and each can provide information on unique aspects of the results. Our findings speak strongly to the question of why there is no agreed-upon average value for fMRI reliability. There are so many factors spread out across so many levels of influence that it is almost impossible to summarize the reliability of fMRI with a single value.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1828618/fmri-reliabilty.pdf

and this is a funny one:
Everything you never wanted to know about circular analysis, but were afraid to ask

Over the past year, a heated discussion about ‘circular’ or ‘nonindependent’ analysis in brain imaging has emerged in the literature. An analysis is circular (or nonindependent) if it is based on data that were selected for showing the effect of interest or a related effect. The authors of this paper are researchers who have contributed to the discussion and span a range of viewpoints. To clarify points of agreement and disagreement in the community, we collaboratively assembled a series of questions on circularity herein, to which we provide our individual current answers in 100 words per question. Although divergent views remain on some of the questions, there is also a substantial convergence of opinion, which we have summarized in a consensus box. The box provides the best current answers that the five authors could agree upon.


or this one is hilarious, a dead salmon recognizes facial expressions:

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... -fish.html