Can Brain Injury cause Autistic Traits?

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I believe injuring certain parts of the brain can cause autistic like traits, smoetimes multiple autistic traits.

Starting with Cognitive abilbity.

Savantism:

This ability to have striking abilities in certain regions of intelligence (memory or arithmetic), but inability at basic tasks and socializing.
This can be caused by traumatic brain injury.

Perseveration:

Uncontrollable repetition of a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus, usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder.

Loss of emotion/emptiness can be aused by brain injury.

Emotional intelligence can also be lowered through brain injury.


It would be interesting to see if these Brain Traits are all located in a similar part/lobe of the brain.

A form of preservation is sometimes caused by brain damage to certain parts of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). I've read about an experiment on rhesus monkeys in which monkeys in which a certain part of the PFC was damaged had trouble correcting errors and so just kept on doing things that didn't work (like, let's say, trying to put a square block into a round hole).

Brain injuries that damage the connections between a part of the Limbic System called the Amygdala and the parts of the cortex often lead to emotional problems.

Interesting stuff.

Yes brain injuries can cause the behaviors.

Traumatic brain injuries, like autism, and Asperger's, are on a wide spectrum. They can cause any number of problems, ranging from coma to cerebral palsy and autistic/AS traits. It depends on what part of the brain is injured. A person who has a frontal lobe injury may be very talkative, but unable to censor what they say. A person whose occipital lobe is injured could have varying degrees of visual impairment. A midbrain injured person may manifest cerebral palsy symptoms. The injuries themselves occur on a spectrum ranging from mild to profound.

There's a lot of things that autistic people can experience that are much like the things that people with brain injuries can experience. Just read this site and I'm sure you'll find some descriptions familiar. Also, things like agnosia, apraxia, aphasia, etc., may have some similarities to autistic people's difficulties in some areas (areas that are not all covered by the DSM criteria). However, at the same time, there are probably differences between the mechanisms of an otherwise standard brain that has been injured at a late age, an otherwise standard brain that has been injured at a very early age, and a brain that was never going to be standard and whose differences are differences in function of the different areas (or between them), not differences caused by injury to a standard brain. They've found it's not entirely appropriate to assign the same terms to atypically-developing non-injured brains, and conditions caused by injury to typical brains. But still there's enough similarities for some things to be useful.

Also, I've found this page to be really interesting, but again there's often differences between autistic versions of these things and the actual conditions, even though there's considerable overlap as well.

http://www.sportsconcussions.org/

Yeah, I agree; I think you might get autistic-like traits, but autism proper, with all of the traits (or, y'know, enough for diagnosis), is pretty unique to what happens when you develop differently from the beginning.

I think this might have kind of a parallel with cerebral palsy, which also starts very, very early, usually before birth; a few children get it from brain injuries when they're very young, like meningitis, a head injury, or hypoxic brain injury; but almost never beyond a certain age (two, I think? Three? Very young, anyway; and the vast majority are prenatal/perinatal). After that, if they get the same injury, they have the usual signs of brain injury in an adult. CP is unique because it results from damage to a developing brain, and if the same thing happens later on, it doesn't have the same effect.

So I'm pretty sure that, even if you changed an adult neurotypical's DNA to the autistic variant, you'd still have an NT adult. Autism's got a lot to do with development.