Parents provide clues to autism
The Autism News | English
Are you and your partner graduates and prepared to answer a few online questions about your children? If so, Simon Baron-Cohen would like to hear from you.
One of the country’s foremost researchers into the causes of autism, Professor Baron-Cohen wants to know what kind of degree you hold. If you are both graduates in the so-called hard sciences, such as engineering and computer science, then you may end up being of particular interest. The reason is that parents who are both “systemisers”, as he describes them, appear more likely to have autistic children.
Systemisers are lovers of precision, people who are good at analysing how things work and discerning patterns. Ideal material for code-breaking activities. Current thinking suggests we all sit somewhere on a scale of systemising. At one end are people who have little or no drive to be precise when confronted with structured information – political spin doctors might be an example – and at the other are hyper-systemisers, those whose obsession with analysis and dissection borders on the autistic.
“If two parents are both systemisers, are they more likely to have a child with autism?” asks Prof Baron-Cohen, who leads a research team at Cambridge University. “That is what we want to find out. Doing it online should provide us with a huge data set.” In the survey, parents who are graduates are asked for their degree, occupation and some information about their child. Couples who are both scientists will be contrasted with those couples in which just one partner, or neither, is a scientist. Prof Baron-Cohen stresses that there is no need for “geeky” couples to start panicking about starting a family – but evidence of a link is building.
A quarter of a century ago we knew hardly anything about autism, a strange and often distressing condition in which people display an inability to form social relationships. Locked away inside themselves, obsessed with minutiae – the position of a cup on a coffee table, for example – they can be oblivious to those who cherish them.
A distressing aspect of autism can be the gradual realisation by parents that a seemingly normal child is, in a very subtle way, different. The earliest signs are easy to miss, but by the age of 18 months the social world is becoming more challenging and the features of autism more pronounced. In a rare sub-group of children, social skills previously acquired are lost, but in most cases it is assumed that the child possesses a genetic predisposition towards autism which takes a couple of years to manifest itself.
“People with autism can cope with the physical world because it is more predictable,” explains Prof Baron-Cohen. “Unexplained changes – a sudden gesture – they don’t like it. Their blindness, if you call it that, is about people: when you see another person, there is not just a face but a mind behind the face. A typical child or adult can imagine what is going on in another person’s mind, but people with autism see only the outward appearance. A lot of people with autism say they feel as though they come from Mars. Human behaviour is largely or completely incomprehensible to them.
“Another part of their make-up is that they go into things very deeply – they don’t do superficial. When we socialise, we are often chatting, not going too deeply into things. A person with autism often picks a single topic and follows it as far as they can: ‘What mobile phone have you got? What are its functions and how is it different to this other model?’ And on and on.”
We now know that autism has something to do with differently routed circuitry in the brain which is at least partly genetic in origin. First described in the 1940s, autism was classed a behavioural problem, the province of psychology, but is now claimed by neuroscience and the MRI scanner. By the 1990s it was clear that boys were more at risk of developing autism than girls, and that the condition may represent a kind of hyper-maleness in the functioning of the brain.
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