Einstein's brain and AS

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I saw a documentary about Einstein's brain. After he died, they took out his brain and studied it. He had AS

They found that some parts were larger and others smaller, he processed info differently from normal brains.

I'm wondering if they studied other brains of people with AS, and if people with AS brain's are the same. May help with AS research.

do you have a link to the documentary? Do you remember the name? Einstein sounds like he had a lot of AS traits.

The doc was not about his brain or his AS, but just how his brain was different then everyone else. Because it was different he was able to commucate with ailens. That was what the doc was talking about.

I know it was on H2. History 2.

Just when watching it I thought because he had AS, maybe other people with AS brains was like his. Could explain why we are like we are.

Einstein ... space aliens ... yup, it's the History Channel, alright.



Did they include any mention of Hitler or the Great Pyramid?



http://curiosity.discovery.com/question ... eins-brain



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/1 ... 44865.html

Last edited by Fnord on 05 Feb 2013, 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Dontha know Testla was an alien?

Testla?

Nichole LaTestla?

I always that she was rather odd...

The Einstein/autism hypothesis is a plausible one. It's nowhere near the level of aliens.

You can't diagnose AS just based on looking at the brain. There are systematic differences between ASD brains and NT brains, but they tend to be not particularly unique to autism, and not predictably present in the same way in every person. If they were so easy to use for diagnosis, we'd be diagnosing autism via brain scan. The most accurate diagnostic test is still a thorough observation of behavior and interview of the person and their relatives.

I don't think we'll ever know absolutely whether Einstein had autism. I think it's possible. He was an introvert; he was eccentric; he had a speech delay despite being very talented in math and science. If he had autism, it wasn't severe, because there's no real evidence that he needed more than minor help in his everyday life. He definitely had the obsessiveness and special interests, and the intuitive visualization ability fits too.

Gonna paraphrase here:

Italicized are the traits Einstein probably had. So, depending on whether there was what they call a "significant impairment", Einstein may well have been autistic.
Einstein's autistic traits included:
--Speech delay
--Naivete
--Lack of tact
--Obsessive fascination with physics
--Tendency to "lecture" rather than converse
--Highly visual, detail-oriented information processing
--Loner; disliked crowds
--Had meltdowns
--Did not adjust style of speech to audience (ex., lecturing an eight-year-old about advanced physics)
--Very literal thinker; when told by a doctor to stop smoking his pipe, he scavenged cigarettes and smoked those instead.

I wonder whether Einstein might have benefited if he had known what autism was and how it likely affected him. He was obviously quite insightful and managed relatively well in the neurotypical world, not least because he was a genius and geniuses are allowed to be eccentric. Still, if he'd known about autism, maybe he might have been able to get more insight into his own thought processes; perhaps gained the flexibility to integrate quantum physics into his own work--something we're still working on today.

What can we draw from the idea that Einstein may have been autistic? Well, not too much; Einstein was very remarkable either way. But it does remind us that disabled people, including autistic people, are by no means barred from doing amazing things, nor does a disability mean we can't be talented or driven or successful or any other thing that humans might strive for. Autism may not make you into a successor to Einstein, but if you happen to want to be a successor to Einstein, autism won't stop you from trying.

That pretty much sums it up. If they make the preposterous claim that he was communicating with aliens, you should automatically know not to trust anything they had to say because they are very seriously deluded.

http://www.history.com/shows/ancient-al ... -5#slide-5

There is a link to info about the show I watched. "The Einstein factor." I'm sure the alien part is BS. But I wanted to watch it to see if it mentioned autism or AS. When they showed how his brain was different, it got me thinking.

Actually, MRI tests can be quite accurate and are becoming even more accurate.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/h ... e-1.470907

The observation of behavior can be much more vague and subjective than a brain scan, especially with the new caricature of a criteria.

http://ianology.wordpress.com/2012/01/2 ... -in-dsm-v/

Actually, if you make a google research, you'll find out that Einstein even had ADHD, dyslexia and I don't remember what else. The web community e-diagnosed him after his death with no evidence that he had those disorders, but just because he was a gifted person.

The MRI study is very interesting and is probably the way of future diagnoses, but unfortunately it doesn't contradict what Callista said. (I say "unfortunately" because it would be good to have criteria that are more objective and less subject to clinician bias.) In the study you linked, they only compared known autistic people versus known not-autistic people. The MRI was able to sort people into two categories. But unless those differences are unique to autism, an MRI still can't help with diagnosis since it won't be differential amongst the other possibilities. It can't be used to pinpoint autism until it can differentiate not just between NT and not-NT (which is all it was really doing in that linked study) but between autism and all other neurological conditions that also cause brain differences.

Perhaps the differences they found will ultimately turn out to be unique to autism but unfortunately the study didn't show that. It only showed that you won't have those differences if you are NT. (I am using "NT" in its broader use of "not having any neurological condition".) However, this line of research will probably be pursued since it is more objective than how somebody acts or is described to act by their parents. There needs to be a lot more research into finding out if there are patterns identifiable to autism that are unique to autism (and not merely absent in people with no diagnosis of anything) and also if these patterns are found in all cases or just in a subset of cases. On this board, there are many anecdotes of clinicans ruling out autism on the basis of something silly such as "you know too much body language to be autistic" and other such non-objective things. So it would be good to have something that is a lot more objective. But this is just an inch in the right direction and a whole lot more research is needed before it can be diagnostically useful.

Doesn't some DNA coding decide whether you have autism or not? If so, then people's cell can be collected and its DNA can be read to determine whether or not you have autism, pretty much in the same way as that doctors/scientists can determine whether you will have bowel cancer etc or not by reading their DNA. Isn't that possible with autism?

As with MRI, it is still in the preliminary research stages and is nowehere near to being diagnostic.

^This

Finding genetic sequences is very difficult considering that some genes have hundreds of thousands of base pairs. The human genome itself has over 3 billion base pairs. To complicate things even more, autism is most likely polygenic, which makes it very difficult to detect, considering that different severity of autism also have different genetic makeups. One of my professors talked about a website where people can sequence their entire genome and compere it to others via directory. If a group of people share a sequence in their genome that differs from most others, they can put health problems into the directory and possibly find the gene that causes a disorder. For example if a group of people share the same genetic mutation and state that they have diabetes, then the possible cause for diabetes predisposition could be identified. Maybe the same could happen for autism once the site gets more people. It is currently trying to get 1 million veterans to sequence their genomes.

Here is a pdf link to this project.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default ... rsmith.pdf

einstein had autism.

he was ashkenazi jewish, which has a very high prevalence of autism.

if you read books about how einstein came up with the theory of relativity, he was obsessed with asking "why". (autism / systematizer). and he did this endlessly, which is a sign of alexithymia.

be proud, he was one of us!