And commentary on article
Yeah, I’ve seen that study and others like it recently. It is quite
amazing how far and how fast the genetic and body/mind linkage to autism and
related neurological “conditions” has come in just the last 12-18 months or so.
Once high-level research institutions like the NIH (National Institute of
Health) stepped in because of how badly the APA (American Psychological
Association) fucked up their autism classifications the scientific progress has
been tremendous.
The study below is only marginally related to most of the recent
work that is beginning to really understand how the human brain works. It isn’t
that autism really matters to many people because it doesn’t and it is not the
kind of “health problem” that impacts any nation near as much as blood pressure,
cancer, or just being a fat and angry nation (FAN). But, they are learning so
much about how different brain types works and how this plays into behavioral
traits and how to a certain degree that epigenetic factors (environmental
influences and “soft” factors of causation) dictate outcomes. The brain-gut
link is pretty well known because of how many neurons we have in our stomachs.
What they are saying in this paper is that if you can make the stomach
healthier and better balanced it literally changes other symptoms. Same for
anxiety issues – studies find that blood pressure lowering meds actually feed
back into the body-mind relationship and help reduce mental pain for many
people.
It is clear already that there will be no real definition for “high
functioning” autism coming in future years because it is so wide-spread in the
population. One recent study finds that key “autism-related” DNA duplication
errors seem to have something to do with how our prefrontal cortex got big in
the first place. They will find that autism traits are human traits. No cure
for that….
Just picked up one of the weighted blankets (pretty heavy at twelve
pounds) that I’ve read about for a while – the pressure is supposed to help
with sleep. Last night was the first I got to try it and I’ll say that it
worked. It is hard to toss and turn when you are pinned down! Woke up rested
for first time in months maybe. In my effigy mound manifesto I introduce a new
term that I call “Embodied cognitive functionalism”; some recent anthropological
work draws the conclusion that our mind and the way we think is highly
correlated with what we think. This helps us travel into the past and figure
out with some certainty what people were thinking and feeling at a certain
location (a high bluff mound site for instance) at some point in history. Lots
of neat things happening on the cognitive front
