Aspergers -- a mysterious disorder that is more common than you would think....
Somewhere Inside, a Path to Empathy by David Finch
IT wasn’t working, any of it. Our third year of marriage threatened to be our last. I’d become cynical and withdrawn, obsessive and preoccupied, dismissive and unhelpful.
“I don’t know when things got bad,” Kristen said, wiping away tears. “I feel like I’ve lost you and I don’t know what will bring you back.”
In reality she hadn’t lost me. She’d found me. The facade of semi-normalcy I’d struggled to maintain was falling away, revealing the person I’d been since childhood. I didn’t even know what was wrong with me, though my wife, a speech pathologist who works with autistic children, had her suspicions. Even so, it would be another two years before she would put all the pieces together and attach a name to what was ruining our marriage: Asperger’s syndrome.
During Kristen’s first few years of practice, she worked only with severely autistic children. But as she expanded her clientele to include higher-functioning kids, she started learning more about Asperger’s syndrome, a comparatively mild autism spectrum disorder characterized by egocentricity and impairments in communication and socialization. That’s when she started seeing parallels to my behaviors.
One evening after we put the kids to bed, Kristen approached me with a smile, wrapped me in a hug and asked me to come downstairs to her office. First she allowed me to complete my 8:30 p.m. routine, fully aware of how essential it is to my peace of mind: circle the downstairs, note which lights are on, and stare out the front window, visually lining up the neighbors’ rooftops. I finally joined her at her desk, where she sat at the computer, ready to administer an online Asperger’s evaluation.
Looking somehow clinical in her pajamas, Kristen instructed me to answer the questions honestly. No problem, since I’m honest to a fault when I choose to speak to people. For the next two hours, she led me through questions that at times had us both laughing with recognition:
¶Do you often talk about your special interests whether or not others seem interested? Who’s not interested in cleaning-product slogans?
¶Do you rock back and forth or side to side for comfort, to calm yourself, when excited or overstimulated? Where’s the hidden camera?
¶Do you get frustrated if you can’t sit in your favorite seat? Friendships have ended over this.
And from the American point of view -- this post from aliasinkhorn captures the inspiration and desperation of those who dared to risk all to sign the Declaration of Independence. Thanks, Ink!
From the page:
THE SPEECH OF THE UNKNOWN
.....
"Such is the message of that Declaration to Man, to the Kings of the world! And shall we falter now? And shall we start back appalled when our feet press the very threshold of Freedom? Do I see quailing faces around me, when our wives have been butchered-when the hearthstones of our land are red with the blood of little children?
"What are these shrinking hearts and faltering voices here, when the very Dead of our battlefields arise, and call upon us to sign that Parchment, or be accursed forever?
"Sign! if the next moment the gibbet's rope is round your neck! Sign! if the next moment this hall rings with the echo of the falling axe! Sign! By all your hopes in life or death, as husbands-as fathers-as men-sign your names to the Parchment or be accursed forever!
"Sign-and not only for yourselves, but for all ages. For that Parchment will be the Text-book of Freedom-the Bible of the Rights of Man forever!
New Brain-Wave Toy Lets You Do 'Jedi Mind Trick'
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Uncle Milton Industries
Uncle Milton's 'Star Wars'-themed Force Trainer, which lets you levitate a ball using brain waves.
The Force can be with anyone now.
Later this summer, anybody anywhere will have the ability to physically move stuff with their minds like characters do in "Star Wars." No joke.
A new toy that harnesses the same technology doctors use to monitor brain waves will arrive in stores in August. The toy moves when it senses a change in the user's brain-wave patterns.
"It's pretty cutting-edge," says Frank Adler, executive vice president of Uncle Milton Industries, the toy company that manufactures the "Star Wars"-branded Force Trainer. "It certainly appears to be where things are headed."
It will be if the reaction from 5-year-old "Star Wars" fanatic Ryan Mogg is any indication. Mogg tried out the Force Trainer at a recent "Star Wars" toy fair.
In less than a minute, he was controlling the rise and fall of a pingpong ball in a clear tube — with his brain waves.
"It's like what Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul do!" he said afterward with a big grin.
aliasinkhorn -- love this post! Your pages have taken on a new look -- very elegant, and still as interesting as ever!
Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss
From the page: " In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding -- and, not incidentally, explaining humans' peculiar erotic fascination with breasts -- Dr. Young predicts that it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.
That's the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn't mentioned in Dr. Young's essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.
Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Long before scientists identified neuroreceptors, long before Britney Spears' quickie Vegas wedding or any of Larry King's seven marriages, it was clear that love was a dangerous disease.
Love was correctly identified as a potentially fatal chemical imbalance in the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde, who accidentally consumed a love potion and turned into hopeless addicts. Even though they realized that her husband, the king, would punish adultery with death, they had to have their love fix.
They couldn't guess what was in the potion, but then, they didn't have the benefit of Dr. Young's research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals -- less than 5 percent -- who share humans' propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole's brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she'll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a "biochemical chain of events" that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.
"Some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female-male bonds," Dr. Young said, noting that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman's body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis, which is by no means proven fact, would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females' desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males' erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a "cocktail of ancient neuropeptides," like the oxytocin released during foreplay or orgasm.
Researchers have achieved similar results by squirting oxytocin into people's nostrils -- not terribly sexy, but it seems to enhance feelings of trust and empathy. Although Dr. Young is not concocting any love potions (he's looking for drugs to improve the social skills of people with autism and schizophrenia), he said there could soon be drugs .."
I hope they keep going with this -- will need that cure for Alzheimers any day now...
Scientists Get First Image of Memory Being Made Friday, June 26, 2009 By Clara Moskowitz
Martin et. al
The increase in green fluorescence represents the imaging of protein synthesis at synapses when memories are made.
For the first time, an image of a memory being made at the cellular level has been captured by scientists.
The image shows that proteins are created at connections between brain cells when a long-term memory is formed. Neuroscientists had suspected as much, but hadn't been able to see it happening until now.
The experiment also revealed some surprising aspects of memory formation, which remains a somewhat mysterious process.
Kelsey Martin, a biochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues investigated memory formation in neurons from the sea slug Aplysia californica, a good model for brain cells in other organisms, including humans.
The researchers exposed the neurons to the chemical serotonin, which has been shown to stimulate memory formation (this discovery won Eric Kandel and collaborators the Nobel Prize in 2000). But in a new twist, the scientists devised a way to determine whether any new proteins were created when the memory was made.
Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.
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