
How autism may stem from problems with prediction - akvadrako
https://spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/autism-may-stem-problems-prediction/
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Erlangolem
_In Ayaya’s telling, her autism involves a host of perceptual disconnects. For
example, she feels in exquisite detail all the sensations that typical people
readily identify as hunger, but she can’t piece them together. “It’s very hard
for me to conclude I’m hungry,” she says. “I feel irritated, or I feel sad, or
I feel something [is] wrong. This information is separated, not connected.” It
takes her so long to realize she is hungry that she often feels faint and gets
something to eat only after someone suggests it to her._

This sounds more like a failure to integrate sensory information than a
predictive error. That also fits with existing theories of autism relating to
sensory processing.

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s_m_t
Isn't that sort of the same thing? To what end does one integrate sensory
information other than to make predictions or classify things?

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Erlangolem
The idea that there is a conflict of prediction vs. reality, and a simple
failure to connect disparate sensations into a whole are nothing alike. The
former is a characteristic of something like motion or VR sickness; your body
expects one thing, but receives conflicting information. Integration failure
doesn’t require prediction, just different sensations not creating a whole
impression.

The author describes experiencing hunger as a bunch of disconnected
sensations, that don’t add up to one thing. She feels pain in her stomach,
irritability, tiredness, but doesn’t integrate that into “I’m hungry” and just
experiences them as different incidental feelings indicative of nothing in
particular.

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SubiculumCode
IMO,autism tends to effect high-level cognitive domains because those domains
depends on a lot of neural machinery. The particular neurochemical pathways
that disrupt those high-level cognitive domains will differ between
individuals though, and the gene-environment interactions involved seems to be
a total mishmash of mutations in genes and environmental factors regulating
the brain...If more genes are affected relating to attention, we might give a
diagnosis of ADHD. It IS a spectrum. So when a title says Autism stems from
problems with prediction, I would rather say that prediction and balance
between prediction and stimuli sensation are frequently disrupted because they
are high level forms of cognition that can get disrupted in a number of ways.

I am still new to Autism research, but in my own work and others, I am seeing
that ASD is related to a reduction of neuro-typical sex differences. However,
I do not think I'd say that Autism stems from reduced sexual differentiation.
I'd characterize it as a piece of the puzzle, and that disrupted neural
machinery will likely disrupt the processes of sexual neuro-differentiation.

I try to be very humble about making claims about Autism, because I have begun
to see how truly complicated and multivariate the disorder(s), an dmainly want
to focus on my efforts to aspects of the disorder that affect quality of life
(and certainly not extinguish all neurodiversity).

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drieddust
Exactly I too believe everything is being classified as Autism nowadays.
Instead of focussing on improving the life for those who truly struggle.

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srtjstjsj
"everything is being classified as Autism" _because_ autism diagnosis opens
the door to insurance coverage for therapy and special-education services in
the schools.

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SubiculumCode
And early behavioral intervention is one of the few things we know yields
tangible benefits to quality of life outcomes

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petercooper
Definitely some interesting bits and pieces. I was recently diagnosed and the
focus on predictive ability reminded me of a particular weakness I have:
inability to follow plots. I can't figure out what's going to happen in most
movies and usually I load up the Wikipedia entry to follow the plot if things
aren't explicitly mentioned in the dialogue :-D

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gt_
I work in film and visual art, and have always, odd as it is, associated my
difficulty following film plots with my intrigue or indiosyncratic
relationship to the art forms. I am also diagnosed. Film editing offers an
interesting boundary of sorts in thinking about scope of perception or
hierarchies of attention. I’ve always had a hard time _just watching_ a film
as a story experience but I find and appreciate plenty of elements about films
to be plenty intrigued by _almost_ any of them. I got very interested in
_media affect_ as a result, that is the experience of media intake.

I have come to believe my (seemingly) unique sensitivity to _aesthetics_ is
somewhat undermined by a lack of sensitivity to _poetics_. This conclusion was
painful to reach, but so far the realization has paid off in the way of
understanding the limits of my abilities. On a more related note, I tend to
experience _poetics_ from the outside in, which causes me to miss out on much
of the human experience, including the way many people enjoy films.

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tzakrajs
This article reminded me a lot of my struggle with ADD. Noises that are
repeating and usually filtered out by most people are the thing that keeps me
from being able to focus on a single thing. I was never diagnosed with ASD,
but I can commiserate.

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stuntkite
Diagnosed with ADHD and ASD over here. My Dr. says there is some thinking that
ADHD is potentially on the lighter side of the same scale of "thing" and the
symptoms often exhibit together. I was diagnosed with ADHD first and the ASD
thing came much later. It really helped put some of the pieces into place for
me. I definitely see their relation.

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rdlecler1
I found this interesting. I’m diagonsed with ADD and carry all of the tell
tale signs. My mind is geared to constantly fill in—like I need to over
predict and guess what someone is going to say. When I watch a movie I am
constantly hunting for the plot twist even if there is not one. I also have a
higher than normal error rate because my mind tends to come to a resolution on
scant evidence and I need to slow myself down and often double or triple
check. I’ve often felt that autism was on the other end of the spectrum.
Everything needed to be explicit, complete, and literal.

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forgotmysn
I relate strongly to your comment, specifically about the need to over-predict
and be wrong. With my ADHD, I think my lack of a verbal 'filter' also
contributes to that error rate, where my brain has a tendency to express the
first thought that pops in it, rather than the best one :/

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nautilus12
Came out of the other end of this article totally convinced im autistic. How
much of this like hearing your own voice echo is part of everyday experience
to lesser degree?

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OrganicMSG
Or possibly, how problems with prediction may stem from autism.

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callesgg
That seams like a very good question.

Why would they not mention that in the article? seams odd

edit:

But on second thought...

If something is caused by autism it would be part of the definition for the
behaviors that we call autism.

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OrganicMSG
I should thank Michael Crichton for getting me in the habit of looking out for
potential "Wet Streets Cause Rain" articles.

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roywiggins
The article gets into that near the end, that maybe social issues make it
harder to learn how to make predictions rather than the other way around.

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jrs95
At first I expected this to be something about the process of synaptic
pruning, which doesn’t seem to work for people with autism and could be a big
part of how autism works. I guess in retrospect this is only somewhat related
to prediction in that the brain has to predict which pathways will be used and
which won’t in the future, and eliminate the less used (and less valuable)
ones. That’s really a key process to learning and associating things, which
sort of ties into what’s described in this article.

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reilly3000
Prediction is the one thing a AI excels at at this point. I wonder if someone
could devise an apparatus to assist with such a disability.

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invertor
Shit HN says.

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EGreg
[http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/)

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debacle
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test)

