Brain damage

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What is it with all these head injuries? There may be something to this. Also, I wonder why autism is so much more prevalent in the Silicon Valley where, coincidentally, there used to be a lot of mercury mines.

I split open the front of my head (cracked skull) at age 2. Also, like another person in this thread, had hearing issues due to clogged ears/allergies to everything. The water where I grew up was later found to contain high levels of mercury (think San Jose). My autism supposedly appeared at 7 months, however, according to my mother.

For atypical autism in particular, how much is actually brain damage caused by environmental factors. Maybe some people have mild symptoms and a predisposition, and environmental factors (be it mercury, head injuries, allergies, etc. make it worse). Maybe underdevelopment and damage of normal development can cause similar symptoms.

Last edited by Tyri0n on 30 Nov 2012, 12:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I think more likely causes of the

brain damage --> (some cases) autism spectrum thesis might be:

Something autoimmune, say roughly analogous to PANDAS
http://intramural.nimh.nih.gov/pdn/web.htm

or,

Something metabolic, say rougly analogous to PKU, or the idea that one cause is the wrong kind of bacteria in the gut which deplete the body of sulphur stores in turf battles (and can be picked up by the infant from other family members and thus seem to be inherited and are inherited in a sense).

And this claim would seem to be testable.

When I was a baby I had brain hemorrhaging in my frontal lobe. I've heard that people who have had brain hemorrhaging are slightly more likely to have AS. I don't really know though; I haven't found much on it.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=608370

Perhaps it is time for another round of vaccines.

Also, I broke a mercury thermometer once and spilled mercury in the fume hood. I am not sure if my autism became more or less severe after that, but I hit my head again around the same time, and I think that my grades improved after that.

The next mercury incident occurred about three years later, and that was someone else discovering old mercury spill at the back of their fume hood. The hazmat people came in hazmat suits to mister kleeen. I noticed a bit of a drop in my social functioning and communication skills around this time when I was not eggsposed to this mercury not in the back of my fume hood.

Also, I stopped having some kind of seizures involving banging my head against the wall around this same time that my social functioning went down some tubes, but I did discover that toilets don't all flush in one direction in the northern hemisphere.

Both me and my boyfriend were born with some distress (he was yellow, I was blue XD). I probably did have some slight brain damage due to the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, but I really don't know if it has anything to do with my behaviours.

I had concussion after knocking myself out when I hit the ground after running down a steep hill and not being able to stop as a child around the age of 9 or 10 and felt different after it - I noticed I wasn't feeling as much pleasure in things as before. No one else seemed to notice any change in my behaviour though.

I know for a fact my brain works slower than average as regards converting thoughts to speech and on anything where I have to hold lots of information in my head at once. On the other hand I reckon I have a broader knowledge and a lot more common sense than average and this stands me in good stead.