Autism Linked To Mirror Neuron Dysfunction
Science Daily — Seeing is doing -- at least it is when mirror neurons are working normally. But in autistic individuals, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the brain circuits that enable people to perceive and understand the actions of others do not behave in the usual way.
So is it becoming more common or more commonly diagnosed
Mind Hacks has this. on schizophrenia
In other words, very little can be said with certainty. Any definition that finishes with the ominous "This may not be a single entity" suggests we really don't understand much about the associated experiences.So why does the argument over schizophrenia persist?
Mainly because the medical and legal systems are far more comfortable with cut-and-dry "you have it or you don't" conditions than ones in which you might have a bit of this and a bit of that.
This is often due to the fact that the medical and legal systems have to make cut and dry decisions. To treat or not to treat, to detain or not to detain, and so on. These decisions become a lot easier when the supporting information is as simple as possible.
It also becomes a lot easier to market treatments for specific disorders. In fact, in many countries, drugs can only be licensed for specific disorders.
So, no diagnosis means that there's no way of getting drugs licensed. This is why pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in supporting the concept of schizophrenia.
In other words, the usefulness of the diagnosis of schizophrenia rests not only upon the supporting medical research, but also on its social function
Madness Explained reviewed here covers this in great detail.
which concludes with a metaphoric description of various mental health professionals
Madness is like being at the wheel of a car that you don't know how to drive on the streets of an unfamiliar city. A psychologist is someone who will look under the bonnet to show you how the bits and pieces seem to connect. A psychotherapist is someone who can point out the traffic jams but may also lose you down a dark narrow street where you end up in a ditch. Psychiatrists are like those men in tow trucks. They can fill the tank with chemicals, they can pull you out of the ditch and sometimes the conversation in the cab on the way home can be surprisingly enjoyable. And they love to turn on those flashing lights...
Madness Explained is a very interesting book. Well worth a read and cast our digital desires in an interesting light.
Watching Newsnight on BBC2 while feeding the baba I saw a piece on Paul Davies who's written a book called "The Goldilocks enigma"
He mentions the problem of infinite regress during the interview. I first heard of this quite a long time ago from one of my best friends in secondary school. Its called "Turtles all the way down"
The story goes ...
"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. "At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." "The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
I was thinking about this again this evening., in light of Paul Davies. The question for science being - where do the laws of physics come from. With the answer from religion being that they come from god. The problem is the next question I want answered is where does god come from ? To my mind all the proposition of god adds is one more level of regress without answering any of the questions.
The friend of mine who introduced me to this and much interesting thinking was http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Cleary/">Kieran Cleary who is now working on understanding the early universe.
Now that really is mind expanding.