Is WP attracting too many of the wrong people

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I'll give that outside influence to age 5. At 5 you are very much the you that is now. There is evidence that working with them up to this young age will make differences. But how much, and how could one accurately delineate this?

I'm thinking of that Bell shaped curve. To me it seems counterintuitive that 3.5 billion are below the curve due to upbringing, as being the significant factor vs. hardwired factors, including personality. I seems to be reversed to me.

There is some convincing evidence that this can be impacted after five. It has a lot to do with environment - home, school, etc. This doesn't mean intelligence has no genetic component, but it does mean that it's not a strictly definitive thing that can't ever change.

I think it's too easy to swing either way, though: It becomes all environment despite significant evidence to the contrary or it becomes all genetics despite significant evidence to the contrary. The answer probably lies somewhere in genetics, environment, neuroplasticity and epigenetics.

Inclined to agree with Verdandi. Government support in Australia for autism "early intervention" lasts until the year you turn 7.
Even after that there's plenty of cases where functionality improved in teenage years and beyond. I read about a 30 year old university graduate who actually started speaking at 21, prior to that his psychologist described his case as hopeless.

So much for life long labels......

We're always changing. I am NOT the person I was when I was five. The foundation is still there (which is why the early years are the most important and thus parents are the primary influence), but I've been building upon it over the past 20 years.

Like I said, genetics do play a part, but environment is much more important.

That's the lowest count I've ever seen. Maybe only .02% are severely autistic, but I know all but for a fact the number for AS is higher than that.

Like 1 in 38

/trollface

(a few in 1000 might be, say, 4 in 1000, AKA 1 in 250, which were the old estimates for AS)

I want to try to say one thing, which is off the main point. (On the main point, I've never had any clear thoughts about how intelligence or IQ is determined by nature or nurture, although I could say something about how IQ only measures a component of intelligence, and anyway, personal attributes, including intelligence, can't literally be "measured", as if people were things - IQ is more accurately comparable to ranking in some kind of sport or game, and we all know how many personal and interpersonal factors can influence that kind of thing, including a simple lack of interest in playing the game.)

I'm always amazed when people talk of the influence of a family environment as if it were like some kind of uniform radiation which shone alike on all the children! We all know perfectly well (don't we?) that a family is an extraordinarily complex living system, which incorporates all the individual characteristics of the parents (and of course not just their genes, but we all agree on that), in a mysterious way, and in its turn acts in mysterious ways to form the individual characters of the children. Each member of the family has a role to play, and character is as much determined by role as role is by character (a word which can even mean a role).

I don't have an axe to grind, either about the narrowness of IQ as a "measure" of intelligence, or about nurture as an influence on either IQ or intelligence. I just want to point out that "environment" or "nurture" (or the opposite of nurture, abuse) is as unique and unrepeatable thing as individual character, and it is an absurd oversimplification to imagine that children in the same family all have the same "environment" or "nurture" - so absurd that I actually cannot imagine how anybody even entertains such an idea for an instant, and I would quite appreciate an explanation how it is possible to think such a thing!

Yes, of course a family has an individual "character" of its own, which is shared by all its members (I have quite a strong sense of what my own family "character" is like, I don't much like it, and I hate having to admit that I share it), but internally it is very dynamic and ridden with conflicts, and individual members of the family all play different roles, sometimes vastly different, and it is these very distinct individual roles, not the family character as a whole, which constitute the true "environment" for each child. [Edited for awkward grammar!]

(Excuse me if I'm frothing at the mouth a bit! Although I'm against simplistic views of the influence of families, and I don't have an axe to grind about IQ not measuring all of intelligence, I do have very strong feelings about all of these matters.)

I'm not sure what point you are critiquing here.

Just a few thoughts on cognitive abilities:

From conventional wisdom: IQ is a metric to measure cognitive ability in relation to your peers. It measures a selection of different abilities on the test gauged against your peers.

It certainly isn't the panacea in determining life outcomes, but does indicate a strong correlation with this.

I believe our intersests or choices in life is at least partially determined by our abilities, or one showing a lack thereof in something indicates an inabilty.

It's (cognition) alterable, but not significantly. One can't become a genius by will power.

(I must leave to work)

The only thing that bothers me is when someone looks up Aspergers and goes "hey, I have trouble being social, I must be autistic!! !!" They don't understand the distress of change, sensory issues (The worst IMO), blank mind when trying to think or say something, not understanding social things. I am not diagnosed but am clear as day when it comes to every symptom besides clumsiness, and I would never claim to be autistic without seeing a professional first (even though IMO, I clearly am).

Language delays.

I heard that these folks can develope later on in life, and even fare better than a Asperger's Dx.

But I suppose there are isolated cases improvement here too.

Yeah I agree there. There is so much ignorance. I sometimes have things going through my mind about what I must have I will never claim to have them without a doctor telling me so.

Yeah, I agree that there is a bit of a misunderstanding when it comes to the social aspect of AS, but on that same note, I think it's also kind of hard to understand the criteria and symptoms when you first learn about AS. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that you can't really understand that you don't understand something. I didn't think I was bad at reading faces, for instance, because I understood when people looked happy or sad on TV. Then I took the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test along with my sister, and was amazed at how differently we looked at things.

You know, considering we've got this awesome community going on here, I think it might be a good idea if we made a thread for those who are new to AS (and one for Autism and PDD-NOS too!). We could take each symptom and break it down with our own personal experiences, so people could have a bunch of different examples of the symptoms all in the same organized space. The trouble with someone providing an example of what makes them on the spectrum is that they tend to be so specific and geared to a single individual's experience. If we had a collection of lots of examples that provided insight into the full spectrum of people on the spectrum, it could cut down on a lot of the confusion, I think.

However, on the other hand, I think that it is possible that not all people here who think they have AS without a diagnosis do. (Not to point fingers, or anything like that, I just think that the odds are that some people could be wrong in their self diagnosis. I'm incredibly open to the possibility that I am wrong about my own self-diagnosis, just because I know that self-diagnosis can be such a tricky thing.) If such a thing were to be organized, someone might need to moderate the information posted, just to cut down on further misinformation. Doing such a thing could be tricky.

double post! : (

Last edited by mori_pastel on 12 May 2011, 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That sounds like a splendid idea.

(Come to think of it, I suggested the same thing in the Usenet newsgroup alt.support.autism last year, but traffiic was very low, and there were no replies.)

Think so? Might start something up then. : D Especially if something like that hasn't been done here before.

I am not sure current evidence supports this. There's evidence that both play a role and are important, but I have not come across anything that says that environment is paramount.