New Israeli Autism Database

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Israel ramps up autism research, helps find new ASD subset

I didn't know about the database, but I've been at their labs in Ben Gurion Uni and it's impressive what equipment they've got there. I've got a friend who's a PhD candidate and researches Autism in that uni. He enlisted me to participate in 2 tests (cause free money, why not?). One of the tests was related to visual perception amongst people with autism . I underwent a couple of tests that required me to spot patterns and difference in color saturation (alpha) while wearing a helmet full of electrodes (forgot how its called) which prints brainwaves and such. Pretty impressive stuff. I hope they come up with interesting conclusions at the end.

What I would personally like to know about in the Autism research field is how is auditory perception in autistics is compared to the general population and why is absolute hearing (which I have for example) so much more common in autistics rather than NTs (IIRC 3 times as much!). I know it relates to the ability to recall and memorize, but still, there is not such thing as a coincidence. I wanna know how and why do autistics excel at that ability, and what else is different between the musical/audio perception of autistics vs NT and what we can learn from that regarding Autism, and maybe musical education as well.

yeah, recognizing the note played without a given reference, unlike relative pitch recognition which is what "ear training" aims to develop. Strangely enough, I (and several other people with absolute hearing) seem to be preplexed as to how hard it is for people without the ability to learn it - and frankly this is nearly impossible to develop after a very young age. Which leaves musicians who'd want to improve their hearing to work on their relative hearing - a skill that can be achieved by almost anyone with the right effort and motivation.

Some autistics can recall dates and historic events instantly with pinpoint accuracy. Autistic Daniel Tammet memorized 22,514 digits of pie in under 5 hours (and it took several people to check after him - he was dead right of course). These abilities in my opinion are definitely connected to the ability to memorize and recall exactly what the note/chord/scale is once heard, every single time.

My mother had perfect pitch. She also talked about how the experience of listening to music transposed into a different key sounded different to her.

I can barely hear relative pitches.

I shall continue to ignore Israel until they recognize Palestinians as fully human.