Gender, autism and the corpus callosum

I heard a couple of things in anatomy classes having to do with the corpus callosum that I thought were pretty interesting. My lab instructor said that Kim Peek, the inspiration for Rain Main, had no corpus callosum. Though it turns out he had FG syndrome which is an x linked condition. I guess we could call that a know etiology that might be mistaken for autism, and who knows how many things we lump with autism that may be like that. The other thing that was in my textbook was that women have more mass in their corpora callosa than men. When I was assuming Kim Peek was autistic, this seemed significant relative to what some scientists call a "protective effect" being female has for autism. I guess it still might be. Though what I observe in my children (and myself?) could be more a disruption in communication between motor and sensory, anterior and posterior in the brain rather than left and right. Though there are also correllaries to the Wernicke and Broca areas in the (generally speaking) right brain that code emotion and stuff. I should really go back and reread that paper about motor neurons and intent now that I know my way around the brain better. Here's some links I was chasing down that I may come back to in my spare time (heh). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/47193.php (this was used as a reference on wikipedia, but I googled the scientists) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15215213 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041005/

The syndrome formerly known as Asperger's

Someone linked me to the XKCD foot fetish strip I was discussing this with someone because they said a phonologist friend didn't get it right away. In defending my position that "foot" isn't the first thing a phonologist associates to stress, I did some reading and wound up walking down memory lane with autosegmental (and nonconcatenative phonology). Naturally it came back to ASD.

I looked it up and it appears the person I was assisting worked in autosegmental phonology, even though there was reference to The Sound Pattern of English. Here's an interesting bit, to me dealing with a language delayed child: Quote 1. the features or feature-complexes which are independent in child-speech should be precisely those which may be autosegmental in adult grammar; 2. The process of language acquisition includes a task of "deautosegmentalization" or to use a less awkward term, restructuring of phonetics into linear segments.... http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/AimsAutosegmental.pdf pg 215 (This isn't the person I assisted, this is someone else's paper but recruits many references that are familiar to me.) This is interesting because children with the syndrome formerly known as Asperger's seem to adopt an expanded tier of interpretation. It appears they process language on the phrase or sentence level rather than the word level, evidenced by a burst of language around age 3, sometimes talking in full sentences all at once. The tendency to repeat entire phrases (often from books or TV) persists, and the difficulty in analyzing intention could also support this idea.

One culture is hard enough

Hekka was just talking to me about a flag retirement ceremony, in which a flag that is too worn for display is quartered and burned. (people often skip the quartering step, which bothers me, but yeah...) I tried to explain to her that it was like in a show we saw recently, where a beloved leader's body was set adrift on a burning boat. Why? That's just how they do it in their culture. It's hard enough grasping the meaning of many cultural observances, when there is such a fine line between shame and honor. In that same vein is the perennial argument over Washington's NFL team name, which was denied trademark registration this week. Is the team owner more like an autistic kid or the neurotypical berating the autistic kid with their chorus of "But I didn't intend to offend you. I meant to compliment you." I don't know. The word means something different to me than it does to you.