As widely reported last week, for example in NHS News:
... a study... assessed the brain activity of 104 infants aged 6-10 months as they watched an image of an adult’s face whose eyes moved from looking away from them, to directly at the infant, then away again. Researchers called these eye movements ‘dynamic eye-gaze shifts’.
They then assessed whether differences in brain activity in response to the eye-gaze shifts were related to autism developing in the same children at three years. Children who did not develop autism showed large spikes in brain activity when they saw the ‘gaze shifts’. Much smaller spikes in brain activity were detected in the infants who went on to develop autism, raising the prospect that autism could be identified earlier than is currently clinically possible.
However, this test was not 100% accurate...
Well of course it's not 100% accurate, as autism is not a yes/no condition, there is an infinitum spectrum between 'completely shut off and irresponsive to other humans' and 'completely with it most of the time', but none of this surprises me.
As I have pointed out before*, for some reason intelligent creatures, most noticeably small babies, like staring you straight in the eyes and appreciate it when you reciprocate. Therefore, by reverse logic, there must be something a bit wrong with small babies who don't do this, or more to the point, who don't find it unusual if you don't look them straight in the eyes.
On a related topic, I'm sure that I read a science fiction book as a kid where the aliens/clones control people's minds by looking them in the eye, and the children make their alien/clone teacher's head explode by focussing on a spot six inches to the left of the teacher's face.** My fellow conspirators and I have tried this technique in Pointless Team Meetings and it does genuinely make the speaker very flustered. The technique is certainly up their there with Bullshit Bingo.***
* As it turns out, my observation that small children don't blink is an accepted fact, explanation here.
** Was that The Midwich Cuckoos? In which case swap round children/teacher.
*** If nobody wants to play, my other fall back is counting all the squares in the carpet, all the tiles in the ceiling or all the panes in the windows - not counting the rows and columns and multiplying, but counting them one by one and starting again if I lose count. When it's finally over, I am usually pleased to establish that I genuinely can't remember a word anybody said and don't have a clue what the meeting was about.
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Detecting autism in six-month old babies
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17 comments:
Nice article MW, however for a pedant such as yourself:
"The technique is certainly up their with...."
Tsk, tsk.........
WFW, thanks, I have amended.
Treating autism as a spectrum of behaviour (which of course it is) has resulted in a few parents using the uncertainty to dump difficult children onto institutions at huge expense.
I once wore shades throughout a pitch meeting.
Migraine. The Boss had them too, so he didn't mind.
I did notice one of the clients looking at me a lot, and wanting to ask. but chickening out.
At the end one of the clients said "..and its always good to see a company not afraid to promote a blind person to a senior level. Well done."
"We'll always do that stunt from now on.." said the boss.
AKH, but 'difficult children' is also a spectrum, I have known plenty of perfectly nice parents who have one or two perfectly nice children and one complete and utter monster. There is no particular reason why one child turns out to be a complete shit, some of them just do.
BQ, nice one, and did you?
(But I didn't mean pitches, if we are meeting client I always pay full attention, take notes, make helpful suggestions, inject a bit of humour and so on, that's different to Pointless Team Meetings.)
Just in case no one else has mentioned it, I have noticed the change in the blog sub heading.
Anon, three people did respond, but how do you like today's header?
Perhaps the babies are shy?
There is no particular reason why one child turns out to be a complete shit, some of them just do.
Can I suggest "cheating wife"?
re MW 23:52 yesterday :-
Not a great fan of Bingo really, nor indeed blogs that are thinly disguised advertorials of one sort or another but as the emporium you are promoting seems to be offering er some sort of therapy service, fair enough ....
The book was certainly not the midwitch cuckoos as I am great fan of the book
Perhaps the answer is fight fire with fire and use bullshit back.Simon Hoggart tells the story this Friday in Guardian that somebody got Dennis Skinner to ask Tony Blair"When are we going to apply blue-sky thinking to a third way approach to beacons of excellence at municipal level?" To which Balir had no answer although he did copy it all down.
Skinner was really asking Are there any ways we can think about localised Fascism?
AC1
"Grinny" by Nicholas Fisk
AMcG, thanks, that's the one! Nicolas Fisk = brilliant author, I read loads of his books. i.e. all half a dozen of them.
Hmmm, not really sure. I don't remember much of Grinny except the bit you described -- she was supposed to be an elderly relative, not a teacher.
Simlarly, of "Space Hostages" I only really remember the cricket match at the beginning.
Trillions I remember vividly, on the other hand, probably because I bought a copy rather than just reading it from the library, so I would have read it more than once. There was this cool general who wanted to nuke everything.
AMG, I was a kid, I never bought a single one, I got them all from the public library, but they were all great.
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