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Rodey316
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24 Jun 2015, 11:26 am

This question just came to my mind. Now, this is going to sound horrible, and I want to make it clear that this is NOT a good idea for an experiment whatsoever to try. This is only a hypothetical scenario to ponder.
What would happen if a newborn baby with a neurotypical wired brain was placed in an environment that was constructed to be very overwhelming, not damaging, but overwhelming to the senses and REMAINED there for a few years? Would the NT child fall behind developmentally and be qualified for a neurodevelopmental disorder? To make matters even more interesting, what if as the child gets older, there were other children sent to the environment who developed "normally" but they were hired as actors to engage in repetitive behaviors like hand flapping in front of the experimented NT child? Let's say that somehow these hired NT child actors found some way to not get overwhelmed by the stimuli of the environment (maybe they're wearing unique headphones to blot out excessive noise) so they don't feel the sensory overwhelm which the experimented NT child feels. Bottom line, would the experimented NT child (we're talking like 6-7 years old) be convinced that these behaviors are "typical" of a person and thus, would acquire the repetitive behaviors?
Also, what if these NT actors wore very realistic masks over their faces (looking 100% like their own faces) which illustrated an expression that does not appropriately correspond to how they're actually feeling at the moment? Then, the NT experimented child would likely lose a lot of understanding of human emotions and nonverbal communication.
Would this NT child become autistic even with a NT wired brain from birth? This is basically testing if some characteristics of autism can potentially be acquired instead of "programmed" from birth.



kraftiekortie
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24 Jun 2015, 12:00 pm

As far as actually developing autism is concerned, I think the answer would depend on whether or not the person is pre-disposed in a genetic sense towards developing autism.

A predisposition means that a person is more likely to develop a condition than the general population. It does not mean the person will definitely develop the condition.



Skilpadde
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24 Jun 2015, 12:32 pm

No, the kid wouldn't develop a differently wired brain. Some NTs are sensitive to sound (my grandfather definitely wasn't aspie, but he was extremely sensitive to sound and he always had been; he even complained that his parents music was too loud when he was a child), and not all aspies are sensitive to sounds and lights (I'm not; my only sensory issues are being particular about food and being extremely bothered by heat and warm weather).
There is a disorder called Sensory Processing Disorder that will give that effect, so no, the NT kid wouldn't develop autism.

You also mentioned stims. NTs can stim if under-stimulated and neglected, like the scenes we saw from Romanian orphanages when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989/1990.


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kraftiekortie
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24 Jun 2015, 12:43 pm

Stims occur in many developmental disorders.



SocOfAutism
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24 Jun 2015, 1:21 pm

This reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode The Eye of the Beholder about the people with the pig faces who were trying to "correct" the face of the beautiful woman. They were gentle and kind and trying to help her...to basically become a terrible monsterface like them.

Um, there are many ways of answering your questions. YES your brain "wiring" changes if you are given different influences. Feral children, for example, are not able to behave normally if they miss crucial human socialization during their first few years. My guess is that your figurative baby would grow to act like a feral child.

Another way of answering your question is that NO, no matter what, you could not turn a non-autistic person into an autistic person, not truly. Autistic people are a social minority group, not just based on biological similarities, but on observable behavior, subjective descriptions of internal states, and other things. We all agree that autistic people are "autistic" and that's WHY they are.

There used to be a condition call hysteria that many women suffered. It was observable, treatable, people who had it could describe their internal states and they were similar to other people with hysteria. But it doesn't exist anymore. There are conditions in some countries that don't exist in others. There is no autism in Papa New Guinea. Why? I'm willing to bet that if anyone in PNG heard of autism it would be dismissed as an outside world condition.