Baffled that CT scan, MRI scan, and EEG scan are all normal?

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Are you baffled when diagnosed with autism or Asperger's or ADHD and find that the CT scan is normal, the MRI scan is normal, the EEG scan is normal, and all blood work is normal? How scientific are the fields of:

Autism?
Asperger's?
ADHD?
Dyslexia?
CAPD (central auditory processing disorder)?

and so on?

Insights? Experiences?

No.

There are some advanced imaging techniques that are showing some differences in autistic brains. But standard tests show nothing.

It's not surprising at all. Excluding the more severe cases, the typical (if there is such a thing) person with an ASD can do 99.99% of the things that anybody else can. There really are very few differences. There is impaired social functioning. There is obsessive behavior. There are a handful of symptoms, but nothing that you can really point to as definitive.

They are doing good research. Its just that most of our tools can only tell us about the structure of the brain, not the not the way that the brain functions. fMRI has shown some very interesting anomalies, but ultimately, we simply don't have the tools to properly understand the function of the brain. Hopefully, as people continue to develop new tools, our understanding will improve.

Ditto that. It is not like this has been the object of intensive research for centuries.

Science takes time - and workers.

It's on its way.

Link

I have a adnormal EEG but I do not have epilepsy. it is not adnormal in a way that looks like epilespy. i have adnormal bursts of activity acros all my brain that look like full brain sezers but apear to have no afect on me. my body just lays still and I am stil consious.

brain scans scare me. It seems as if everything is deterministic (

from my understanding of physics it would never be completely determanistic.

bar the discovery of a TOE

Current medicine and brain scanning technology is only really good for gross anomalies like brain tumors, ruptured blood vessels, stroke, gross electrical problems (seizure), and bruises, and such. There are veterans from Iraq who have been close to explosions and had the shock wave disrupt the microscopic connections in their brains, but they are getting told their problems are psychological because their brain scans look normal (and some of them look pretty obviously brain-damaged).

I gather that there is recently some technology (diffusion tensor imaging) that can trace white-matter tracts to some degree. But the minimum pixel size is 3mm, so I guess it can't image individual axons, but rather big groups of them going in one direction or another. (And I get the impression the data is so complex that people are not sure what to do with it.)

I guess that's why certain neurological conditions are treated by psychiatrists, rather than neurologists. I've heard that neurologists tend to deal with gross problems, like Parksinon's or MS, and tend not to be interested in ADD, ASD, OCD, and the like. Might depend on the neurologist, though.

Autism in 3D topic

I am hoping this will give me some form of visual understanding of what is going on under my skull.

Good story.

i just got tested with regular pen&paper stuff

Hi oodain,

i think if you got all information and states, then you can calculate the next steps. If you would know the state of the brain and all inputs, then you can calculate the rest too. Seems as if the brain is nothing else than a big computer, though a very complex one.

Why don't you think so?

byebye,
Anton

Even if the world was deterministic it wouldn't matter. Check out the Futurama episode "The late Phillip J Fry."

could you give me some keywords instead of a futurama title?

thank you,
anton

Sorry anton, I don't understand what you mean.

Not at all - standard brain scans can not detect left-handedness, sexual orientation, IQ, dyspraxia or aphonia, and they are all easily measured characteristics. As far as I know, standard brain scans can not even be used to determine gender. Brain scans are simply not, at present, an effective or useful method of examining these phenomena.

As far as I know, there are specialised tests that researchers claim are able to detect features of all of these, with varying levels of accuracy, so it is possible (actually very likely) that the technology will be available very soon. Whether it is ever preferable to functional diagnosis (by interview and observation) is the big question.

I would love a machine-based diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder.