
The imprinted brain theory - robg
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/badcock08/badcock08_index.html
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bd
_"However, the very same excellence in mentalism would make such psychotic
savants much less noticeable than their autistic counterparts, whose deficits
immediately identify them as odd, socially-isolated, and eccentric. Psychotic
savants, by contrast, can be expected to be deeply embedded in successful
social networks, and found at the centre of excellence in such things as
religious and ideological evangelism; literary and theatrical culture;
litigation and the law; hypnosis, faith-healing, and psychotherapy; fashion
and advertising; politics, public-relations and the media; commerce,
confidence-trickery, and fraud of all kinds."_

This is scary.

------
gruseom
This theory of a binary opposition between autism and schizophrenia, explained
as a tug-of-war between maternal and paternal genes, strikes me as grossly
simplistic. Notice how, in the second-last paragraph, the author evades the
question of how then a single person can have both disorders. He also glosses
over the well-known fact that schizophrenia (as well as autism) is more common
in men.

The theory is surprisingly reminiscent of older models about schizophrenia
that traced its cause to mothers. Nowadays, I suppose, we reimagine the family
drama in genes and call it "symbolic".

The theory does have the property of being perfectly suitable for science
journalism, no doubt a significant advantage for a meme.

~~~
robg
I posted this because the theory has been making the rounds among
neuroscientists. It came up in one of our lab meetings. And the context was
provocative - brain activation patterns in neuroimaging studies of the two
reflecting mirror images.

Still, I agree it's simplistic. Problem is, in order to be comprehensible to
mere humans, theories can only be a tad complicated. Take two main effects
with an interaction. That's hard enough. A three-way interaction is near
impossible to talk about.

~~~
gruseom
I didn't think you were endorsing the theory, and it was certainly worth
posting. But the more I think about it the cruder it seems.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mere humans", but unless it's "journalists and
most of their readers", then I have to disagree. Theories are welcome to be
quite a bit more complicated than this _if they work_. Take Maxwell's
equations. Though "complicated" isn't the right word for something so elegant,
they certainly encapsulate more than two or three "main effects".

~~~
robg
Bah, the limits of language. I should have said "mere neuroscientists".
Maxwell had a Silver Hammer.

Seriously, I agree with your criticism and your hopeful view of science. But
even as Hodgkin-Huxley is elegant it's a long way from explaining how human
thought and behavior arise from our wetware. We're likely to get many muddled
theories in the near future. The best we can do is test them.

~~~
gruseom
I think science is an art and not a science :)

------
markessien
Animals in general always tend towards two binary opposite behaviours, each of
which is more successful in certain enviroments. It's a sort of hedging of the
bets, in case unexpected situations spring up. As such, there will always be
extremes of both behaviours - the bird that takes more risk to get the worm,
and the other bird that takes less risk. Depending on the external situation,
one of the two types will always dominate.

It's my belief that the concentration of genetic tendencies is what is causing
the increase - people from universities tend to marry people from
universities, and so there is a similarity in tendency among people who are
reproducing, and so there is a larger tendencies for the extremes to manifest
themselves.

It's like the sickle cell gene - when the population is diverse, this gene
hardly shows up as a disease, but when the community is closed, the disease
comes up very often.

