Time.com article

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -4,00.html

You have to agree to view an advertisement before you can read the article, but you should definitely read the article.

Some pertinent quotes:


"More recent studies by Amaral and others have found that the amygdala, an area associated with social behavior, is also oversize, a finding Amaral believes is related to the high levels of anxiety seen in as many as 80% of people with autism."

"the excess white matter in autistic brains has a specific distribution: local areas tend to be overconnected, while links between more distant regions of the brain are weak"

"they memorize alphabet characters in a part of the brain that ordinarily processes shapes. They tend to use the visual centers in the back of the brain for tasks usually handled by the prefrontal cortex."

And my personal favorite: "Striking up conversations with strangers," he writes, "is an autistic person's version of extreme sports."

There is another thread about this article.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/asperger.htm ... ic&t=13528

Thanks for posting that.

More good quotes...

"Other classic symptoms--a lack of emotion, an inability to love--can now be largely dismissed as artifacts of impaired communication."

"at a recent retreat for people with ASD, attendees wore colored tags indicating their comfort level with spontaneous conversation: red meant don't approach, yellow meant talk if we've already met, green indicated, "I'd love to talk, but I'm not good at initiating."

I need one of those green tags - that's one thing that I wish people IRL knew about me. (Without me having to tell them or explain it.) When I don't initiate conversation people automatically assume that I don't want to talk, or worse, that I don't like them. That's not the case though - most of the time I'd be happy to talk but I need the other person to initiate the conversation and then keep it going by asking me questions etc.

I didn't realize that was the same article. I never bothered reading it in the other thread because other posters were talking rather negatively about it. They raise good points - the article does have its flaws, but it has good points too.

I read that article today myself, and though it was pretty good. I liked the part describing the tags. I'm a green tag person myself, and will really chat up a storm after someone has broken the ice with me