If the Pentagon actually paid for this "research" hoping to get some useful information then they are more incompetent than I thought but when you read the article pretty much anyone here at least will know it is total garbage and propaganda. It's just a headline and most people can't be bothered to actually read past that, the ones that do probably don't know enough about Asperger's or ASDs in general to know what it total bunk.
Someone on Reddit broke it down
Quote:
I just read the original Pentagon paper that this article was citing. I'm a psychiatry resident at Washington University in St. Louis, which is a place that's well-known for studying the neuroscience of autism (of which Asperger's is a type). There are so many problems with the paper that I think the person who wrote it should be fired immediately. Here are the first few that come to mind: (1) A significant portion of the science quoted is simply wrong, including many things that are used to make big conclusions. I don't want to point out every single MAJOR scientific problem because there are so many of them. One example is that she refers to the "temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex" as the source of Putin's movement problems. In fact, there is no such thing as the "temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex" - the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex are completely different parts of the brain, and neither of them has any influence on subconscious/involuntary movement. It also says that the findings could only be confirmed by MRI, which is also simply false - MRI has no utility in autism/Aperger's. Also, she repeatedly states that the neurological insult would have happened in childhood and brain plasticity would never have recovered, which is also false - brain plasticity recovers remarkably well in children, and even in an adult, it would have mostly recovered if it was caused by the etiology that she suggested. (2) The author is a political scientist with no medical training. As an aside, there are lots of spelling and grammar mistakes in the paper. (3) The author's qualification as a "certified movement analyst" is something that is only provided by a single school, whose only accreditation is by the National Association of Schools of Dance. The person who started it was an expert on dance movements. (4) Most of the psychological findings described in the study would be much better explained by Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is very common among world leaders because narcissism leads people to seek leadership roles. Any psychiatrist can tell you that, but because the author of the study has no medical training, she didn't know that this is a more likely diagnosis.