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7:29pm October 28, 2012

josiahd:

allies-person replied to your post: evidence?

On average, autistic people’s brains are different on both a micro and macro level.

Right; people say that — what’s the evidence of that, though?

And if there are clear brain-level differences, why isn’t autism diagnosed that way?

Because they’re still figuring out exactly what those differences are and how they work. You can tell that there are differences in things like perception, cognition, and movement, that have to involve the brain. But we know much less about how the brain works than TV or something makes it sound like, so we can’t just instantly pinpoint how all these things work in nonautistic people, let alone autistic people. But you can’t have differences in perception, or cognition, or movement, without involving the brain, and autism seems to involve all three of those things, far more than it involves “social problems” (which are more like… even when they exist, they’re more an outgrowth of those other things than anything central to what autism means).

That’s a simplistic explanation of course because autism is not and never will be just one thing. (And please don’t get me into a discussion of “social constructions” and stuff because I literally cannot have a conversation on that level of abstraction right now.) But it is certainly true of many things that get called autism, including my own. (Reality is that of course there’s no thing called “autism” – there’s only autistic people, and that is people whose brains work in certain particular ways. Not all the same. Autism is just an abstraction of autistic people. It’s not a thing that a person has.) But really it’s nearly impossible for something routinely involving those sorts of aspects of the way people function, to not involve the brain in some way. And it’s incredibly simplistic to think that just because we know something involves the brain, we can immediately pinpoint exactly what that thing is, and then know how it works, and then diagnose it based on those things. Because again, we can’t even do that for nondisabled people let alone people with brains that seem to function in atypical ways. (There’s not just like “a center of the brain that does this” and “a center of the brain that does that”, the brain is far more complex than modern science is able to fully deal with.)