See the pattern? Maybe this will help.
Or consider this little fact - the CDC's estimated prevalence of autism
If you are interested, the full report is available here.
Part of the reason autism has captivated Hollywood moviemakers more than other developmental disabilities is that, for all the difficulties it brings those who have it, it also gives some of them the ability to perform uncanny feats of brainpower: effortlessly memorizing train schedules or song lyrics, identifying the day of the week of any date in the past. Even among those who aren’t full-blown savants, many display an impressive ability, even a desire, to immerse themselves in what the rest of us would see as mind-numbingly boring, detail-oriented tasks.I really do love the phrases "it also gives some of them the ability to perform uncanny feats of brainpower" and "even among those who aren't full-blown savants". If you thought that all talk about the "benefits" of autism was harmless, well, there is your harm.
A lot of software testing is done overseas by workers in India. The case Hahn makes is that his software testers will work for $15 to $20 an hour—pay comparable to, or even lower than, that of software testers in India, but right here in the U.S. After all, he points out, people with autism don’t have a lot of alternatives—when they do find work, it’s usually bagging groceries or sweeping hospital floors at the minimum wage.
Hahn, in other words, is proposing outsourcing to the developmentally disabled rather than the developing world. Asked whether it might be exploitative to pay people with a disability less than those without one for doing the same work, he says he doesn’t see it that way. For one thing, he says, Indian software testers aren’t exactly sweatshop labor; they make about $25 an hour. And if paying less makes the company able to hire the developmentally disabled in the first place, he doesn’t see a problem with it.Because, you know, it is OK to pay people with autism less because they "don't have a lot of alternatives".
Perceptual and Neural Response to Affective Tactile Texture Stimulation in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with differences in sensory sensitivity and affective response to sensory stimuli, the neural basis of which is still largely unknown. We used psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate responses to somatosensory stimulation with three textured surfaces that spanned a range of roughness and pleasantness in a sample of adults with ASD and a control group.
While psychophysical ratings of roughness and pleasantness were largely similar across the two groups, the ASD group gave pleasant and unpleasant textures more extreme average ratings than did controls. In addition, their ratings for a neutral texture were more variable than controls, indicating they are less consistent in evaluating a stimulus that is affectively ambiguous.
Changes in brain blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal in response to stimulation with these textures differed substantially between the groups, with the ASD group exhibiting diminished responses compared to the control group, particularly for pleasant and neutral textures. For the most unpleasant texture, the ASD group exhibited greater BOLD response than controls in affective somatosensory processing areas such as the posterior cingulate cortex and the insula. The amplitude of response in the insula in response to the unpleasant texture was positively correlated with social impairment as measured by the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R).
These results suggest that people with ASD tend to show diminished response to pleasant and neutral stimuli, and exaggerated limbic responses to unpleasant stimuli, which may contribute to diminished social reward associated with touch, perpetuating social withdrawal, and aberrant social development.
... people with autism show an increased ability to focus attention on certain tasks. Yet clinical reports backed up by some laboratory research show that these individuals can be more sensitive to the distracting effects of irrelevant stimuli, such as flashing lights or particular sounds, which can be easily ignored by people without the disorder.
Professor Nilli Lavie, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, hypothesises that this combination of the ability to focus and a susceptibility to distraction might be caused by a higher than normal information processing capacity.
"Our work on perceptual capacity in the typical adult brain suggests a clear explanation for the unique cognitive profile that people with autism show," she says. "People who have higher perceptual capacity are able to process more information from a scene, but this may also include some irrelevant information which they may find harder to ignore. Our research suggests autism does not involve a distractibility deficit but rather an information processing advantage."Or in short, people with autism only appear to have sensory issues but in reality their problems are caused because they are too good at processing information....
Hyper-or hypo-reactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of environment; (such as apparent indifference to pain/heat/cold, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, fascination with lights or spinning objects).Never mind that the reason that a human brain can process information and reach conclusions based on that information faster than any computer out there is precisely because the brain is extremely good at filtering out the unimportant details and focusing only on what is important.
Professor Lavie believes that the finding may help explain why people with autism spectrum disorders, such as Asperger's syndrome, may excel in some careers such as IT, which can require intense concentration and the ability to process a great deal of information from a computer screen.While I guess the ability to "process a great deal of information from a computer screen" sounds like it could be related to being good in IT, the reality is that that only helps with the version of IT portrayed in movies.
Risk Factors Associated with Self-Injurious Behaviors in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
While self-injurious behaviors (SIB) can cause significant morbidity for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), little is known about its associated risk factors. We assessed 7 factors that may influence self-injury in a large cohort of children with ASD: (a) atypical sensory processing; (b) impaired cognitive ability; (c) abnormal functional communication; (d) abnormal social functioning; (e) age; (f) the need for sameness; (g) rituals and compulsions. Half (52.3%, n = 126) of the children (n = 241, aged 2-19 years) demonstrated SIB. Abnormal sensory processing was the strongest single predictor of self-injury followed by sameness, impaired cognitive ability and social functioning. Since atypical sensory processing and sameness have a greater relative impact on SIB, treatment approaches that focus on these factors may be beneficial in reducing self-harm in children with ASD.